I’ve been enjoying iTunes 7. There are a number of things that I like a lot about this version but there are two that seem to have been over looked by the other coverage that I’ve seen.
Great feature number 1: Proper movie controls ala Quicktime. I’ve been trying to get into the whole watching-tv-on-my-laptop thing with iTunes, but it’s been annoying because there have never been any video controls in full-screen video mode. If you wanted to rewind or fast foward you had to escape from the full screen and click on the annoyingly small buttons at the top of the window. Now however, if you are in full screen mode and you move your mouse, a control area appears near the bottom of the screen that lets you do the common video control actions. Quicktime has worked like this for a while, so I’m excited that this is finally in iTunes.
Great feature number 2: Finally a download queue! I subscribe to a rediculous amount of podcasts, and managing the downloads has always been a pain. When a lot of things are queued up at the same time you ended up having to scroll up and down in the podcast screen to see what was downloading, and if you wanted to see the progress of the downloads you had to click on the rediculously small buttons at the top of the window. Now however, there is a new download screen that appears when anything is…wait for it…downloading. Is puts them all in a tidy list where you can see the progress bars of each, and if it is something you are downloading from Apple, there is even a pause button so you can resume the download later!
I can’t figure out why it took them 7 versions of the software to figure these two things out, but it’s sure making my digital life easier so far.