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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

Agreed on the new iTunes and iPhone Music app. I had to re-learn how to shuffle songs, and how to pull up the album of the song that was playing the other day. Extremely non-intuitive and hidden behind 4-5 interactions.

All for the sake of cramming in new paid features that I'll never use - "For You", "New", "Radio", and "Connect". Why Apple? You make enough money from iPhone sales already. Is Apple Radio really going to add that much to your bottom line?

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I probably spent 5 minutes trying to disable shuffling in iTunes the other day. The icon appeared in several different contexts where clicking on it did nothing.

It's just incredible -- stunningly, unbelievably incredible -- that Apple allows this turkey of a Windows application to ship with their name attached.

Every iTunes is a mess. HOW THE HELL DO I GET BACK TO MY SONG LIST

Yeah, the thing I miss most from Spotify is the "Recent" menu, which was basically just a list of the last 20 - 30 albums you listened to. It really clicked with how I (and a lot of people) listen to music - we tend to repeat a certain subset of our music depending on the mood. This is the rare case where I feel like Apple has barely tried to look at how customers use the thing.

You can make the 'Connect' button into something a little more useful. In the Settings app, go to General > Restrictions and turn off Apple Music Connect. The 'Connect' button will then be replaced with 'Playlists.'

Thanks for this great tip. Again, another totally non-intuitive way to make Music 10x better.

Tangent: I wonder if people who work at Apple browse HN and see these kinds of complaints regularly? It would be weird to work at a big company that gets a lot of press on HN and stealthily get direct user feedback from a tech forum.

Sorry, I don't follow. It's unituititive to have a settings change under settings, where settings for built in apps have always been?

You have to have some reason to think a setting might exist before you'll go looking for it. If it's unintuitive to think that a particular piece of functionality might be controlled by a setting at all, the fact that it would be easy to find the setting if you knew it existed is of little help.

There is an obvious line between being non-intuitive or unobvious and reasons to think something exists or not. A UI cannot rely solely on intuition alone; investigation must be encouraged too.

For me - yes. I had never needed to use "Restrictions" before, and it would seem much more obvious to be able to customize the display of the application from within the app. It also doesn't make all that much sense that by turning off one of the tabs, it would be replaced with an actually useful tab - playlists.

I don't work in UI/UX and I'm not an iPhone power user, so perhaps it's just me.

>> Is Apple Radio really going to add that much to your bottom line?

They will try to use radio in 2 way:

1. Make it unqiue and hard to copy, to add one more reason for people to use their device.

2. When making content deals, it's hard to get good deals if you come without a large crowd of subscribers.So apple plan to to use your radio subscription as content negotiation tool, and than upsell you a tv service - and there's a lot of money there.

iTunes is a real trainwreck. I cannot understand why a company like Apple, that makes so much noise about design, would let it languish.

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