iTunes is 10 years old. Apple introduced the now ubiquitous software on 9 January, 2001, nine months before it unveiled the first iPod.
The first iTunes was a much simpler application than the behemoth that we know today. There was no video, no syncing, podcasts hadn’t been invented and it didn’t run on Windows or even on Mac OS X, which was three months from release. The iTunes Music Store didn’t open for another three years.
What it did do was rip and burn CDs, organise and play music files — indeed the launch tagline was “Rip. Mix. Burn”.
iTunes 1.0
“Apple has done what Apple does best — make complex applications easy, and make them even more powerful in the process,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive in the press release. “iTunes is miles ahead of every other jukebox application, and we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution.”
In fact what Apple had done was buy an existing application, SoundJam MP and remove its recording and customisation options, while adding what turned out to be a revolutionary interface that has informed Mac application design ever since.
“iTunes was, of course, and I’ll say this now, brilliant,” said Cabel Sasser of Panic, whose Audion music player eventually capitulated to iTunes.
“It single-handedly taught us an entirely new philosophy on software design. Do you really need that Preference that 1% of your users will use? Can you find a better way to design that interface than having each function in a separate window? Can you clean this up, even if it means it’s a little less flexible? iTunes blazed the trail for clean, efficient software design for a broad audience, a design philosophy we practice actively today. It was a way to take a complicated digital music collection, and make it easy. Sure, it was limited, but man was it easy.”
Unfortunately that is a lesson that iTunes itself been unable to follow. As feature after feature has been added the interface has struggled to keep up. It has become a hugely powerful tool for playing and organising music, but a clumsy interface for handling iPads, iPods and iPhones.
“Today, iTunes has assumed a burden that goes far beyond ‘tunes’,” wrote The Mac Observer’s Ted Landau last summer. “And therein lies the problem. When it comes to syncing, each of these devices and media types have their own unique set of rules and exceptions. Too often, the resulting crazy quilt gets in the way of the sort of intuitive ‘it works just like you would expect’ interface that has traditionally been Apple’s hallmark.”
But as Landau himself points out, the alternative would be worse.
“For all of its deficiencies, there are advantages to having iTunes as the hub. It’s convenient and, compared to an alternative of having a dozen or more different applications involved in syncing, it’s simple. By incorporating each new media type into the iTunes framework, Apple also maintains continuity — keeping users in a familiar interface, with just an incremental change each time.”
And that is iTunes in a nutshell, a familiar friend. Happy birthday.
