Elements is shaping up nicely

Justin Williams pushed out Elements 1.1b1 to testers yesterday.

I’m extremely impressed by what he has managed to get into this revision of the app.
A lot of useful stuff will be coming in the next release, including on-device file renaming and file deletion, as well as minor design changes.

iTunes user interface changes

As every year Apple changed the UI of iTunes upon release of the new major version.

While I wasn’t very fond of last years revision, I really like what they have done this time, even if some of it still needs some work:

 
Immediately after the first screenshot of iTunes 10’s window was shown during the demo, there was an outcry among users, that Apple arranged the ‘traffic lights’ (buttons for close, maximise, minimise) vertically.
Yes it’s unusual, and Apple ignores their own interface guidelines here, but I like it, because it saves some space; and should I ever get tired of it; there’s already a “fix” that brings back the old look.

The redesign of the capacity gauge for iDevices looks absolutely gorgeous in my opinion.

Apple’s choice to bring back the blue-ish graphite look for the application has me wondering, but it does make for a clean look.

The interface does still need some polish, though. The sync button is but one example of impurities in the UI.

What’s more important — and far more annoying — is the new way album art is being displayed. Having been touted as revolutionary and useful by Steve Jobs during the keynote, I will admit that I like the idea, but the execution is far from perfect:
No matter how big or small you set the cover image to be, if the album title is slightly too long, it’ll be cut off. The only way to remedy this, is to widen the column, sacrificing a lot a screen real estate for grey-ish space.
Placing the album title atop the album art would allow for a much more efficient use of space.

All things considered this update brings a few welcome features to iTunes, gives it a great new UI and some welcome performance improvements.
I don’t like the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach Apple has been taking with iTunes for years now, but this update makes the feature overload bearable and more usable for me.