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Saturday, Feb 11 2006

iPod interface

BTW, I've been meaning to make a comment about this for a while, but I always forget. It's about the acclaimed iPod wheel-based interface. Sure, it's nice, everybody loves it, etc. However, personally, I think it has one major flaw that I will try to explain.

Once I am playing a song, I have a tendency to want to browse the other songs I have loaded and see what I'd like to hear next. When you do that, and you have thousands of songs in the device, it becomes a pain to go back to what you were listening to, which I want to do to see how much I have left, or skip ahead, etc. The easier way to do is to go back to Now Playing, which takes quite a few wheel clicks. Not really friendly. Another way is to scroll back and find your song again, but this is not practical when you have many thousands.

The interface feels limited in the sense that it lacks shortcuts to jump around the library in an easier manner.

I thought so from the very first time I tried a 2nd generation iPod, couldn't believe there wasn't an easy way to get back to the song currently playing in 1 or 2 clicks. And I like them, they are neat little devices. I have owned a 3rd generation, a 4th generation, a Nano, a Shuffle, and a Mini, and I've always found the interface a bit lacking. So much so, that ultimately they end collecting dust by my desk at home in a few days after the novelty wears off.

Nano

Good stuff, Steve Johnson, a Chicago Tribune gadget writer, posted a funny article about the trouble he and his wife had getting an iPod Nano up and running. It wasn't long before the hords of brainwashed Apple "cultists", as he refers to them, started flaming him. He wrote a follow up, that I found hilarious. Take a peek if you have a minute or two, it's worth it:

No, no, Nano: The afterglow

Here is the original article as well:

No, no, Nano

I am not surprised. I've observed this tendency for years myself, a considerable number of Apple fans exhibit a rather unbalanced zealot-like behavior. Come to think of it, this tends to be true of small minorities. They feel "threatened" I guess. It is a natural move, they have to work extra-hard at being loud to avoid being ignored altogether. You rarely see it happening the other way around. The vast majority of PC users couldn't care less.


Taxes

It's that time of the year, tax time. I just finished doing mine. Took a while, but not nearly as long as last year, when I had all kinds of schedules to attach because of the part year OH and NY residence, plus I had to establish myself as a new NY resident as well (which is more forms.)



Today, I even discovered a minor last minute calculation error when double-checking all the numbers (I always do that before sealing the envelopes.) It was in the NY forms. I print the instructions 4 pages up, and the numbers are so tiny that they are hard to see. I used a number from the wrong line. Anyway, this serves as proof that once in a great, great while I do make a mistake

It's snowing out. Bill stopped by JD's yesterday. I may go out later, but I am not sure. I stayed in last night and went to bed relatively early.

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