i-tunes sucks balls.

Tom

1. UI doesn’t follow Windows conventions/standards

Yep, it doesn’t. Bad Apple.

To be fair though, Microsoft are not exactly making it easy for others to follow. Their media player bends and breaks the rules. They’ve changed the appearance and operation of it (and look to continue the trend in Vista). The latest WMP 10 doesn’t even have a menu bar by default. Frankly, the only dependable standard for media players on Windows is to roll-your-own.

I know this doesn’t excuse Apple, who could have made a more honest attempt to follow the conventions that are there (eg native scroll bars to pick one of many possible examples).

2. What does the gray dot mean? What does the checkbox and arrow do?

I guess it’s reasonable to point out that the purpose of these is not immediately obvious. However they’re not crucial to the basic operation of the application, so I’m wondering why you felt they were important.

The gray dot means that this podcast (it only shows on podcasts) has not been listened to. There’s a minor inconsistency here with the “played count” column which only updates after the entire track has been played, whereas the podcast dot goes away if you play any part of the track. I guess it’s like the new message indicator in an email client – perhaps boldface type would have been more intuitive here?

The checkbox is used to indicate that the track will be synced to the iPod. The iPod options dialog has an option to “only update checked songs”.

The arrow takes you to the iTunes Music Store. You can turn these off entirely in the options dialog.

Again I say that none of these should have severely impacted the usability. You could perhaps argue that the presence of these widgets added clutter and confusion, in which case I would probably agree. There are a lot of features here and perhaps Apple could have selectively disclosed them in accordance with the user’s expertise (this is tricky though).

3. What does the exclamation mark mean?

It means that the track cannot be located. Although iTunes is by no means perfect here, it is indicating the error in a relatively subtle way which is entirely appropriate. If you click on the track and choose “get info”, or play, or whatever, it will prompt you to locate the track if it has moved.

4. Every time I delete something, it doesn’t go away

Are you deleting from the library or from a playlist? It makes a difference, as you might expect. The former removes the track entirely, and the latter removes a reference to that track from the current playlist. [Tip: To delete a track from the library when you have it visible in a playlist, hold down the alt/option key when deleting. This will prompt you to delete the file from the library as well and optionally trash the file itself.]

All this makes sense to me anyway. Throwing away the track and the file when all you wanted was to remove the track from the playlist sounds like a worse option…

5. iPod “linked to another iTunes music library”

This is a feature, not a bug. The iPod was designed to sync one-way from a single iTunes library. You can use an iPod with multiple computers, but you have to disable the automatic sync, see here for instructions. I think the fact that you were aware of the implications of the message prior to accepting the action is testament to the success of the app’s usability, although there is still room for improvement (eg link to the website for further info).

I appreciate that you were simply trying to mount the iPod to determine it’s legitimate owner, and not copy all the tracks off. However the iPod just doesn’t store the owner’s name and details, hence they can’t be retrieved (and I would agree this is a nice feature request). As far as it is concerned, you were trying to get all the tracks off, and it was designed to not allow this.