You know what pisses me off about some of these Apple events or announcements? When an OLD feature is highlighted as something new.

The ability to show album art on the left in iTunes and sort the list by artist and then sub-sort by some album criteria (alphabetical or year) has been in iTunes since version 7. It's the single feature that actually made iTunes worth anything at all for looking at more than a dozen track collection.

The new twist on this feature is that by enabling it the way Steve showed, it will only show the artwork if there are at least 5 tracks from the album. Personally, I think that's a load of rubbish and just prefer to always show the artwork like that. Because now it's impossible to see the artwork for singles and other "abums" with only 4 or fewer tracks. You suck Apple.

You have been able to get to this feature in different ways, most recently by checking the "artwork" option in the View preferences to show album art on the left, and then clicking the ALBUM header which cycles through "Album by Year," "Album by Artist" and just plain "Album." It used to be much simpler than this as there was an arrow on the left of the header that simply allowed you to toggle the artwork on/off.

WIth iTunes 10 the artwork view comes automatically with a new view mode. Which is easier to see than setting the view options, but a bit redundant, IMO. It's even less interesting and useful than it used to be for a number of reasons:

-The artwork on the side is small and it doesn't resize when you change its column width. You can now pick "small" which is ultra-small, "medium" which is the default, and "large" which is scarcely bigger than medium. Kind of sucks on a high res screen.
-The name of the album appears to the RIGHT of the album artwork, which means that instead of possibly wasting vertical space, now you're wasting a shitload of horizontal space if you ever hope to read your album name - it creates a ton of empty white space which looks very bad.

What Apple did to make sure people use this new mode? The removed the "artwork" option from the View menu so now you can't do it the old (better) way.

And what about the OTHER possibly redundant information? Album year and genre for instance? Maybe it would have been nice to include the title UNDER the album artwork along with the name of the band and the year of the album. Genre can change between songs for those anal enough to set them that way, so don't bother to include that there.

Good job Apple. You guys can't design squat anymore. It amazes me that they can still keep ahead of everyone else. That says a lot. Everyone else sucks much much worse.