I hope the future of OS X will not be flat.

My favourite bit, after that long blogpost, was the single comment.

"Cool works mate!"

When he started talking about nomenclature I stopped caring. Yeah, good design and all but respect developers naming system. It's not 10.1 its 10.10 thats the way it works, we're not treating this as a mathematical system. 10.1 is 9 versions behind 10.10, 10.10 is not 10.1 Who cares if you don't like the way it looks, its not for you. It's for software versioning so everyone knows what version it is. Why the guys bring this up seems really confusing and unrelated anyways.

I'm somewhat concerned about the treatment of the player controls grouped with the navigation on the sidebar. All of the mockups display the app in full screen, but what about users who use iTunes in windowed mode? When you decrease the window height, what regions of the interface become scrollable and which don't?

You definitely don't want your player controls to ever get hidden in a scroll view, but then there's potential for the navigation to get squeezed into a super narrow scrollable strip (see mockup above). It's also difficult to distinguish the end of the scrollable navigation from the Library/Store toggle thanks to invisible scroll bars -- a light grey dividing line might be an easy way to fix that.

Also, you can only resize horizontally so far before the filter bar at the top can't reasonably scale down.

Maybe these issues aren't major deal breakers, but it's certainly something to consider!

Software versioning is the process of assigning either unique version names or unique version numbers to unique states of computer software. Within a given version number category (major, minor), these numbers are generally assigned in increasing order and correspond to new developments in the software. At a fine-grained level, revision control is often used for keeping track of incrementally different versions of electronic information, whether or not this information is computer software.

10.10 ≠ 10.1

This is nice. Albeit, a bit busy. The trick with redesigns like this is that they often fit the mold of the designer's usage. In all fairness, design at Apple isn't necessarily heavily user tested.

That said, good work. The difficulty of thinking through, presenting, and sharing a piece of work - solicited or not - is worth congratulations. Job well done!

There's definitely some stuff in here to like.

A few points:

• I love the look of the full bleed album grid, but I absolutely couldn't deal with album covers without a textual label of the artist and name.
• I would like to see more space on the song list with longer names.
• I would really like to see the Artist browsing view. That's how I mostly navigate my 100GB+ iTunes library.
• The scrubber is far too small.
• This seems inspired by Spotify (not a bad thing) - there are some good differences (current album cover top left is great) and problems (search seems demoted)
• To my taste, it pushes the flat look too far.
• Why pink as a highlight colour? It would be interesting if it followed through the current auto-generated album background idea to make some element of the entire UI alter based on the currently playing album. I don't see when the blue would actually be used, as you don't play things from the store, you download them and play from your local machine.
• I hate using "wasted space" as a criticism, but the General tab for the connected iPhone is a massively wasted opportunity.

I enjoyed it. It let me know that someone besides me thinks iTunes is ugly and barely usable.

It almost makes me wish Microsoft had continued with Zune.

Good, comprehensive case study.

My one gripe is the size of the scrubber. It would be difficult to navigate to a particular point. The current scrubber (song timeline) is long enough for me to be precise in where I want to visit. Something which is important for those, like me, who listen to thumping mixes.

I also hope that OS X won't be all flat, but this looks really good. Also, great case study.

Lacks a lot of hierarchy. So many of these iOS-ish redesigns do.

They all fail to root themselves around fundamental design principles.

It doesn't feel right, using complete flats design on desktops. When on mobile devices actually you could scan the whole device with a single eye flick. It doesn't actually work same way on monitors, even laptops. All of us had an experience like 'where's the damn x tool in the program' and it was actually right at 'that' corner. Now, think about it was just an icon instead of button next to other bunch of icons which you cannot differ which one is clickable or not. In a time you'd ignore icons and search for something else or click everything on monitor :p

I really despise the way Apple has redesigned the navigation in iTunes. Its not intuitive whatsoever. I am a person who really doesn't buy a lot of music, I download mostly live mixes from DJs and have been for years, so most of my library cannot by synched or searched easily. They are not thinking about their full user base. Not every bit of music can derive from the iTunes.

I always made it a point to fill in the metadata of my mp3s, it was especially helpful to search specific artists, sets, or albums....however with the new architecture and such a strong reliance on a visual, this quick process takes much much longer for me.

If only there was a team at Apple who worked on iTunes...

Lovely to see iOS7 look and feel applied to the desktop experience for iTunes. You rock for putting these concepts out into the design community ether :)

However, I do have to agree with Wells. If you're going to do an unsolicited redesign, you best be ready for the criticism you may receive by making sure every detail has been accounted for. The first thing I noticed when hitting the link to this case study was the quality of the image on that mockup and it really threw me off for the rest of the time I was looking at this.

two column library is super awkward.