Monday, October 01, 2007

iPod Nano design

I cracked, and got one of the new iPod Nanos. It really is a big step up in design, it is gorgeous. Best hardware anywhere. And the high-rez screen is amazing.

Aesthetically, one small flaw, in my taste: the white scroll wheel does not match the subtle blue of the case. Even grey or black would have been better.

More seriously: I had looked forward to the high-rez screen, so I can read the full title of an audiobook without having to sit and wait for several seconds like a chump, waiting for the text to scroll by at its snail's pace. (I often use this, because audiobooks are divided into several parts, and the number of the part only come after the title, which often is long.) And what did they do? They put the book cover filling half the screen so the text has to scroll anyway...

But wait: didn't I see an option in iTunes to turn off the art on the screen? Oh yes I did. Plug in the pod, and turn this off. Testing, testing. Now, instead of the album art (which was too small to be useful anyway) is... a generic iTunes musical note icon, even less useful, and still using the space which could have been given to the text.

Sigh.
Same old story: the hardware people giweth, and the software people taketh away.

[Update: I just updated the software on the iPod, and it deleted all my careful selections of the main menu items. Oh, come on. Apple, you can do better, you do so all the time.]

3 comments:

Alex said...

I'd spent so long writing code for small footprint systems that when I got to write for a PC I continued being careful. My project lead told me not to bother, the PC we'll deploy to the customer will be twice as fast as the brand new machines we had just got - Moores law....

He had a point, the project schedule would get bogged down with optimizing everything, and optimizing too much can leave fragile code, or code that's hard to maintain.

Still, it was painful to me to abuse the hardware progress.

Anonymous said...

What a shame!
I hate when things you are used to stop working.

Apparently the new ipods (all the models) don't support 3rd party video gear, like the previous ones.

So if you had an ipod video which worked with 3rd party cables or docks, and now you bought an ipod nano - you'll have to get an apple dock instead.

It's like you said - Oh Come On!

Anonymous said...

Yes, it's quite a miracle of a hardware. I've been waiting for the industry to move on to 200 ppi displays and here's the first taste of it. Glorious!

The Nano may in fact be the sweet spot in the new line up of iPods. It achieves an interesting balance of size vs. features. It is amazing that they can put video in something this small. And for quite a reasonable price too.

Yes, Apple is a bit too much in love with the idea of displaying cover art.