iTunes 12.5.1

iTunes 12.5.1 surprised me; Apple actually changed a lot of stuff with sweeping changes to many views of the music library. Mirroring iOS 10, the new iTunes removes dynamic colour tinting and translucency effects, in favour of a plain white theme with occasional accents providing a splash of colour.

iOS 10 uses a pink tint colour but — for some reason — the new iTunes on Mac uses a blue shade. This discrepancy in colour palettes is jarring and I don’t see a reason for it to not match the Music app on iPhone and iPad. Aside from that, I really like the changes. The design is much cleaner and they’ve tidied up many loose ends. There is also a noticeable performance jump: the list of albums finally scrolls at a solid frame rate on my Retina MacBook Pro.

As another example of Apple’s iOS 10 design trends, the selected album is now delineated by a subtle shadow. The chosen artwork pops up from the library. Heavy San Francisco font faces are also used for the main titles and subtitles. They fit in well with the rest of the app and the font sizes are appropriate, unlike the equivalent iPhone fonts.

I was pleasantly surprised with the breadth of the UI changes in an update that, on the surface, has a pretty innocuous bump in the version number.