John Topley's Weblog

December 2004 Article Archive

Living With The iPod

Thursday, 23 December 2004

I've now had my iPod for three months and am therefore able to offer some further thoughts on the pros and cons of iPod ownership. I've bought a couple of accessories, these being the Apple carrying case with belt clip and an iPod Dock.

The carrying case is no great shakes as you still have to slide the device in and out to operate the controls—I don't have the remote control headphones—and to see the display. I'm sure there are better third-party alternatives around. I hate the idea of carrying cases; taking this beautiful piece of design and engineering and burying it in some ill-fitting tat. Ideally I'd like to protect my iPod with a force field, but I hear that Apple still have some way to go on that one.

The Dock is much more useful; it's so much more convenient being able to drop the iPod in the Dock to synchronise and charge rather than having to fumble around with cables. I'm impressed by the build quality too. It has a sturdy metal base and generally feels a lot more solid than the other docking stations that I've used in the course of owning PDAs.

The packaging of the official accessories is just as particular as for the iPod itself and I couldn't help noticing that the box sizes are all exact even multiples of each other i.e. the Dock box is half as wide as the iPod box and half as deep, and the carrying case box is half as deep as that etc. It's all so pure, I love it!

I'm very pleased with the basic operation of the iPod i.e. the sound quality, ease of use and partnership with iTunes. My other observations are:

The Good

• The Music Quiz that comes with the iPod is brilliant! You're played a brief snippet from any part of any track and are presented with a multiple choice list of which song it's from, and have to select the correct one. The song list shortens as time progresses and you get more points the earlier you select the correct answer. A very simple idea but good fun to play. I guess this game is the iPod equivalent of the sliding puzzle desk accessory that shipped with the original Macintosh.
• You can create On-The-Go playlists by selecting songs and holding down the wheel button until the song title flashes. There's more to it though because you can do the same for entire playlists, artists and albums. You can also save these ad hoc playlists.
• The Click Wheel is an amazing hardware user interface. It's possible to scroll through thousands of items really quickly without losing accuracy.
• When a song's playing, a Now Playing menu item is added at the bottom of the menu structure, which takes you to the song status screen. This menu structure follows Fitt's Law because you can scroll down indiscriminately using the Click Wheel and be assured that you'll hit the menu item you want.
• You can drag iTunes searches to the desktop or to a folder.
• I was downloading a purchased song when I lost my Internet connection. iTunes told me exactly what to do to re-commence my download (use the Check for Purchased Music item on the Advanced menu).

The Bad

• The iPod doesn't handle long titles very well. They're truncated whilst browsing which means that I often have to edit them in iTunes to distinguish them. Using a slightly smaller font and wrapping the text over multiple lines could be a solution. Long titles are scrolled in the Now Playing screen and I find the legibility of the scrolling text to be poor.
• I don't use the Contacts or Notes features because they're completely unprotected. It would be nice if you had to enter a PIN to access them.
• The option for the Clicker beep is reset after going into a deep sleep.
• The iPod seemingly takes an age to wake up after going into a deep sleep.
• The owner-draw window buttons in iTunes breaks Fitt's Law, unlike the native ones provided by Windows.

The Ugly

• The beautiful shiny back casing seems to get scratched just by looking at it!

Wish List

• I'd quite like a way to be able to mark stuff for deletion from the iPod whilst on the move, but I can understand why Apple don't provide this feature. For one thing it would make synchronisation with iTunes less straightforward, as you'd have to manually reconcile tracks that existed on one but not the other.
• I'd like a numeric indication of what the current volume level is, so that I'd know that (for example) my preference is to turn it all the way up to 11.

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E-Mail Of The Year

Monday, 20 December 2004

In order to be considered for the prestigious E-Mail Of The Year award, correspondents have to demonstrate a mastery of the English language that verges on childlike, a flair for getting straight to the point without any of those social niceties like introductions, but most of all, the point that they're getting to has to be so off-wack as to leave me paralysed with incredulity and completely incapable of replying to them.

This year there are two nominations for the award, but they're both winning entries in my eyes. The judges found it very hard to separate them. Interestingly, both e-mails were received in response to posts I'd made on the Joel on Software Forum, so I really must post there more often next year. So without further ado, let's take a look at the nominations.

shanmugam e-mailed me with the haunting and delicate:

Sir how I install pirates of Win XP sp2

—The judges were particularly impressed by the avant garde abandonment of punctation in this sentence and by the frugal structure. I liked the ambiguity implied by the use of the word “pirates”.

williams martins e-mailed me with this:

hi,
i will like to buy this item and i will pay u via paypal, and i will like to buy up to 20 pieces. let me know the total amount to pay so that i can send u the card.

—Regular readers will know that I'm a sucker for replacing the difficult to spell and type “you” with “u”. I also find all lower case text to be outstandingly stylish. However, what really caught the judges' attention with this entry was its context:

RAM - 1GB over 512MB?

Hi All,
I am planning to upgrade my PC.
I have selected Athlon XP Processor and an ASUS Motherboard.
The only thing right now I am stuck is how much RAM to go for?

I have already ordered 512MB RAM.
I was wondering if adding another 512 MB RAM will give me enough bang for my bucks or not?

I am planning to use comp for Photoshop, Web app development in PHP,MySQL.
and most importantly, I am studying .NET currently (heavy use of VS.NET in coming days!!)

So what you suggest? Shall I go in for 1 GIG RAM?

Your suggestions are appreciated!
Regards,
JD

If you can afford it, then why not?

John Topley

hi,
i will like to buy this item and i will pay u via paypal, and i will like to buy up to 20 pieces. let me know the total amount to pay so that i can send u the card.

—Did you see what happened there?! williams managed to take the conversation to an entirely different level, using a manoeuvre through spacetime so complex that even Stephen Hawkings would struggle to keep up. It's unanimous: the E-Mail Of The Year award is yours, williams martins! Well done.

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Six Degrees Of Separation

Wednesday, 01 December 2004

I try to avoid writing about things that I've stumbled across whilst browsing—preferring instead to concentrate on creating my own content—but via a six degrees of separation-like process, I've come across something so remarkable that I just have to tell you about it.

I was browsing the Stylish Scripting blog on SitePoint, when I ended up at Cameron Adams' The Man in Blue website. Now this site is probably old news for any of you high-quality web design gurus/aficionados who may be reading, but upon visiting it for the first time this afternoon, I was astonished by it.

Cameron has created a site that just about embodies everything I wanted for this site: compelling content, visually stunning and totally up to date and W3C standards-compliant. Only he got there in a way that I never could. I read most of the site this afternoon (sorry boss!) It really is a lovingly put together piece of work. However, that's not what's so remarkable that I just have to write about it…

Back in January this year, The Man in Blue created an online Scrabble game using nothing more than XHTML, CSS and Javascript. It's called SSCrabble and is without a doubt the most interesting and impressive web application that I've ever seen. Okay, so it's taken me nearly a year to come across it, but it was worth the wait! It really does show what can be achieved without having to resort to Java applets or Flash. Check it out.

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