As you have probably heard elsewhere, Apple released new versions of iTunes and QuickTime as well as an iPod update yesterday. I’ve updated, of course, and having had some time to let all of the chewy goodness sink in, I’ve got a few thoughts. (Bet you’re surprised about that, eh?)

Thanks to Brad Miller, who sent the first notification of the iTunes upgrade out to our local Mac OS X users mailing list. Based on his initial feedback, I plunked down the upgrade on my calendar for the evening. But that was only the beginning…

Unsurprisingly, As the Apple Turns was the first site I saw that mentioned anything about this. Jack’s got a crazy publishing schedule, even though it’s only a daily update. This is where I first learned that the tasty little arrows that were formerly only in the iTunes Music Store have found their way into the library. Trouble is, they bring you to the iTMS search page instead of other songs by the same artist, or on the same album. My initial reaction was similar to Derek Powazek’s – but of course I knew before reading his article that there was at least a default behavior of allowing you to option-click the arrows to get the intuitive behavior. Derek did, too, and in fact someone forwarded him this little tidbit:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

Enter that in a Terminal window and enjoy the chewy, nutty goodness that ensues.Now that’s a candy bar. Mmm, mmm, yesirree. Whoo!

“But Scott,” you ask, “what’s General Uproar have to do with this?”

Well, that’s the bad news. Since applying the updates above, two Bad Things have happened on my Cube running 10.2.8. First, the iTunes icon has turned into the generic app icon; certainly annoying, at least. Far worse is a problem with being able to drag files around on the desktop or in Finder windows. They seem to be locked into place. I’m not sure but it seems like it’s a Finder preference… but I have no time to figure that out right now. Probably over the weekend.

One more day of Citrix MetaFrame Administrator training. Time to get some sleep.