A new version number for an old friend, amidst news of nano iPods and iTunes capable phones: iTunes 5.0 is out. UI changes, major: you can now have playlists in folders (what a relief). UI changes, minor: the volume slider no longer sits under the forward/back/play/pause buttons. (For the latter: why? Perhaps people were hitting the big buttons by mistake when adjusting the volume, or vice versa.) UI changes, gratuitous: on Windows, the window now blends seamlessly into the title bar, which is good, but actually looks a lot less cool. Probably it will just take some getting used to.
Scary installer moment: this ad, which I first saw at an Apple store. I don’t really think the young woman looks happy to be sharing her tunes with her friend:
More scary installer moment: the installer crapped out during the QuickTime install when it told me I needed to close Firefox—somehow it got trapped in an endless loop. I had to force quit the installer and reboot, and rerun the installation, at which point everything was fine.
Other impressions: parental controls ok, shuffle calibrator should put conspiracy theories of “is it really random” to rest, or at least confuse them, search bar looks useful, lyrics in tags looks good. Look forward to playing with the search bar on my home library.