A lot of people are complaining a lot about the UI changes Apple made for iTunes 7, but a few people, like me, like the new changes. It seems a lot more professional than other interfaces, with more subdued colors. The candy look of Aqua is nice, but distracting. By focusing on the most important areas of the application, you can choose tyour song without being drawn in by the magical pulsing scroll bar. The two big issues I have with it are the new icon, and the capitalized letters in the sidebar.
The new icon is terrible. Already, tons of icons in my Dock are blue, but before, iTunes distinguished itself by daring to be green. I mean, why blue? I love blue, but what's wrong with having a multicolored Dock? And the gloss is horrible. Try as I might, I can't get a CD to shine like that, even under bright lights. The old icon was glossy, yes, but had nowhere near the atrociousness of the new icon. The esteemed Adam Betts has made a replcement icon freely available, which fixes the terrible gloss and the glow, but not the blue.
The capitalized letters in the sidebar are just so ugly and out of place. As someone else said, the only other place in all of OS X you'll find a word in all-caps is the OK in save dialouges. Someone posted a fix for the capitalization at macosxhints, but it displayed gibberish for me, so I'm stuck in the suck. I've been using Uno for a while now to make everything more unified-er, and that now works with iTunes 7 as well, so it fits in better. For anyone who wants a total fix for the UI, here are some awesome resource replacements which make it look all Aquaish again.
Well, I kind of sidetracked, but I really hope the iTunes UI gets adopted by all applications for Leopard. Vista looks a hell of a lot better than XP (they got rid of all the blue), and it's definitely competing with OS X in interface design, no matter how many ideas they stole. What better way to pounce ahead of the competition than by offering a more professional looking interface in 10.5?
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