I skipped the whole “first takes on” bandwagon with the last large-ish release of iTunes, but not this time (apparently). So, here’s what jumps out at me:

  1. I don’t get why people say the MiniStore is gone. If I show it, there it is (on both Mac OS X and Windows).
  2. Apparently, it isn’t enough anymore for every Apple application to have a different splitter widget (and, in iTunes’s case, a different window rounded-corner radius). Maybe they decided that, since the main interface basically looks the same on Mac OS X and Windows, it should look like an alien in both environments, instead of just in one environment or the other.
  3. I also saw somewhere that the scroll bars have the arrows together — on Mac OS X it picks up the value for this from your Appearance preference pane (on Windows, as far as I can tell, it always uses the at both ends variety).
  4. The every widget looks different than it does anywhere else plan applies only to the main window — the preferences dialog looks like a normal window for whatever OS you’re running it on. This makes me suspicious of the theory that maybe this is a Leopard preview (well, that and having used some recent Apple applications). But theming the OS is still crazy talk.
  5. In iTunes preferences, the Show: Podcasts and Show: Radio items on the General pane and the Disable Podcasts and Disable Radio items on the Parental pane apparently set the same two preferences (flip between the two panes, flipping the Podcasts item each time, and you’ll see what I mean).
  6. Related to the above, if you want to hide the STORE category in the source list, there’s no check box to hide it, but there is a box for your parents to disable it. Mind you, if either the Purchased or Download item in that category has stuff in it, that item (and therefore the STORE category) will remain, just with fewer items in it.
  7. iTunes 6.something has been the current version since I returned to the platform, so I’ve only ever seen the green variant of the iTunes icon on a current version of the software. I keep noticing the blue one in my dock and wondering how I managed to get iTunes 4 or something on my Tiger machine.
  8. The only two gapless examples I can think of in my library weren’t detected. And by weren’t detected, I of course mean they now play gapless, but the checkbox that seemingly enables this behavior on each item’s Get Info dialog is not checked.
  9. There’s useful newcomer in the Get Info dialog if you’ve been playing with TiVoToGo on your Windows box — some of the TV Show tags on MPEG-4s can now be edited, so you can put your TV Shows in the (*gasp*) TV Shows part of your library.
  10. In Finder (and a number of other apps, for that matter), there’s a segmented control in the toolbar to chose from the three different view types, and you can use Command 1–Command 3 to flip between them. iTunes already uses those for zooming videos that you’re playing, and there’s no hint how you might flip between the three view styles from the keyboard, if you even can do it. And that control isn’t in the sequence of controls you can Tab to, so don’t get any ideas there scooter.

Update 1

I’m a dimwit (or shouldn’t write this stuff so late at night). iTunes 4–6 all had the green icon, and I’d actually come back during the iTunes 4 era. iTunes 3 had the purple icon, iTunes 2 had a blue icon, and it looks like iTunes 1 had this spiffy three-colored job that I don’t think I’ve seen before.

Update 2

The iTunes 1 link above now points where it’s supposed to.

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