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UPDATE #2: (Sept. 15) I was able to get the scroll bars working correctly after changing the scroll bars to “Click in the scroll bar to: Jump to the next page” under System Preferences > Appearance.

However, the problem with this is that I don’t like that setting. I prefer the “Jump to here” setting. However, the only way that iTunes 7 will behave like the rest of the apps on my system is to have that option selected. Otherwise, it does it’s own thing.

UPDATE: I’ve since updated my Mac at work, and there’s nothing wrong with how the scroll bars work. So, it looks like it’s a bug on my system at home. Now I just need to see if re-installing iTunes will fix it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah… Apple updated iTunes, iPods, and all that stuff. I think it’s great. But rather than rehash all that, I want to know what they were thinking when redesigning the UI for iTunes 7.

iTunes 7 has been working pretty good for me so far, other than a few issues - one being that Menuet seems to be crashing now as a result of updating, so hopefully there will be a fix for that soon.

My biggest gripe has to do with the changes to the user interface. I’ve been getting used to the new locations of a few buttons, but what’s with the new scroll bars? Has anyone else noticed that when you click the handle of a scroll bar to drag it, it doesn’t actually start moving the scroll bar until the cursor is further along the scroll area? Or, if you try grabbing a scroll bar handle closer to the end of the handle, the entire scroll pane jumps to a new position, as if you had clicked in the gutter of the scroll bar?

If this isn’t happening in the Windows release of iTunes 7, or you haven’t updated iTunes on your Mac yet, here’s what’s happening to me:

This behavior is not only irritating on it’s own, but it’s doubly irritating because these scroll bars behave differently than every other scroll bar in OSX. It’s the type of complaint I’ve heard against Flash applications because the UI controls in the app don’t behave like users expect them to.

I don’t claim to be a UI expert, but stuff like this really drives me nuts.

As a side note, I really like the adding of the [CLEAN] / [EXPLICIT] flags to songs in your personal library, similar to the way they’re tagged in the store. Makes it easy to know what songs I should probably have or not have playing on the speakers when various folks are within earshot. Though, it would be nice if I could add these tags to the songs that I ripped from my own CD collection, and not just the ones purchased from the iTunes Music Store.