It's been more than seven years since Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs bounded onto the stage at the annual MacWorld conference in San Francisco and took the wraps off the first version of iTunes. And oh, what a difference (nearly) a decade makes: The desktop jukebox has evolved from a simple, no-frills MP3 manager into an ever-expanding media gateway offering music, TV, movies, podcasts and even video games for the iPhone and iPod.
Putting episodes of "Entourage" on the same digital shelf as Kanye West and "Ms. Pac-Man" may have been a stroke of genius. But with each new version, iTunes has risked pulling a Marlon Brando, morphing from a hunky heart-throb into a corpulent has-been. Apple's latest free update, iTunes 8, was released earlier this month, and its design clearly aims to deal with the bloat.
The biggest change to the application, aside from the addition of high-definition television shows to the online store, is a new focus on improving the user interface. A so-called Grid view, and an innovative Genius playlist-creator are the headliners in this upgrade. Both are aimed at improving the ways users access their music. Over two weeks of heavy use, I found that these features are mostly an improvement.
