Overall, I find that programs running in the Windows environment these days respect the look and feel guidelines pretty closely, making the experience really pleasant.  However, there is a whole class of software that has resisted this trend and persists in not only offering skins to its user, but also coming by default with a look that will baffle the most seasoned Windows users.  I am referring of course to MP3 players.

Whether it be MusicMatch Jukebox, WinAmp (probably the worst offender) or even Microsoft’s very own Windows Media Player, all these programs sport a UI that is meant to look sexy and “real-world like” but only manages to be annoying and often littered with graphic bugs causing me to close and reopen windows on a regular basis, when it’s not the entire application itself.

So imagine my surprise when I tried iTunes and discovered that it is a very well-behaved Windows application with one single window and with menus and fonts that blend nicely with the rest of my desktop…  Okay, they couldn’t totally drop the Apple way and the scrollbars have the Aqua cerulean look, but I can live with that.

Apple is doing a better job at honoring the Windows look and feel than Microsoft itself.  Oh, the irony.

There are two more things I like about iTunes so far:

• How easy it is to create play-lists and switch from one to the other.
   
• How songs fade into each other.  This is something that has always bugged me in pretty much all the MP3 players I have tried on Windows:  they never pre-buffer the next song, which means that when a song reaches its end, there is a blank in the stream while the software is busy loading the 5-10 megs of the next song.  Really dumb.  Not only does iTunes do prefetching, but it also fades a song when it ends then slowly goes crescendo on the next one.  And this is configurable (actually, I take back what I said:  if you disable crossfade altogether, then there is a gap between each song.  Too bad, because sometimes you don’t want the songs to fade into each other but just carry on without any volume alteration such as in concept albums).

iTunes is also pretty revolutionary on the sharing side.  As soon as you launch it, it will broadcast its presence on your LAN and it will display all the other instances it finds on the network.  If their owner has decided to share their library, you will have access to it right away, otherwise you will only see their name (Macs seem to come with the firewall on by default, so Mac users will have to open a particular port to enable this feature).  Note also that you cannot copy the songs of your friends, only listen to them (and only when they are online), so Apple is being very obedient of the copyright laws.  It is however very easy to buy a certain song if you like it (I haven’t tried that yet).

What I would like to see in future versions of iTunes:

• The album and song title of the song currently playing when I hover over the tray icon.
   
• When I minimize the iTunes window, I want it to disappear from the task bar and be only present in the tray.
   
• More flexibility in the naming of the MP3 files that get created, such as “Track number - Song name”.  Right now, the format is not configurable, which makes iTunes not an option for me for ripping songs.
   
• A lot of the buttons don’t have tooltips.

Hopefully in the next version…