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.)

There’s been some buzz today about the new Yahoo Answers. It’s a site where users can ask questions, and other users can answer them. Yahoo used to have a section called Yahoo Experts which was virtually the same thing IIRC. It’s been gone for a quite a while, but it appears as though the Help for Yahoo Experts is still around (I may use that help link to compare the old Experts site to Answers). Yahoo replaced Experts with Yahoo Advice which also dried up a long time ago. I wonder what Yahoo has done differently with Answers to ensure it doesn’t end up disappearing like Experts and Advice. Better get this one right Yahoo, you’re running out of name.

On a related note: Does Yahoo’s Help Section need an overhaul, or what?! Still having help for a service that disappeared in 2002 isn’t a good sign, Yahoo. I’ve been finding Bad User Experiences left and right with Yahoo’s Help these days. Just see my previous blogs on Yahoo Mail for more. I’m don’t want to write about Bad UI all the time, honestly …

Adobe announced that they’re finished with their acquisition of Macromedia. It’s been a mixed-bag for many real-life users out there, some being thrilled with others being worried. But most of the fears have been about user interface or software bloat.

I am not looking forward to the merger because of competition. I really only use one Adobe product, and that’s Photoshop. I’ve been using it almost daily since 1997, and I’ve stuck with it through many revisions since that time. The biggest upgrade I ever saw to Photoshop was 6.0, when Adobe added a ton of web-related features. Photoshop never had proper drawing tools, but 6.0 added vector illustration tools, new in-document text editing, layer styles, layer-based slicing tools, weighted image optimization, the liquify tool, text warping, not to mention a complete second tool called ImageReady designed just for the web. It was just a massive upgrade. Read the rest of this entry

Another Web2.0 trend : The public Beta. You know, when a website runs for years with a little label stating it’s beta, as if it’s an excuse to have bugs or unfinished features.

Citations: flicker , gmail

I still cringe when I hear “web 2.o” thrown about. I completely buy into what it stands for, and where it’s going, but I believe the label is hype,because I don’t see many aspects of Web 2.0 as being new. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been running a web forum for a few years now. But I’m off-track, perhaps another post.

Here’s a list of a few web2.0 trends I’ve spotted these days:

Missing Vowels
Boy, vowels must be selling for a premium these days, since they seem to be missing from a handful of Web 2.0 sites.

Citations: Flickr, Frappr, not to mention the hipper-than-thou phones at Motorola: The RAZR, PEBL, and ROKR.

Vanilla Design
I think Google popularized the trend of no-frills websites as a “cool” thing, but the Web 2.0 version of the vanilla website seems to use a little more CSS than Google.

Citations: Wordpress, Flock

Multi-sized type
The trend is to post a series of words or phrases in different point sizes. This looks very amateurish to me, like something I did when I first used the GEOS word processor in the mid 80s-- more WYSIWYG1.0 than Web2.0. I spotted it on the Flock preview page as well, but it seems to be gone now.

Citation: Wordpress forums, Ning near the bottom.