Invisble iPod
I'm a fairly late adopter when it comes to technology (note the start date of this blog). Many years after people started talking about the design of the iPod, I now jump in:
I got an iPod Nano a couple of months ago. I love the thing for the usual reasons: the aesthetics of the hardware, the way it feels in the hand, the integration with the music store, and the information density on the small screen, to name a few.
But since all that is old news, I'd like to mention a couple of nice features/design decisions which happen to be invisible. Invisible features rarely get enough credit.
The first is one I noticed just the other day: when you pull out the headphone jack, it pauses playing automatically. Perhaps Apple hasn't gotten it quite right yet, but the general idea is a good one. I think of all the scrambling I've done to press Pause in the inanely frequent event of a music player being accidentally separated from its headphones. Who needs that stress?
The second cool thing, something I am grateful for on a daily basis, is a few differences in how the iPod treats songs and podcasts. When you play a song, it always starts from the beginning. When you play a podcast, the podcast always resumes from where you last paused it, even if you've listened to a bunch of other stuff after you paused the podcast. Also, when you use the "Shuffle Songs" feature, podcasts don't get into the shuffle list.
On paper, these facts might seem like minor details. On paper, it's also easy to come up with reasons to think they're actually terrible ideas: "The behaviour of podcasts and songs is inconsistent!" OK then, these are good examples of how consistency isn't always important (or, put in different terms, the most important kind of consistency is consistency with the user's expectations). In practice, the simple truth is that I would be quickly annoyed if songs always started from where I last left them, especially given my habit of hearing the first few notes of something and skipping to the next song. As for podcasts, my expectations are indeed different: I'd be even more annoyed if I had to fast-forward through anything I'd heard before as I make my way through the latest interview on Quirks and Quarks.
Like the pause-when-headphones-drop-out feature, the songs/podcasts separation is also imperfectly implemented. For example, if you download a podcast from somewhere other than iTunes, it's difficult to get the iPod to treat it as a podcast. But for trying and getting it mostly right: Thank you, Apple.
I got an iPod Nano a couple of months ago. I love the thing for the usual reasons: the aesthetics of the hardware, the way it feels in the hand, the integration with the music store, and the information density on the small screen, to name a few.
But since all that is old news, I'd like to mention a couple of nice features/design decisions which happen to be invisible. Invisible features rarely get enough credit.
The first is one I noticed just the other day: when you pull out the headphone jack, it pauses playing automatically. Perhaps Apple hasn't gotten it quite right yet, but the general idea is a good one. I think of all the scrambling I've done to press Pause in the inanely frequent event of a music player being accidentally separated from its headphones. Who needs that stress?
The second cool thing, something I am grateful for on a daily basis, is a few differences in how the iPod treats songs and podcasts. When you play a song, it always starts from the beginning. When you play a podcast, the podcast always resumes from where you last paused it, even if you've listened to a bunch of other stuff after you paused the podcast. Also, when you use the "Shuffle Songs" feature, podcasts don't get into the shuffle list.
On paper, these facts might seem like minor details. On paper, it's also easy to come up with reasons to think they're actually terrible ideas: "The behaviour of podcasts and songs is inconsistent!" OK then, these are good examples of how consistency isn't always important (or, put in different terms, the most important kind of consistency is consistency with the user's expectations). In practice, the simple truth is that I would be quickly annoyed if songs always started from where I last left them, especially given my habit of hearing the first few notes of something and skipping to the next song. As for podcasts, my expectations are indeed different: I'd be even more annoyed if I had to fast-forward through anything I'd heard before as I make my way through the latest interview on Quirks and Quarks.
Like the pause-when-headphones-drop-out feature, the songs/podcasts separation is also imperfectly implemented. For example, if you download a podcast from somewhere other than iTunes, it's difficult to get the iPod to treat it as a podcast. But for trying and getting it mostly right: Thank you, Apple.
posted by Su-Laine at 8:00 p.m.
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