iTunes 10 Hands On: Snappier Performance, Questionable UI Choices

By now, most iTunes users have already downloaded and installed iTunes 10. We've already given you the low-down on the biggest addition to the new version of iTunes—the Ping social network—but we also wanted to give our impressions on two "improvements" promised in the release notes: look-and-feel and performance. While we agree that iTunes is "faster and more responsive," we're not sold on the revised user interface.

After playing with the new version for the better part of a day, we can honestly say it is a little snappier. It certainly doesn't suffer from the unresponsive UI that plagued iTunes 9 on my aging original Core Duo MacBook. Specific genres and artists load instantly in the browser. Flipping through albums in Cover Flow seems especially fast. And the new list view with album art scrolls like butter.

We still hope for a fully turbo-charged, block-using, GCD-enabled, Cocoa-fied version of iTunes with blazing performance. iTunes 10 isn't there yet, but the tweaks that are there are welcome.