Friday, November 6, 2009

Apple iTunes 9 UI (User Interface) Design, Podcast Sync Settings Still Suck

Let me start this out by saying that I am a loyal iPhone user and have used iTunes for years.

I get tired of hearing everybody talk about how good of a design company Apple is.  Yes, Apple has delivered great products to market and many of them have very intuitive designs.  I continue to be amazed at how poor the iTunes design is.  With the popularity and revenue the iTunes site brings in, I would think the UI (user interface) would be flawlessly executed.

One area I am constantly frustrated with is the iPhone sync settings for podcasts.  I am a huge podcast listener and have tons of subscriptions, with hundreds of podcasts.  Way too many that I can fit on my iPhone at a given time, therefore I have to manage my sync settings to TRY to load the podcasts that I want.  This area of iTunes has been broken for many releases.

With the most recent release, the Apple designers have improved this functionality, but it still sucks. It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to give the user a little more flexibility with settings.  Just allow the check boxes to be active for every podcast and allow the user to check off which ones they want to sync.  Sounds simple to me.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but stop making podcast sync settings more convoluted and give the user the freedom to make their own selections rather than forcing them to use the predefined dropdowns.

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