Embracing Chaos

I am both proud and awed by the productivity of the rhapsody.com development team. Just two months after Rhapsody.com added playlists, a huge new feature has been added: a personal music library for bookmarking your favorite content. Along with it is a fabulous new AJAX library manager which gives users quick visual access to a large collection of music in their web browser. What makes this even more impressive is that one of those two intervening months included the end of year holidays. When I’m doing long-term project scheduling, I generally write off 3 weeks out of December because of…

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A few months ago I wrote about why single-purpose devices will always have better UI’s than general purpose devices. Here, always really means for about the the next 5 years. I’ll explain why in a second. In the iPhone, Apple has built a completely generic UI. All the controls are software reconfigurable “soft keys” — you touch a part of the screen that has a picture of a button on it. This offers a fantastic level of flexibility, allowing them to build a lot of useful functions into a small package. But soft keys like this are intrinsically limited by…

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“Should we dodgeball?” my ex-girlfriend asked as we sat down for brunch. The question struck me because nobody had ever asked me that before, although the question should have come up a lot. She had figured out a key question about proper dodgeball etiquette which had been bugging me. I’ll explain, after some background. What is Dodgeball? If your friends have discovered dodgeball, I’d guess you’re probably in one of three states: Infatuated with this neato service that broadcasts SMS text messages to your friends when you go out Wondering what your friends are always doing with their phones under…

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If you’re a frequent visitor to www.rhapsody.com you’ve probably noticed that a bunch of “plus” buttons recently appeared all over the site. Right next to basically every play button on the site, there’s a new button that brings up a context window with lots of new options: So you can build a playlist as you’re browsing the music catalog. You can also (finally) queue up music without interrupting the current song. There’s also a drag-and-drop playlist editor for modifying existing playlists. All these playlists are accessible from everywhere Rhapsody works — in the Rhapsody PC Software, on your Sonos system,…

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Yesterday morning I woke up feeling like a zombie and was happy to figure out that with the end of daylight savings time, I had an extra hour to do homework. I started turning the clocks in my house back. They were all pretty easy except one. My inappropriately named “smart phone” just needed to reboot (not at all uncommon) to get its clock reset. But before too long I realized that not only was my smart phone was smart enough to move back its own clock, but that it also moved back every appointment in my calendar by an…

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The volume control system on Windows XP is somewhat broken. The main volume control is pretty easily accessible — you can adjust it with a single click on the volume icon in the tasbar icon tray. This master volume adjusts everything going out to the speakers (or headphones or line-out or whatever). But model for adjusting the relative levels of different sound sources is awkward and not well implemented. Feeding into the main volume is the “mixer.” You can get to it by double-clicking the main volume control. It lets you adjust the relative volume of various sound sources like…

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I’ve been installing OS’s a bunch lately. Every time I do the installer asks me what part of the world I’m in so it can set the timezone. This totally seems like 20th century technology to me. There are really accurate IP-geo lookup databases these days that can tell from your IP address where you are in the world pretty reliably. So once the OS has my network stack working, why does it need to ask me what part of the world I’m in? When it comes to installing something free like Ubuntu, it seems that there’s a real “you-get-what-you-pay-for”…

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A little while ago, I got my hands on a MacBook Pro. I’ve been slowly switching over to it as my primary machine. It’s pretty. It’s fast. When using it, I feel calm and happy as if I’m sitting in a japanese garden. (I bet if it wasn’t so expensive, this effect wouldn’t be so pronounced. But that is part of the charm too.) I haven’t had the guts to switch over to it as my mail e-mail machine yet, but maybe the new .mac email will convince me. Here are a couple of thoughts on why I’m liking it…

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My house pretty much always has music playing in it. Generally the same music is playing throughout the entire house. I do this through a fairly complex involving a pirate radio station, a PC dedicated to playing music, and a set of custom perl scripts and remote-control applications to be able to select music from any of the house’s internet appliances. When it’s working (most of the time, actually) it’s a fantastic system. I wander around, and hear the same thing, and it’s pretty much always something I want to be listening to. For everybody else out there who didn’t…

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Apple is generally known as the ultimate masters of industrial design. Sure, they’re pretty good at marketing and pretty good at designing simple, intuitive user experiences that satisfy 90% of customers’ needs. But the thing they really do well is package their products to make them sleek and beautiful. I have to say that the magsafe power plugs are really cool. But the way you have to wrap the power cords around the main transformer unit (undoubtedly actually a switching power supply with hardly an inductor to be found anywhere) is pretty weak. Those fold out clippy things are flimsy…

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