iTunes 7 came out today, along with new iPods, new iPod nanos, new iPod shuffles, the iTunes Movie Store, and even a sneak peak at the next big Apple thing: iTV. But iTunes 7 alone is a great update, here are some of the amazing new features that I think are the coolest:

Cover Flow

This is one feature that has simply belonged in iTunes since the start. Based off of the third party app that was released a while ago, Cover Flow is a great addition to iTunes. It allows you to always see your album art front and center, and browse your entire library by album art, just like flipping through a CD collection. Very slick and very smooth, this is easily the best feature in iTunes 7.

iPod Management


Now when you click on your iPod in the source list, all of the settings that used to be in the Preferences window of iTunes have been moved to this new view. It allows you to change all your settings right from the iTunes window, easily and quickly. You can see how much space you have left, what type of media is taking up the most space, etc.

Album Art Retriever

With one (okay, maybe two or three) clicks in iTunes 7, you can now get album art for all of your music in your library. This means that all of those completely legal songs you've imported into iTunes from CDs (cough) can finally look as good as purchased music from the iTunes Store. Third party utilities have done this before, but since Apple broke downloading art from the iTunes Store, everyone has sort of been left in the dark with crummy quality artwork from Amazon. Now we can all pretty up our libraries.

There have not been a lot of dramatically exciting new apps this year, so thanks to Apple for breaking the ice. I think the new GUI elements look pretty good overall, though I have a few complaints which I'll keep to myself. Apple has once again proven that graphical consistency is not that important in user interfaces.