If you’re ever near Alameda, California, stop in at Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge and check out the touch screen jukebox that some bar buddies and I made:

Tell them Hanford sent you.

Scott Lund did the hardware, Matty & Jessica did the case, and Martin Cate organized the content and was executive producer. I did the software and most of the UI design along with the rest of the team.

It randomly plays music from the least-recently played selections on the juke. This was a major beef the owners and staff had about the old off-the-shelf jukebox, which played the same 20 songs over and over.

Here’s a shot of the jukebox’s custom “shipwreck” case:

Top MP3 player requests:

1. Flag songs/albums/folders as “never play randomly” for Christmas and holiday tunes, novelty tunes, audiobooks, movie quotes. They should play when double clicked, or when in a playlist, but otherwise no.

2. Avoid similar songs in Shuffle -- it should do this by avoiding songs with one or more similar tags (perhaps just song title but could also be for artist and album too), checking the play history to make sure it’s been a while since a song’s been played. Large music collections often have multiple takes/versions/renditions of the same song. Would work great on a Christmas shuffle to make sure 3 different versions of “Jingle Bells” don’t play back to back. Update: Looks like iTunes has this already; it’s called Smart Shuffle.

3. Give me one or two click access to nuke a song from playback, and off my disk. This should be available whenever a song is playing, whether it’s on my PC or on a portable player. Shuffle turns up a lot of junk that I don’t want on my iPod or my hard disk anymore, and there’s no easy way to do this. This request is actually part of a bigger point-of-access UI request -- that I should be able to access options for my music regardless of how I found it.

4. When I skip a song before it’s fully over, mark it as “played”, so that shuffle doesn’t decide to play it again a few song later.

Ugh. I just read an article on Wired today about Zune and Creative Commons.

The super condensed version: Zune has a sharing feature that allows a file to be transfered to another Zune, but the receiving Zune has only 3 days or 3 plays (whichever comes first) to listen to it before it’s rendered useless. This goes against the spirit if not the letter of some Creative Commons licenses, which state that DRM cannot be applied to the source files.

Here’s where it gets ugly: Read the rest of this entry

This is a comment I posted on the blog zuneinsider, where the question “where will we be in 1 to 5 years?” was asked. I decided to repost my comment here as well.

I want an MP3 player that I don’t have to use. No one ever says “I love to use my radio”. They say “I love listening to music”.

Right now, all I associate my iPod with is maintenance. I gotta make sure it’s charged. I gotta make sure it’s synced, and I gotta do a fair amount of spinning and clicking just to get some music playing. On the PC I gotta answer little dialog boxes for store updates and downloads, which appear at the worst time. I gotta check the screen to make sure it’s okay to unplug it, or I may hurt the little thing. Keeping a working iPod in my life is more trouble than owning a pet.

So, when are these things actually going to become easy to use? When is using an Mp3 player going to be just as easy as using a radio?

At the end of the day, it’s not about the iPod, or the Zune. It’s about the music, and any time I spend “using the player” is just taking away from “listening to music”. Less is more.

In 5 years, that’s where we should be. Listening to music, not fussing with dialog boxes and cables.

(And a full mia clupa here: I’ve worked on a few MP3 players, but it’s not easy to cause a sea-change.)

Here’s a tip: A “progress bar” should go from left to right, and never go backwards.

Yours doesn’t. It goes from left to right, and when it just about reaches the end, it hops back to the beginning with a new “status” message, so it never really shows you how far along you are. That’s retarded. Literally.

Apple announced the iTV -- a set top box that will play iTunes movies and shows on your TV. Details are blurry at the moment, since it was just announced hours ago and it won’t ship until 2007, but from what I understand it’s 300 bucks but still requires you own a computer and have it turned on and running. I think I’d be fine with that but I don’t think that’s going to fly with the iPod generation. Read the rest of this entry

I just read about a lawsuit filed against Apple stating that the iPod can damage your hearing and that Apple has not done enough to protect against it.

I kinda agree. But not for the reasons stated in the article.

The iPod has the crappiest volume control in the world. When you’re in a menu, you can’t change the volume. So, if a quiet song ends and a loud song starts, you get a blast of loud sound in your skull. you can pause it, or rip the ear buds out of your ears, but my contention is reaching for that non-existant volume control would be my impulse reaction.

I sure hope that comes up during the lawsuit. It’s silly to not have a volume knob on the iPod.

Since 1995 there’s been a joke going around that goes something like this:

Only Microsoft could design an OS so counter-intuitive that shutting down the computer is accessed from the “start” menu.

All too true, and I occasionally still see that gag on the web. But, many people don’t realize that Apple one-upped Microsoft with the crazy-popular iPod. Here’s my Apple version:

Only Apple could design a music player so counter-intuitive that shutting down the device requires pressing-and-holding the Play button for three seconds.

Furthermore, there is no text label on the Play button to let one know that it’s overloaded with “off”. And during this three second period while ‘I’m holding the play button down, there’s no visual indicator that anything is happening. And one out of three times when I’m attempting to turn my iPod off I get five to seven seconds into it before I realize that for some unknown reason the iPod is ignoring the command, so I have to let go of the button, wait a second or two, and try it again and hope for the best.

The iPod is far from a bad product, but it’s filled with tiny little cases of Bad UI like that.

Update:

A bit more about this. Since turning something off is normally a simple procedure, the iPod’s overloaded Off button can make first-time users who don’t figure it out to feel, well, stupid. And a product should not make the user feel stupid.

I suggest Apple change the Hold switch to do double duty. Make it a 3 position switch, with it’s normal position resting in the center. Slide it to the left, and it locks on “hold”. Sliding it to the right makes temporary-contact as an off/on toggle. The right side is spring-loaded to return to the center. This allows the switch to rest only in the center (on) or the left (as hold), and this way the device can auto-power-off without the switch ending up in the wrong state. This also solves the problem I run into occasionally where I try to power the iPod down while the device is on Hold.