Dave Gustafson pointed to a great Gizmodo post that looks at the absurd place the clickwheel iPod has gone over the years with all the functionality that slowly got added to something that originally was designed only to play music.
“To put this eyeball cacophony into perspective, the new menu system has over 60 places to clickânearly triple that of the original iPod version (and that’s not including Nike+ integration on nanos). Plus, the new system has five screens just for settings, all of which are unrelated to the main “Settings” menu. How did things become so complicated? The iPod went from doing one thing really well to doing a bunch of things pretty well. But the UI was never redesigned to accommodate the functionality…Right now Apple’s sending city traffic down a one-lane, unpaved road.”
Link: A Sad Fact: The iPod’s Clickwheel Must Die (gizmodo.com, via)
JamLegend, a Guitar Hero / Rock Band service for the PC, piqued my interest just because of the illustration that showed how you can play along with your keyboard by holding it guitar-style. It spurred the thought: how can we hold ordinary objects in different ways so that they become different things entirely?