The Podcast app and the iPad Music app are both a mess, and both happened under Forstall as I understand it.

Trade away the lyric and podcast show info displays for kitsch wood veneer? And a reel-to-reel tape recorder simulator? Move seek controls to weird locations? Replace the easy-to-spot seek knob with a radio needle? Why? So many small steps backward, even if no single one was a deal breaker... negative trajectory is negative trajectory.

If this means they walk some of that silliness back, it's the best Apple news in ages. It started to look like designers who didn't actually use the apps were taking over.

Wow. I haven't listened to any podcasts recently but felt compelled to try it after your post. That thing is just awful. Not only "yo dawg, I heard you like skeuomorphism..." territory, but they didn't even do it right - scrubbing through a track is completely disconnected from the tape wheels (go in reverse, it's much more obvious) If you're going to go down that path, you really have to emulate the device in question 100% accurately or else it just looks really stupid.

There's a good reason that its a bad idea to roll a system UI replacement the vast majority of the time. The next time it comes up in conversation, I now have a perfect example of why in my pocket.

I also totally agree about the "designers who didn't use the apps" bit, and would go a bit further - they really need to do a better job testing real-world network conditions too. Designing stuff designed around cell reception doesn't fare so well outside apple campus where it's not blanketed with reliable, high-speed, low-latency network connections. iTunes Match... it brings back memories of realplayer. It's a cost of secrecy, but seeing that the supply chain had already failed them there, best embrace reality and use it to improve stuff before launch.

I think that's unfair: The "everything is simplistic, monochrome gray" half of Apple's recent design may be more tasteful in many people's view, but it isn't any more usable.

I had many situations in which the auto-hidden scrollbars made it impossible to tell that there was more to discover in a scroll view. The CAPS SIDEBAR HEADERS have no triangle indicator anymore, it is impossible to tell without hovering if a section is closed or open & empty. The monochrome sidebars made Finder and iTunes noticeably less efficient in my usage. Many new-style toolbars like Xcode's are not customizable anymore. etc...

And all these things are in line with Apple's hardware design (where I enjoy the simplicity a lot more).

The last time I looked, save dialogs for example in Preview were broken too, as the horizontal scroll bar hid most of the lowest row even when you scrolled to the absolute bottom. What were they thinking? That's a pretty serious basic level bug that your UI is blocking your data. Don't they test such big changes?

All kinds of things are broken left and right in OSX but I guess that's just how it is. Mail hangs constantly and silently, you're just not receiving anything anymore. You can't close it (and force quit is not an option anymore?), you have to kill it from command line. The new calendar is brown faux leather all of a sudden, completely different than everything else. And you can't easily select which account you're viewing and setting events for.

It is interesting to note that software functionality and polish above a certain mediocre level just can not be reached.

Sure, sometimes it's understandable that stuff is totally rewritten from scratch since some fundamental new technology made it necessary, and you have to go to a state of more brokenness. But even when that is not the case, it seems software can't go beyond "90% complete" or so, at best it just reaches an asymptotic level where stuff is broken at the same rate as it is repaired.

After the major and hard stuff is done, what the heck are all the engineers and testers working on? If you're not in a hurry to create those big features any more, you could concentrate on at least doing the few new small features very well. But it feels as if OSX UI has taken as many steps backwards as it has gone forward from Snow Leopard.

This happens in other software too. For example Xnview and XFLR5 have both been developed for a long time and have had their ups and downs, and at the moment might be below 50% of their historical level of "perfection". But they're cheap/free mostly one man operations, multiplatform and have had massive rewrites and feature expansions. Often the developer might not even have some supported platform to test platform specific issues on, and it's a surprise they work as well as they do.

You likely know this already, but Downcast is an awesome podcast app, it has location based downloading as well, which is great if you're a commuter.

(I also listen to a lot of podcasts and have been disappointed by the Apple Podcast app).

Luckily, they didn't immediately pull all competing apps out of the store when they released this, as they have done in other cases.

Podcasts.app is crap, but there are Instacast and Downcast (I alternate between those) and probably other good choices that cost less than a half gallon of gas.

When have they pulled competing apps that they haven't acquired?

Apple has capriciously pulled apps from their app store too many times to count, so I assume you specifically mean when have they pulled competing apps because they decided to introduce their own apps with similar features. Well, they've done that numerous times, too. For instance:

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/08/quickpick-update-in-limbo-for...

http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/02/apple_yanks_widget...

EDIT: fixed first link

On a suggestion from my father - I downloaded the 'downcast" app. $2 well spent in my opinion.

I have tried almost all the podcast apps at this stage (sinking about $15-20) and although Downcasts is great (my number 2 choice) I recently found myself prefering the lesser known Pocket Casts. The best feature by far is they poll the feeds on their own servers and push notifications to you (I know Instacast is supposed to do this but I didn't find it very reliable and Instacast had many other problems for me). Pocket Casts very rarely crashes (with over 60 podcasts subscribed), resumes/pauses system-wide reliably and instantly, has a nice responsive UI (even on my iPhone 4) and has full import/export OPML so you aren't stuck with them. No affiliation.

The new podcast app makes certain workflows impossible--like downloading a single podcast before taking a walk. Now it just says "preparing to download" indefinitely. By the time it shows up on my device, that window of free time to listen to a podcast is gone. Complete and utter crap.

It's horrifying bad. Even the app that I use for my (relatively) ancient Nokia N8 (Podcatcher) is miles better than Apple's Podcasts app. The SO complains about it all the time.

Not sure about you, but I've had pretty decent success with the Podcasts app.

It was a bit cumbersome to learn (tap to show position/scrubbing bar) but it works well for my news podcasts as well as my podrunner casts.

I often find streaming works fine instead of downloading the episode... couldn't do that before easily in the iPod/Music app.

Can't up vote this comment either. Just the reel to reel player is a joke.