So I just installed iTunes 10 and… wow. This isn’t a good ‘wow’. It’s just a… wow. Here’s why:

Yup. Apple’s decided it’s been at least a few months since it screwed with the iTunes UI, and so it’s made some changes. Some of them actually work. There’s a decent ‘hybrid’ list view, and the main interface pane offers more clarity. However, two changes are mind-boggling:

1. iTunes previously coloured its sidebar items. This enabled you to—without thinking—associate certain items with certain colours; even if you didn’t do this, each item was differentiated. Now, you have to think before you click, and the usability of this area of the app has been substantially reduced.
2. The close/minimise/zoom buttons are now aligned vertically in the full window mode. In the mini-player window, this was always the case, but in the full window mode, it’s a baffling decision. Even though Mac OS X’s hardly a bastion of total consistency these days, these three important buttons usually stay put, and people’s muscle memory enables quick access to them. Now, iTunes 10 chucks Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (the ones Apple seemingly expects every developer but itself to follow) out the window, in order to save a little horizontal space. However, this again reduces usability—not only are these buttons now in the wrong place, they’re also much smaller and harder to hit.

In the past, iTunes has foreshadowed subsequent updates to the look and feel of Mac OS X. I seriously hope that isn’t the case this time, because the iTunes 10 UI is a botch job—a collision of fairly good ideas (which are incremental updates) and the very worst in interface design. To that end, I wonder where all Apple’s best UI designers have gone. They’re certainly not on the iTunes team.

UPDATE: In the comments, mr_phillip writes: “For what it’s worth, defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1 restores the default close/minimise buttons”. So at least Terminal-savvy Mac users have an option to deal with the second of Apple’s UI disasters.

In a press release on its website, Apple has confirmed that it will “broadcast its September 1 event online”, thereby providing immediate disappointment to users worldwide when Jobs doesn’t reveal a $50 256GB unicorn-powered iPod touch with Retina Display and sprinkles.

The event will be streamed using “Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming”, which the company says is “based on open standards, so fuck you, Adobe”. In order to view Apple’s open-standards streaming, you require a “Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™”, along, presumably, with a shield to defend yourself from the onslaught of registered trademark characters, hypocrisy and irony.

Amazon’s released a new Kindle. The low-end model costs just £109, and, of course, is backed by the gargantuan-yet-still-growing Kindle store. It’s going to kick some serious bottom.

Nigel Whitfield today asks: How much is Kindle? A year of eBooks from Waterstones. Astonishingly, in the face of some massive competition from the USA, British chain Waterstones is now charging more for a few dozen ebooks that Whitfield bought over the past year than when he originally bought them. The net result: it would be cheaper to buy a Kindle and all the books than to just buy the books from Waterstones.

In the print market, I had—and indeed have—big problems with Amazon. Its margins are so low that no-one else can compete. Small publishers have been driven out of business by Amazon only buying a few books at a time (sent by the publisher to the online giant) and then selling them at a ridiculous discount, leaving mere pennies per copy in profit for the publisher.

This is bad.

However, in the world of digital, it beggars belief that every British chain isn’t doing what the supermarkets do and at least comparing costs. It’ll be interesting to see how the likes of Play fares if it seriously enters the ebooks market, since that company at least has the gumption to mess about with its audio download pricing structure. Everyone else: take note. In the internet world, people have little loyalty to companies—they care about price. In the digital media world, this happens even more so, and sellers have fewer excuses regarding competing on pricing.

It’s not a big surprise when a right-wing think-tank bitches about the licence fee, but they’re not usually so transparent as to say: “We love Sky. Sky makes us feel funny in our happy place. We really really think the BBC should be just like Sky.”

So congratulations, Adam Smith Institute, where the BBC you hate so much was kind enough to report your boneheaded views:

It says continuing with the public subsidy will lead the broadcaster to be scaled back and “diminish its contribution”. To be fair, this isn’t entirely inaccurate, but only because governments and Rupert Murdoch bang on about the ‘evils’ of the licence fee so much. The Tories are desperate to marginalise the BBC under the guise of ‘value for money’, which will, inevitably, lead to it being scaled back.

But let’s think about the subscription model. The BBC would suddenly have to become competitive in every way: pricing, market-share, popular television. In other words, it would have to become another Sky, otherwise it’d lose the income it needs to survive. This would most definitely lead to it being scaled back and diminishing its contribution.

The report singles out the success of Sky with its subscription model, adding that the BBC could have “the global presence of a Hollywood studio but with a wider range of output”. Sky is now in around ten million homes, but for the majority of its life it’s had little serious competition. Even when Virgin arrived, Sky was the major player and with Virgin totally capitulating towards Sky recently, that looks set to continue. The BBC would not enter a market in the same fashion as Sky, which offered people lots of US shows at a reasonable price, the alternative being terrestrial television. It would enter a market fighting both against Sky and Freeview.

Again, the only way it could possibly survive as a major player would be to ditch the niche and go with the popular; if the BBC stayed as it was, it would become utterly marginalised—the television equivalent of a critically acclaimed indie studio, rather than a big Hollywood player like Warner Bros.

The BBC should be given a fixed sum of money from the government to cover any initial losses, it suggests. I’m not sure how a ‘fixed sum’ can cover loses, unless said fixed sum equates to the money the BBC would have gotten from the licence fee, but there you go.

The institute has also called for what makes up the essentials of public service broadcasting to be redefined. Sounds great, although these guys don’t seem to understand that public broadcasting services are more able to service the public in a meaningful manner when they aren’t commercial entities.

It currently includes areas such as news and children’s programmes, which would remain free under its proposed new system. But hang on—you’ve already said the BBC’s going to have to scrap its licence fee and will only temporarily get government money to make up some of the shortfall. Now you’re saying that it will have to pay for news and children’s TV for no return, out of its diminishing pool of resources? What a great idea!

Advertising on the BBC is not ruled out in the report, but it acknowledges the broadcaster would prefer advert-free forms of revenue. Man, if only the UK currently had a really good company that offered a great range of programming, news and children’s TV, radio and web services, and all entirely ad-free, for a reasonably low monthly fee. HANG ON A MINUTE!

David Graham, the former BBC producer who wrote the report, said he hoped his findings would encourage “serious debate at a critical time”. I’m also hoping his findings will encourage former BBC producer David Graham that coming up with some actual arguments might be nice, rather than banging the old ‘poor value’ drum again and again. This is particularly tricky when those you’re trying to convince bother to do the sums and find out how little the BBC costs.

“It really is going to be very difficult for the BBC to resist the justifiable hostility of other competitors who just now, receiving no subsidy, have to bear the whole brunt of the… competitive market, cycles that go up and down,” Mr Graham told BBC 5 live. And now we get to the crux of it. Those poor commercial channels! It’s so unfair that they have to deal with the cycles that go up and down when the BBC gets huge piles of cash for doing nothing apart from: providing loads of programming that isn’t considered commercially viable by other channels; creating niche output that is world-class and that commercial channels won’t touch; offering the closest thing the UK has to impartial news, since it doesn’t need to deal with advertisers; getting the bulk of its output from the UK, rather than grabbing from an ever-diminishing pool of quality US output. (We’re already seeing UK channels being forced to buy second- and third-tier US shows. Sooner or later, we’re going to be importing the dregs. Surely, it’s better to make more British television, but, hey, that doesn’t work terribly well when it comes to making huge profits for commercial organisations.)

Also, cycles go down and up. When the commercial companies are making money hand over fist, I don’t hear them complaining.

“You know ITV up against BBC really hasn’t a chance in a difficult advertising environment and that really shouldn’t be allowed,” he added. OK, so in a tough financial climate, we should hamstring the BBC, because ITV can’t cut it? ITV’s problems are, of course, nothing to do with ITV choosing to increasingly concentrate on terrible mass-market programming that leaves it unable to differentiate itself from all the other garbage channels now available in the UK. It’s all the fault of the BBC!

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has indicated his support for continuing with the licence fee, but last month suggested it could be cut from the current £145.50 after the next negotiations. ‘Culture’ Secretary Jeremy Hunt wants to kill the BBC, but thinks it’ll be more fun for it to get a death of a thousand cuts.

The spokeswoman for the BBC Trust, which represents licence fee payers and governs the BBC, said: “The trust welcomes the fact that the current government has expressed its support for the continued existence of multi-year licence fee settlements. But, frankly, we wish they, Hunt and Graham would go screw themselves, and realise that £2.80 per week for everything the BBC offers is, in reality, a huge bargain.

Being a fan of South Park in the UK isn’t easy, especially since I’m not also a fan of downloading torrents (both for bandwidth and moral reasons). For years, South Park releases in the UK rather absurdly stalled at season four, requiring fans to buy the region 1 releases (which in itself makes certain studios spit red-hot fury). Even when this changed, the releases retained the most boneheaded aspect of the US editions: making you wait several minutes to access any one episode—see Helpful Hints for DVD Producers for more on that.

Today, I was helpfully spammed by Amazon about South Park – The Hits Volume 2, which is now excitingly available. Containing random, out of context episodes I already own on DVD, this DVD with one of the laziest pieces of cover art in history (name, eyeballs, rating—it just screams ‘bargain bucket’) could be mine for just £6.49!

Never mind the fact that I’m still waiting on season 13 of the series, which was released on Blu-ray (for £49.99) back in March. Another search reveals, though, that Paramount Home Entertainment is finally going to allow people with a DVD to buy the series (for £24.99), albeit in September, six months after the Blu-ray release (which, remember, costs £49.99, which in NO WAY is the reason for the DVD version’s delay).

No doubt said DVD will still be stuffed full of adverts and anti-piracy garbage you can’t skip, along with a tiresome and lengthy snippet from an episode, before the menu appears. And companies wonder why so many people are drawn to torrents these days. As noted in the title of this post, Paramount Home Entertainment hates South Park fans—unless they own a Blu-ray and have deep pockets.