Here is the company representative explaining why the Edit menu always comes first , instead of the File menu as Jobs intended it.
CoreUI, our skin layer, is not meant to hardcode things like "File". There are some apps that don't deal with any file and still require text editing. And we can't wild guess where they want the Edit menu. The thing we could do is add a special
Now, I would very much like to see better efficiency in H.264 playback, especially on the 1.6 GHz Core Duo Mac Mini on my wife's desk. That would be a good thing. But here is a cross-platform application whose creators can't be bothered to put together a simple Cocoa shell application for their player, and believe me this would not be a lot of work for a semi-competent Mac guy to throw together. Instead, they've ported their skinning engine—which I'm sure they are quite proud of. The engine is extremely flexible, except in the sense that you can't put together a skin which doesn't make their programmers look clueless.
Let's see. How much time to put together a nice Cocoa application to host your player: X. How much time to port, and debug a "flexible" skinning engine: maybe 4X. So, precious development time which could be spent elsewhere is instead spent on skinning: a misfeature given to the world by WinAmp, and repeated by seemingly every other media player intent on letting skinless iTunes eat their lunch.
You want to know a big reason WinAmp, or MusicMatch (which I worked for) or whatever, couldn't keep up with Apple's iTune team? A big reason was skins, if you are spending 30% of your development time maintaining skins and the skins engine, and you start rejecting new features because they don't fit into the design of the engine, or because you have to add new artwork to 10 separate skins, and you have your best minds trying to figure out an abstract design for docking arbitrary subwindows, and your testing staff spends all day long looking at every permutation of new feature and skin, then it's going to be like you are fighting Apple with your arm tied to your leg, and your leg is bolted to the floor.
And for what? A feature that the vast majority of your user base is at most going to flip through once and forget exists.
BTW, CorePlayer, at the moment, is virtually useless on the Mac, as it lacks AC3 passthrough. You know an actual feature involving playing media. Maybe, if they hadn't spent all that time on their skinning engine, they'd have a product Mac users, like me, would like to buy.
