ExpanDrive

It’s September, folks, and we all know that means: football, free stuff on the sidewalks, and yet another batch of shiny new iPods from Apple. While people who do that sort of thing for a living are prognosticating all sorts of fancy crap for the new lines, there’s really only one thing I want to see: the quick and painful death of Cover Flow.

While it may seem like just another example of Jobs buying and/or stealing someone else’s idea and pawning it off as “innovation” (see also: Dashboard, Spaces and pretty much everything else), Cover Flow is unique among Apple’s line in that it’s complete and utter garbage.

Now before you get your irrationally-tight blue jeans in a knot over how awesomely retro cover flow is, stop and act like you’re a useful human being. Do a cost benefit analysis. Benefits of cover flow: You get top sift through postage stamp-sized images of your favorite album covers. That’s it. Costs? Where do I begin…

First of all, it kills your ability to quickly parse a list of music. While the mind scans images more quickly than words (this is why favicons are so awesome), Cover Flow lets you see nine albums at a time, tops. Of these 9 albums, you can maybe tell what 3 or 4 of them are. No problem if you’ve got every corner of every album cover in your 20,000 song collection memorized, but for those of us who aren’t idiot savants, it’s a real thorn in the grundle.

Awesome! Three copies of Elephunk! But what the hell is that off to the left?

This problem is complicated by the fact that iTunes is just way too stupid to have the responsibility of assigning songs to albums. Miss a hyphen? A capital letter? Misspell a band name? You’re gonna get three different albums. It’s not that iTunes can’t figure out what art to assign; it just can’t tell that three discs with the same art, title, and band name belong to the same freakin’ album.

Ok, sweet. I finally found Van Morrison. But what’s all this other crap?

This is, of course, assuming you have art in the first place. But if you’re below age 30 or so, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you came into a fair chunk of your collection via Napster, Scour, Limewire, BitTorrent, or what have you. Over 30, and you’ve probably brought everything in from CD. Either way, That means lots of ugly, useless space-holding images in your Cover Flow. It’s as if Steve Jobs and his evil cabal convened in their Cupertino War Room and asked “how can we shame self-conscious yuppies into paying us money for music that they already have?”

Wow, this is almost as fun as looking through identical, unlabeled folders in real life!

Apple’s real crime with Cover Flow, though, was bringing it into the OS. Maybe, if Preview were somehow disabled and you had a folder entirely filled entirely with images, Cover Flow would be an acceptable means of sorting through it. But for the most part, it’s just a slow, inconvenient bit of eye candy that brings to mind the condescending, overdone metaphor of Microsoft BOB.

Cover Flow is Apple at its worst: shiny, overpacked, and buggy. Sure, it looks real cool on TV ads, and if the compugods are smiling on His Jobsness, it’ll look fly when unveils it for the fanboys. But Apple’s recent purple patch is fueled largely by the popular perception that its stuff just works; by any standard you can imagine, Cover Flow just doesn’t.