The iCloud hovers above us glinting in all its glory. Nobody knows quite what it’ll do for sure yet but Apple watchers are speculating like mad, gleeful that the speculation about that gigantic data centre Apple built is finally coming to pass.
But regardless of how iCloud squirrels your music collection away in the electronic ether, there’s a problem Apple has to fix first. It’s called iTunes and it’s still stinking up your desktop…
iTunes is a a big ball of gloop which Apple pushes features into like a mischievious child mashing up sweets. Individually they look quite tasty but clumped together they’re just a mess. Version after version, Apple has asked iTunes to do more and more, gradually slowing it to a crawl as it moved from somewhere to organise your music to a book-shelving, video-storing, app-updating, device-synching monolith.
While the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 pride themselves on how simple they are to use, they’re both tied to the confusing grey wasteland of iTunes. When Apple desaturated all the desatured all the icons in iTunes in the last big refresh, it made it even more difficult to find your way around, searching for songs is hilariously hit and miss and deleting duplicates is a sisyphean task.
iTunes is ugly, ungainly and gluttonous when it comes to memory. Even on a new MacBook Pro, it lumbers into life, groaning and wheezing in its efforts to let you listen to some songs or attempt to watch a TV show. Other content that it indexs won’t even open the programme. Want to read your iBooks on your Mac? No dice.
iTunes is almost offensively bad and while Apple may well deliver a brilliant music syncing service with iCloud, it won’t mean a thing if you have to relate to it through the grubby window of iTunes. Apple needs to break iTunes down to its constituent parts and rebuild it to match the ease and elegance of use of other successful apps like iMovie (the less said about iPhoto, the better).
When iTunes consistently gets confused when syncing an iPhone or being asked to download new podcasts, the dream of it hooking in to a cloud-based collection of every thing you’ve ever grabbed from the store seems foolish. iTunes can barely handle a collection of files stored on a local drive so quite why people suddenly think it’ll work like a dream with cloud music is a mystery.
Right now, iTunes feels like a tax imposed on iPhone, iPod and iPad owners. It’s a virtual assault course to be navigated on the way to your goal. If Apple wants iCloud to be a shimmering success, it needs to get iTunes on track too.
