Posts Tagged: music

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11
Sep 08

The iPod can’t scale

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.

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“To put this eyeball cacophony into perspective, the new menu system has over 60 places to click—nearly 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)

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29
Aug 08

Overloading Car Dashboards

“So what has probably happened here – Toyota had to create this one product that integrates the GPS, CD changer, the blue tooth telephone, the trip information and the other 15 things I have not discovered yet. It probably started as one component, which then had to be reworked to integrate the second component and so on. When everything was said and done, we have what I get to use now. It sure does meet all product functionality requirements that it was set to achieve, but it falls well short of usability requriements – thanks to product integrations. Do your products suffer from this same problem?”

Link: Product Integration – Usability killer? (productmanagementtips.com, via)

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6
May 08

Spatial music UI concept

Cool stuff.

“I wanted to try to take advantage of spatial reasoning and spatial memory to make it easier to find and navigate stuff. Let the user see the scope of information available. Start by showing the big picture. When it makes sense, let it behave more like real-world objects. You can normally pick up objects where you left them off. They don’t move when you are not watching, something digital objects often do. (Insert your favorite joke about spouse here.) Over the last couple hundred thousand years our brains has developed a fantastic ability to take in and store where stuff is in our immediate surroundings. Since mobile screens are a part of our immediate surroundings, we should try to take advantage of this ability. It might sometimes make user interfaces a bit less confusing.”

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Link: Flat Music Player version 2 (sender11.typepad.com)

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9
Oct 07

Serenata

A production phone /music player that looks like a concept device. Putting controls above the screen is an interesting one.

Link: Serenata (serenatamobile.com)

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6
Aug 07

Nokia Trends Lab

Nokia’s launched a “lab” that facilitates experimental creativity using mobile devices.

“Nokia Trends Lab is a physical and virtual hub of mobility experiences. Nokia wants to enable creative thinkers to push the boundaries of how to use mobility as part of the creative process.”

Link: Nokia Trends Lab (nokiatrendslab.com)

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20
Nov 06

The experimental end of ubicomp

An interview of Laya Gaye – a researcher working in ubicomp.

“What I find interesting with mobile music is that it democratises the use of music technology and takes it to the streets. The field develops very quickly so it can take various directions at the moment: mobile music is by nature multi-disciplinary, at the crossing between interactive music, mobile computing, locative media and consumer audio, so it benefits from all the current developments in all of these fields.”

Link: Interview with Lalya Gaye (we-make-money-not-art.com)

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12
Nov 06

The Walkman story

How the Sony Walkman came to be.

“There were some cassette recorders available at the time, although they were not designed for the general public. Sony called theirs Pressman and marketed it exclusively to reporters. These recorders lacked stereo sound and were very expensive. They also used (typically) microcassettes, which had no support from record companies (and were expensive to boot).”

Link: The Story Behind the Sony Walkman (lowendmac.com, via)

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31
Oct 06

Creating the iPod

Henning Fischer writes about the process of creating the iPod.

“It’s a given that the digital music player market wasn’t exactly saturated in 2001, but Jobs’ back of the napkin analysis of the opportunity space was clever in its adherence to simplicity. He compared traditional CD players, Flash-based units, Mp3 CD units and hard drive jukeboxes on a simple price per song basis. Again, a basic analysis but one that illuminates the choices available to Apple. More importantly, Jobs was clear about what Apple wasn’t going to do.”

Link: The Future Was Staring Us in the Face (adaptivepath.com)

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24
May 06

Nokia’s handheld computing experience

“If you are old fashioned enough to call these devices “phones,” Nokia people will politely correct you. They are multimedia computers, which offer features and picture quality to rival digital cameras or camcorders, and music quality to challenge an iPod. And because they can connect to the Internet you can check e-mail, download songs, or even update your blog while on the go. (Thought the world already had enough blogs? Think again.)”

Link: Nokia Puts Your Digital Life in Your Hand (businessweek.com)

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9
Mar 06

The iPod is badly designed

A detailed, occasionally overzealous, discussion of the iPod’s design flaws. A deserving topic given the status of the object in design discourse.

“The IPod Photo has six buttons – and it should have more. Apple tends to go for a simple aesthetic, which isn’t a bad idea sometimes. However the IPod is used regularly all day long by many people and simple aesthetics aren’t as important as decent usability. The number of buttons is a design tradeoff. Too many and it becomes confusing and complex, too few and it becomes confusing and simple. The IPod has too few buttons and it results in a slow, error prone, modal interface. Read any HCI textbook about modal interfaces – avoid them if you can is the advice. The middle (unlabled) click-wheel button first brings you to a track-movement mode, then a rating mode, then back to the original track-progress mode, and if you leave it for 5 seconds it reverts back to the original mode by itself. Also note that the track-movement and track-progress modes look very similar and can easily be confused. Additionally, stroking the scroll-wheel enters a volume-changing mode (which times out after 2 seconds).”

Link: What Is Wrong With The iPod (mobilecommunitydesign.com)

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12
Dec 05

Portable DJ

“The HP DJammer portable appliance could be the next generation of MP3 players. Building on top of current MP3 players, the HP DJammer has the following two additional functionalities: a personal DJ User Interface (UI), and a live digital session with one (or more) similar HP DJammer appliance enabling listeners to create music and digitally mix in real-time together (hence the term jamming).”

Link: DJammer (hp.com)