I don’t know about you, but my home is wireless. I have various devices hooking up to my home network: Macbook Pros, iPhones, Apple TV, PS3, hard drives etc… It’s great. The Apple TV is a good example actually of what I want to talk about here…

When you setup your AppleTV, you hook it up to your network (ethernet or wireless), go back to your Mac and “discover” it, and start synchronising your music, videos, photos with the device. From that point onwards the device has the ability to synchronise completely cable free between Mac and AppleTV over wireless.

So why, I wonder – after a few years now does the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch continue to require a USB cable to sync up between the Mac and the device? They all have wireless cards in them. Sure you get some power charge for your device – but that should be optional.

Apple should be thinking beyond the cable on mobile devices – they are mobile after all. My iPhone for example, hooks upto my wireless network as soon as I enter my house – it knows the network is available, and uses it. For starters, Apple really need to look at this – I want my iPhone to call my Mac when it gets back home, see if anything is new (apps, music etc), and just sync them up.

Don’t ask me to sync – Just do it.

This is the one massive pain I have with the whole iTunes, iDevice thing. I have to physically connect the two together in order to get my content synced up. That is so last decade!

Cloud it up!

Let’s go further than that. If rumours are true, Apple are looking at cloud solutions for your iTunes catalogue – effectively storing your music and maybe video collection in the cloud. What we would see is a scenario where all of our iTunes centric devices call the cloud instead of calling Macs/PCs to sync up data.

Content sync over any network, wireless or mobile.

Your Mac/PC effectively steps away from being the central storage point for your content, the cloud takes that role – and all iTunes is is the content management system. Your iPad, iPod or iPhone then hooks into the cloud anywhere, and keep the data in sync.

I think music, photo and app synchronisation has a strong possibility of going in this direction, both on mobile networks and on wireless, but I highly doubt we’ll see video sync over anything other than wireless.

Again – Don’t ask, Just do!

This is the key point – especially for a so-called “user friendly” company such as Apple – Take the action of syncing away from the user. I shouldn’t have to care about that, I shouldn’t have to figure out if x piece of content is on Y device, and whether or not I can do something until they are synced.

It should all just happen. Kind of like when OS X knows a piece of data has changed on your Mac and adds a change point in Time Machine – it just does it. It doesn’t ask you.

The important thing is to give the user some flexibility to configure what they want to sync, and not let the user worry when they need to sync.

Apple yesterday launched iTunes 9 as part of their “It’s Only Rock and Roll” event. I’ve now had the chance to sit and play with all the new features. Here’s a rundown of them, and my experiences so far:

UI

One of the first things you will notice in iTunes 9 is the updated “glossy” UI.

iTunes 8

iTunes 9

I have to say, I am not a great fan of it. Apple have decided to give it more of a look like an iTunes 8 window which isn’t activated. I constantly find myself clicking the window thinking it’s inactive, when in fact, it’s “ready to rock”.

Elsewhere in the UI, not much has changed. Buttons, playlists etc are all in the same place they were before – however the sidebar options have had a small icon refresh.

iTunes Store

The iTunes Store also got a make over – a very busy one. Compared to the store of old, there is far more content for the eye to absorb than before. In fact, it’s almost too much content. Clicking through to the App Store for example presents you with probably around 100 different app icons – it’s all a bit too much!

Apple have implemented a new navigation system though for the iTunes Store which is a great improvement over the previous incarnation. Now all the stores are constant and available as a horizontal static nav across all pages, rather than disappearing as part of any page.

When you hover + click over any of these buttons you also get the category options in a dropdown, which is also a very nice addition!

Social Sharing

iTunes 9 now also includes the ability to share albums via Facebook and Twitter. Apple have been quite cunning about this actually. You won’t find the option on any of your songs or albums in your playlists. The only place you can share music is from the iTunes Store.

You basically need to navigate to an album you like, and select the dropdown next to the price to grab the sharing options. What this does is share the album on your twitter, with a helpful link directly back to the iTunes Store… very well thought out! Bit of a shame though (even though I probably won’t use this feature) It would be best placed throughout all albums outside of the Store too.

Home Sharing

Home Sharing is another new feature of iTunes 9. Home Sharing is meant to make sharing content easy between computers and devices within the household. For example, you can share music purchases, movies, apps etc between 5 computers in your house with Home Sharing.

The trouble is, I’ve been doing this for about 3 years without the requirement for this feature. I have simply shared my iTunes ID with my wife, and she has happily listened to my purchases, used my iPhone apps etc etc and visa versa. Admittedly – some people may not want to do this, so Home Sharing does come into it’s own here, allowing potentially 5 different iTunes Store accounts to share each other’s content.

For me though, it’s still not far enough for Apple. I’ve waited for years for an iTunes server – one single repository in the home which holds all iTunes content, with the ability to cache locally some or all songs so you can take them with you on the move. I really don’t see the point in all this copying of identical content to multiple machines – it’s such a waste!

It is possible with network drives etc, but it can be problematic. Experiences here have been up and down – a genuine product from Apple in this area is definitely needed.

Improved Syncing

The one main nice addition here is the ability to download and organise your iPhone/iPod apps from within iTunes itself. Allowing you to effectively reorder your apps on multiple iPhone/iPod screens, and re-sync back to the device. It’s a very cool feature, mimicking the developer tools iPhone Simulator that has been around for a couple of years – although you cannot run apps within it.

One bug(?) I did find was the sort by date functionality of the Application section in the sync options. I don’t know what order Apple are syncing by, but it’s whacky! I am guessing it’s by very first release date, because it’s definitely not by when you first installed the app on the device, and it’s not by the most recently updated.

Apple have updated nearly all the sync option tabs for your iPhone or iPod, making it much easier for you to select the content that you want on your device, as well as adding new ways to pull events, genres etc.

Genius

So Apple’s Genius technology also got an update – adding Genius Mixes to the plate. Genius Mixes is meant to take the massive wealth of data that Apple has consumed from users since Genius’s inclusion with iTunes 8 last year, and play songs in your playlist together with other songs that fit. When I say together, I mean one after another – meaning “Song 1″ will mix nicely with “Song 2″ etc…

Not something I’m that interested in to be honest – I’m a fan of the original Genius toolbar as it helped me discover new music I might not have otherwise found, but that’s about it.

iTunes LP

iTunes LP is a feature I haven’t yet had the chance to check out. However it promises to be pretty damn good. Aiming for the more old-school market of music purchasers who loved owning the physical product, loved the liner notes, loved the artwork, iTunes LP tries to bridge the gap by giving a rich user experience and lots of extras to an album purchase.

User’s can flip through liner notes, select tracks to play from the album itself, rather than clicking through the normal playlist – plus much more. It promises to be very good. That said, it appears the offering is extremely limited at this time – with only 6 albums available to purchase in this new format.

iTunes Extras

Another feature I haven’t had a chance to play with yet is Extras. In a nutshell though, this feature gives you additional content with your movie purchases – specifically the type of DVD extras you would normally see.

What it isn’t

64 Bit – iTunes 9 has remained a 32-bit application, despite nearly all other standard applications for OS X being upped to 64-bit (other than the iLife suite). This is a shame because I think that iTunes more than anything could do with some 64-bit goodness.

Is it too late to make my Apple announcement predictions? Nah I don’t think so! There’s alot of rumour going around – mostly iPod centric which frankly I don’t care about – but here are a few things I do care about, and really hope happen:

[Update] Check out my review of iTunes 9 here.

iTunes 9

Actually, this is one of the main rumors going around, it’s pretty certain it will happen. What are we expecting though?

1. 64-Bit – This is a must – it’s one of the last Snow Leopard apps that is still 32-bit.
2. Cocoa? With it’s 64-bit goodness, will we see a re-written iTunes in the same way Finder has seen a Carbon->Cocoa update?
3. Social – I just cannot see this happening – sharing songs like “I am listening to xxxx” is so dull and about 3 years too late. I’d be interested in other social aspects, but I see little 3rd party integration.
4. New UI? – I’m keen to see iTunes get some new sparkle – the existing UI has been in place now for a couple of years.
5. iTunes Plus – I see this becoming the default, no more options. Goodbye 128kbit DRM’d downloads – no need for them anymore.

Subscriptions

With the inclusion of Spotify on the App Store, I am almost certain a music subscription model is coming from Apple. I just cannot understand why else they would allow this application to go onto the the iPod/iPhone because it basically infringes on one of their biggest products – the iTunes Music Store.

Sure, there are legal implications which may have forced Apple into a corner on this one, but seeing as the record labels seem willing to go with subscription models these days, I am more than certain Apple will have to eventually.

I’m predicting a seismic shift in the way user’s consume music. From CD -> Digital Downloads -> Subscriptions via streaming/offline cache. I strongly believe that this is where we will see the future of music consumption going.

Music aside, there have been some strong rumors and rumblings around a subscription TV show service – I’d like to see this stretch to movies too. We’ll see.

iPhone 3.1

I’m pretty sure this will happen today. The 3.0 OS has been out for a while now, and seeds of a 3.1 version have been spotted. What will it contain though? Well it’ll more than likely add support for any of the new aforementioned features above (and any I haven’t guessed). Hopefully it will have the usual zippy speed boosts, and will make Safari Snappier(TM).

AppleTV

Finally, I don’t think we’ll see a new AppleTV today, but I do believe some new firmware will come out the door, which will include access to online content such as BBC iPlayer. As you know, Sony PlayStation recently released their firmware 3.0 for PS3 which also includes the same, so I see no reason for Apple to ignore that.

All will be revealed in a few hours…