The iPod and Naive Interfaces
December 26th, 2004Dave Winer asks whats wrong with the iPod? I posted a comment on his blog but I felt the need to expand on my gripes. My gripes with the iPod:
- You have to hit the menu button too many times to do anything useful, like change a setting. There should be a “top menu” button as well as a button to bring you back to the previous menu.
- You can’t create playlists on the fly on the iPod. How frustrating is that.
I think Apple tends to oversimplify things too much and create what I call “naive interfaces” like the iPod. Interfaces which are too simple. I’m still skeptical of Apple even in light of OS X, because a lot of the power OS X (read: Unix) was not their doing. It was the FreeBSD team and their Unix forebearers. Because it is based on Unix they had to support the advanced use cases, which I feel they normally ignore.
Things should be as simple as possible but no simpler. I think they went too simple with the iPod.
December 26th, 2004 at 5:55 pm
Wow, we’re really bourgeois to be sitting around and complaing about our iPods, but anyway, here’s the deal on on-the-fly playlists: (Well, it’s more like a via media.) Truth is, you can make a playlist by holding down the non-descript middle button on a song until it flashes—and then it shows up on the “On-The-Fly” playlist. Unfortunately, however (and herein lies the rub), you can only have one “On-The-Fly” at a time.
But amen on the menu button thing. How often do you change settings, though?
January 3rd, 2005 at 2:17 pm
Hmm, my iPod mini seems to handle multiple on-the-go playlists, and I recall this being a feature of the 4G (added to my mini with the last Software Update). The 3G is one list only.