Comments on: Is iTunes 9 sporting “Marble”?

By: Kip Marlowe

Kip Marlowe — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 10:07:02 +0000

Doesn’t anyone think iTunes 9 looks less attractive than ever before? Since Leopard, Apple made theming all but impossible, so they should at least change the look more often.

Better still, they should finally allow for multiple colors like Windows 95 did from its inception (OS was ugly but at least one could escape the predominance of gray), and multiple themes like Windows 7 does now. Maybe OS X can remain metal, but with metallic colors (to go along with metallic MacBooks).

Please, at least one theme that isn’t gray.

In the meantime for iTunes 9, they did things like put white slivers under the Play, Forward, and Back buttons, and made the gradient more dramatic — but it just looks sloppy and unrefined rather than exciting and fresh.

We’re talking going on a decade of GRAY. It may look like metal, but at the end of the day gray is gray.

By: Grant Wall

Grant Wall — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:35:43 +0000

This is all referring to the rumored OS X Theme called Marble. http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/03/25/os-x-snow-leopard-about-to-don-a-fresh-coat-of-marble/

Both the black navigation system at the top for the iTunes store, and the volume/status sliders somewhat resemble this. Small little glimpses of it at most.

By: Preston

Preston — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:33:59 +0000

How does this look anything like marble? Marble looks like this: http://tilenet.net/admin/guploads/.MARBLE-EmperadorDarkMaron.jpg

All they did was add a more prominent gradient in the window.

By: Lo_PhatZ

Lo_PhatZ — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:30:16 +0000

Dear god! Talk about bloat…
iTunes 9 app size 151Mb!
After ’slimming’ with Xslimmer its down to 32.8Mb
Thats 118Mb of garbage no longer filling up my HDD space from ONE app!

By: Lo_PhatZ

Lo_PhatZ — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:28:05 +0000

..ok Im back after installing 9.
It looks much the same.
Slight visual changes here & there.. the icons on the left ‘pop’ out more (more vivd colours?)

Whats all this babble about marble theme?

By: Lo_PhatZ

Lo_PhatZ — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:59:01 +0000

Im sitting here looking at iTunes 8 & I cant for the life of me see any difference to the screen shots you have here of iTunes 9…

I’ll go install 9 now like a good little lemming & see if there is really any difference..

By: Matty

Matty — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:33:12 +0000

I just love how different it looks. It’s just so refreshing. The option for the purple and green hue really seals the deal for me.

By: Grant Wall

Grant Wall — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:43:06 +0000

I had tweeted about this earlier on in the day as well. Definitely looks like a Marble theme going on, especially with the volume slider and loading progress bars. Not to mention the iTunes Store Navbar.

By: ncus

ncus — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:51:31 +0000

iTunes 9 has horrible typography ever! Especially the App screen, the top bar line height is need more space.

The playback buttons and the progress screen on the center looks quite slick tho.

By: Lucky

Lucky — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:17:46 +0000

As always, iTunes is a hint on how the next generation Mac OS will look. That’s how 10.7 will probably look like.

As for what Patrick said, Apple never said anything about marble, EVER. They never said anything about a new interface for snow leopard. Only rumors by fanboys. Get your facts straight.

If anyone else noticed, Safari 4 also had a different look than what we were used to. We can all expect a much improved interface in Mac OS X 10.7.

@Artur: no and yes.