Now that it has been out for a day, yay or nay? I definitely think it looks better, but performance still sucks.

It looks great and the expanded view with the store integration is slick. I'm liking the cleaner interface for device management and the iCloud movie time placement sync works every time. Scrolling has definitely felt a bit smoother. Might just be because my content was loaded into a new app installation, but still, seems a bit better.

It's kind of hard for me to get my brain around, but I'm really happy that it's added a bunch of new interaction types in different modes! And most importantly, I have been waiting for a next-to-play queue on iTunes for ages now. (I have a Logitech Squeezebox and it's had that feature since day one.) That, for me, is the #1 feature upgrade.

Still not a fantastic app but I use it all the time and I'm encouraged that they're trying new things with iTunes.

1. They added colors back to the icons in the sidebar menu, I hated the all-grey look they moved to a year(?) ago.
2. I cringed at "album view" at first but the new album view is not only usable (unlike the previous version), it is actually great. Very surprising.
3. Lots of iCloud weirdness. By default, everything I ever purchased shows up as streamable, downloadable from iCloud even though those tracks are already on my machine, essentially duplicating every purchased track. Easily turned off but still jarring and weird. Also, my playlists are now considered "iCloud playlists" for some reason and I can't see how to turn that off.
4. The search results menu is all new and, like album view, not only (finally) usable but also great.

Other than looking better and some slightly new functionality, none of my complaints about iTunes have been addressed, it is still a huge, cludgy, weird mess of functionality that fails far too often for something that is so integral to iPhone ownership. Example: a "4 items could not be synched. See iTunes for details." message on my phone but no indication of a problem on iTunes. I tried it a few times in different views to verify but no dice. I swear iTunes' goals must include giving Apple a bad name.

Frankly I think the mooted dramatic redesign is rather less dramatic than they suggest and not all to the good. What iTunes needs at the moment is someone to go through and throw away features that are non core - it needs focus more than anything. As it is, they've made it superficially cleaner but all the spiraling mess remains just beneath the surface.

The biggest culprit here is the drop down to switch between media types. There's no really plausible reason to get rid of the left bar navigation completely except that it got so heavily laden with functions. Rather than remove any of those functions, they've just decided to hide it and slap a drop-down in its place, effectively hiding 4/5s of your media from you at any time.

Whether or not you choose to use that sidebar or not, there's a stunning lack of design consistency in the navigational items on display. In music, selecting artists, genres or playlists results in the addition of a side menu in two distinct versions. Tap on Radio and you have something that could easily have been reorganised to function as a side menu like the other ones, but isn't - for no clear reason. In the TV section, 'Unwatched' creates a side menu but shows doesn't. There's no clear reason why this is the case.

It's important to note that there really are some significant improvements in various areas. The album view is really nice, as are the blurred borders of album art and the mini player. Generally, though, less is more, Apple!

iTunes 11 is the last of the late great local heroes. iTunes 12 will be a completely different beast, masked by the fact that it looks the same as 11.