So, the big announcement is past and I wasn’t too excited.

New iPods; OK; I’m still relatively satisfied with my 3G, 40GB device. The new Shuffle looks good. Finally a price point and size suitable for jogging, although I’ll probably buy it only when it grows to 2 or 4GB. The new Nanos look less scratchable now, but still, at the price points they’ll be available here for, don’t seem to be a good value for me. The large iPods do stuff I’m not interested in, like photos and video, and I suppose that they – like my current iPod – aren’t suited, speed and reliability-wise, to be used regularly as an external drive.

Games. I very rarely play any games on my Mac these days and I’ve never owned a console, so I can’t see me playing games on an iPod either. The positive part about this is that it shows that iPods are tending towards having some sort of developer API – I wonder if these were all ported in-house or if there’ll be a PodCode announced at next WWDC.

The whole movie hoopla leaves me cold. I watch almost no TV (we don’t even have cable), rent a DVD very rarely (under 10 times a year, or less), buy no DVDs, and wouldn’t know what to do with a TiVo. I suppose it’s all big news in the USA. The iTV thingy looks like it’ll boost Apple’s stock when it comes out, so I’m for it in theory…

iTunes 7 is about the only part of all this which I’ll use soon – in fact, I already gave it a try. The new UI looks quite good. All the Aqua is gone, the exception being the “traffic light” window buttons; the rest is done in muted plastic tones. Some people are decrying this as further dilution of the increasingly varied Mac OS X interface, but I’d say this is mostly dictated by iTunes unique position as a cross-platform application that looks the same on both Mac and Windows. In fact, a quick peek into the package reveals that all the UI elements are present internally – it uses no native widgets at all.

It may be subjective, or the new QuickTime decoders may have had some bits polished, but some songs sound better now. The left-hand column looks nice, though most of the items aren’t relevant to me. The two new alternate library views are somewhat wasted on me; I deliberately erase cover pictures to save on space, and this only helped me find two albums that had slipped through. I wonder whether the pictures must still be stored inside each track, and whether they still are copied to iPods that have no cover display? If so, I’ll continue avoiding them.

Finally, the iPod control screen looks good. I’ll certainly study the whole new UI to see if I glean any ideas for XRay II…