An intriguing thing: I've installed iTunes 8 on Tiger only to discover that the main window is different from iTunes 7 (and any other OS X window, for that matter). This one is a lot paler, like... snow. Given that iTunes 7 heralded the Leopard look & feel, could iTunes 8 be doing the same for Snow Leopard?

huh? it's exactly the same as itunes 7... and every other unified window in mac os 10.5.x.

I thought of Snow Leopard, too when I first say iTunes 8 next to my other windows.

The snowy look in iTunes 8 only appears if you have a sufficiently advanced video card, kind of like older Macs wouldn't display the translucent menu bar.

As much as I love OS X, I miss the days of OS 9 (and earlier) interface consistency...

At least chrome windows are gone.

The button for hiding (or revealing) the genius bar is the exact same button that is used to hide and reveal the now playing/selected item preview. Only it's turned 90 degrees. That button style has been in iTunes a long time, long before the finder slideshow button.
I agree they're similar but then again you put the back/forward buttons from safari or the finder next to the buttons you mentioned in the article and one could argue they are also too similar.

I would argue that the Genius hide button is actually an attempt to keep consistent.

Find the show/hide button for Album Artwork. You'll notice that the Genius show/hide button is merely an inversion of this button that has a similar functionality. While I'll concede that Preview button is fairly similar, it is in another app... logic would have the button following a similar function within the same app. Which it does.

The UI isn't crazy. It's perfectly logical.

I have to disagree. You have ignored the context - the "hide the Genius sidebar" button is right next to the "make Genius playlist" button and right underneath the sidebar itself. There's no way you'd think that it was a "play slideshow" button. I looked for the button to hide the sidebar, and found it first time...

@Matteo: It's true that the show/hide artwork button is the same icon, rotated. But they've changed that icon slightly over time: take a look at iTunes 6, where it had a title bar showing. They also used the same icon for the Mini Store (now gone). Oh, and when you look at that last picture there, is it just me or does the Genius button look a lot like the old button that used to be for the Visualizer?

Sure, the idea of an arrow is pretty close to things like Back/Forward buttons. But there are differences: for one thing, believe it or not, that square around the show/hide buttons makes a difference. As does context. Back/Forward buttons are pretty much always shown as a grouped pair, which substantially changes how you perceive them.

Even though there are not slideshows, there are videos, and a visualizer (which used to inhabit that area and could be started by a button that looked like a playing window). I only mention it since that's what I thought the button was for.

I got exactly the same problem! I was searching for several minutes how to hide the genius sidebar!

Hopefully, a friend told me this button hide the genius sidebar!

Scary! :/

I'm surprised iTunes 8 incorporated Zune features.

First, scrollbar consistency. I don't have trouble using or understanding iTunes' black scroll bars and I doubt anyone else does either. My first reaction was that they looked really good.

Consistency, as it pertains to UI design, doesn't have to prevent artistic license. People who don't actually do UI design often make that mistake.

Second, I recognized right away that the "right arrow" icon would hide the genius bar, just like similar arrow buttons show/hide panels in iTunes (Album Artwork) and Mail.app (Activity), among other places.

The slideshow icon, on the other hand, only appears as an alternate button icon, and is rarely used or seen. In the context of Quick Look, the slideshow icon makes complete sense, despite the fact that they might look similar to the panel icons in iTunes and Mail.app.

The bottom line is that button icons and scroll bar colors are largely inconsequential and, relatively speaking, are simple problems to solve; real UI designers solve much more complex usability problems.

I have a current MacBook Pro and a slightly older one. Both have more than enough video horsepower for any special effects.

The iTunes 8 window is the same as any other Leopard window.

What you might have seen is the window without focus. (Like all other Leopard windows it lightens when not in focus.) During the initial album art thumbnail generation, which takes quite some time, focus is hogged by a tiny modal progress bar dialog.

@Matteo,
@dagneyandleo

There is a big difference between the show/hide artwork button and the one for the genius sidebar.

The artwork button is attached to the correct edge. (The edge out of which the artwork emerges/hides.)

The button for hiding the genius bar is attached to an unrelated edge and the clue that something might be sliding in/out from the side is "blocked" visually by the neighboring buttons.

I had to google how to hide the sidebar and found a lot of other people asking the same question.

Why aren't the two Genius buttons grouped, the way the Create Playlist, Shuffle, Repeat and Show/Hide Artwork buttons are?

Actually, iTunes had this "show & hide" glyph for several years before it was introduced in Leopard as a "slideshow" icon. This is the same glyph used to show & hide the "Now Playing" area in the left column.

I had the exact same experience. How do I make this stupid sidebar go away!

Seconded on the not-Snow responses - I have a Mac Pro with an upgraded video card and the iTunes window looks exactly the same shade as others, both when the main focus (stronger grey) and when background (paler grey).

I'm mildly surprised that the original writer found it difficult to spot the 'show/hide' Genius bar - it's exactly where I'd expect it to be, and looks the same as others with similar functionality (show/hide info, for example).

@ dal20402

I too have a fairly powerful Mac Pro and an old PowerBook G4, and the iTunes 8 GUI looks the same on both. Can anyone else confirm any possible GUI oddities that may require a fast GPU to display? I'm thinking the first poster may have seen something else, but I'm still curious at the possibility!

I find it funny how Apple doesn’t follow their own UI guidelines. I mean, iMovie has panels which can be hidden and they use a standard icon plus a small triangle. Why on Earth not use this iconography here?

Chalk another one up to spending "several minutes searching around iTunes 8’s interface trying to figure out how to make the Genius sidebar disappear". I found it eventually.

Bump.
I eventually resorted to clicking random buttons. (/sigh)

"Spend several minutes searching around iTunes 8’s interface trying to figure out how to make the Genius sidebar disappear (and worse, there is no menu command to hide the sidebar without deactivating the entire Genius system)."

Finder Slideshow icon? Where???

One more (small) change - on the 'downloading' section of the program, you can no longer right-click on an in-progress item and 'delete' it. Prior to 8, you could do this (I was doing it all day yesterday with a problematic download of the latest YLNT podcast from the iTunes feed).

As of v8, you can't - there's no right-click menu now.

You can still highlight a downloading item and press delete, mind.

Just seems a strange thing to remove.

Well, if you think back, these two genius buttons had a totally different association for me at first sight!
I thought the dedicated visualizer buttons were back in iTunes 8!
I can't say when it got lost in the version review, likely with v7, but I found an old screenshot online: http://www.ilounge.com/images/uploads/iTunes.jpg
The genius button looks just like the visualizer button, and trying to hide the sidebar was done with great hesitation, as I initially associated the button with the fullscreen command for the visualizer!
So it isn't exactly intuitive design, although it makes sense sticking with the cover art window button in rotated shape.

After reading this, I took screenshots of iTunes 7 and 8 on my system running 10.4.11. Here's what I found:

Animated GIF on Flickr

The differences between iTunes 7 and 8 when they're in the foreground are minimal—the minimize, maximize and close buttons are shifted a pixel or two to the left in iTunes 8. The greater differences are when they're in the background—the window takes on a light, "snowy" appearance in iTunes 8. Keep in mind these screenshots were taken under Tiger (10.4) not Leopard (10.5), where this effect is system-wide. Also note that this effect has nothing to do with the capability of the graphics card in the system, as I observed it on both my eMac G4 1GHz and my PowerMac G5 Dual 1.8GHz tower.

I had no trouble finding the button, but they could certainly improve the iconography. Probably the easiest change would be to simple remove the border on the right side so it looks like a tab.

Isn't the Finder slideshow button an eye in Leopard?

IMHO, the "Eject button" at the bottom of the iTunes interface (AKA, "Show/Hide Artwork") is FAR more confusing, and always has been.

Overall, Apple should rethink its use of "triangle in box" buttons, especially as they apply to applications with media-playing capabilities. That particular glyph - generic as it is - has been used for Play / eject / etc for many more decades than Apple has even been around!

I agree, that is and have since the day of 8mm film been a "play symbol".... and when they flip it downwards it is an eject something button..

I never really liked the iTunes "Im special, so I can look different" way of going about it's UI. I understand it needs to feel local on different OS' , but still... I also searched in vain for the hide genius button :)

You're expecting consistency from Apple like in the old days, when they were small. Whether we like it or not, Apple is becoming the new Microsoft in its ubiquity and the inevitable diverging of UI elements.

The problems with iPhone 2.0 and the MobileMe launch are similar to what happens with nearly every MS release: quite simply quality control is slipping because Apple is trying to do more than they can support at the quality levels we've come to expect.

More and more, the left hand will not know what the right hand is doing--like Microsoft.

I think the problem is that when the arrows go up and down, as they do with hide/show artwork, they have no associations for the user (unlike the above commenters I don't ever remember seeing an eject button without the extra line underneath) but when the genius sidebar is activated and the arrow is pointing to the right it seems to me that "play" seems like the most logical assumption. when the button is used for showing the genius sidebar and the button is facing to the left I don't think it is nearly so hard to identify (I also had to search more than I should have to hide that damn sidebar.)

Genius sidebar can't even be closed like other sidebars - by dragging its edge (fixed width, which seems unneccessary, isn't an issue - other sidebars spring to their minimum width automatically)

the hide icon actually looks similar to the show/hide icon at the bottom left of Mail that shows/hides the Mail activity window. Just horizontal v. vertical.

I had the exact same UI problem here: I couldn't figure out how to turn off the sidebar!

I assumed it would be there to foist ads full-time, threw a mini fit, and turned off the feature all together.

If it weren't for your pointing out that retarded sidebar hide button, I would probably never use the feature again.

Point taken but I can't find the finder slideshow button that you speak of. The closest I can find is the slideshow button in Preview.app it has the same icon but is a different bezel from what you showed.