Sixteen students at German college Fachhochschule Potsdam each reimagined iTunes as “smaller, focused, single-purpose apps.” Examples include watching movies, reading books, listening to albums, etc. By and large, these aren’t bad as far as student projects go, though I have to question the wisdom of the exercise as a whole. Some of these are built around use cases that, in the mobile age, just don’t seem relevant for desktop software anymore, e.g., downloading apps and transferring them to your phone, listening to podcasts, even watching movies. Still, as a group they do highlight a bigger problem for Apple: when one of your flagship software applications is assigned in schools as a case in feature bloat, it’s crossed some threshold for acceptability. Time to fix iTunes, Apple!

See all the projects at interface.fh-potsdam.de.