iTunes 5 is Butt-Ugly.

I'm going to put off downloading iTunes 5 for as long as I can. It is butt-ugly. I don't mind the smoothed over brushed metal look too much, though the gradients are a bit over-done. But everything is so horribly crowded now. Dark lines divide the main panes (source list on the left, browser columns above the main list). Controls crammed into the top and bottom areas with pathetically small margins.

This is yet another example of the Applications group at Apple not coordinating with the rest of the company when it comes to user interface. While Microsoft is actually starting to make the Windows UI suck less, Apple is slowly poisoning themselves by making the Mac (after all, it's applications are the users' main experience of the platform) look worse and worse.

Though it's not friday, I have filed this as a bug, id 4247645. I encourage others to do the same. It's high time that Apple's iApp developers stop being User Interface Renegades.

Update:The picture here is not of iTunes, but of Sina Tamaddon, the guy who runs the Apps group at Apple.