Apple recently held a media event to launch some new ipods, a new Apple TV and iTunes 10. Whilst the first two seem to have been largely welcomed, the new iTunes has created some debate. For starters, they've changed the UI so that now the minimise, maximise and close buttons are aligned vertically and the icons for music, movies, apps etc are devoid of colour. Whilst I like black & white photography, I quite like colour in my icons...
I'm a bit confused as to why they've decided to alter the window buttons when there is plenty of room to align them the normal way and Apple - please put the colour back in! The second big thing is their new social network. I can't help thinking this is just a starting point for bigger changes ahead, but at the moment it seems to aim itself squarely at Last.fm although comparisons with myspace have been made. The difference between Ping (yes, that's what they called it...) and Myspace is Ping offers little or no customisation options and whilst it does say you can connect to Facebook, I can't for the life of me work out how. Your profile has room for a photo, a brief "about me" section, an activity window where it tells people who you've started stalking and space for 8 handpicked thumbnails - you can thankfully leave out the embarrassing one-hit wonders in your collection. It doesn't appear to show people what you are currently listening to though, so not quite like Last.fm either. You can follow anyone you like as long as they've set their profile to allow it, but you don't appear to be able to message them... I'm still trying to work out why they've bothered...I'm downloading the keynote video to see if that clears things up a bit. As they've bought a streaming company Lala, Spotify could be on Apple's hit list in a future update...who knows.