iTunes 11 was released a few days ago, and my first conclusion is that it violates POLA so badly I reverted to iTunes 10.

Out of the box, it hides most things iTunes 10 (and iTunes 9, too) showed, moving with Apple’s unappealing iCloud mentality. But once you wrap your head around Apple’s ridiculous bloating of user interface elements, it’s effectively the same.

My first issue was, of course, media keys. They didn’t work, but I hammered on them for a bit, and they started working again, so it’s likely something wrong with the media key handling. Nonetheless, the behaviour is still counter-intuitive. And then I discovered Apple ~~removed~~forgot to put in useful shortcuts like ^⌘Z, the zoom shortcut. Naturally, too, issues with multimonitor spaces and full-screening apps haven’t gone away, and don’t work at all intuitively.

The only nice feature I’ve found so far is the album preview, only available in the Album view. It does a surprisingly good job of picking the colours from the album art; for instance, Melody A.M., Mind Bokeh and Petestrumentals:

But, as usual, it’s still a passable product, and I don’t think any of the gripes I have about it would really influence the average consumer of music against using that particular product.