There has been a lot talk about the design choices made in iTunes 10. Most of the changes seem fairly minor in my opinion and not worth getting to wound up about. The only change that is worth noting is the non-standard vertical alignment of the window controls. I don’t think the 25 pixel savings out weigh the non-standard design, but I also don’t think that users will be too perplexed by the change. The controls are still anchored in the upper left and retain their color scheme. The re-alignmet also only affects mac users because the Windows version still requires a menu bar.

This begs the question of why the changes in iTunes have gotten so much attention. The answer is that Apple actually gives a shit about interface guidelines so they look hypocritical whenever they make a minor exception for themselves and pointing out hypocrisy gives us bloggers something easy to talk about. A much more significant non-standard interface change is the continual erosion of menu bars from application design, but that would be much too hard to actually cover.