Apple's zippy new iPod will play itty bitty videos, as well as music. Even Steve Job's is dubious about whether or not little video will fly, but boy this new 60gig thing in thin. a bid wide, in an almost high definition kind of way, but thin.
In fact, this new ipod is so thin, it only supports one connector type: usb2. No more firewire. But everyone has USB2, right? everyone has a new computer? right? (lest we forget apple did not add USB2 to its powerbooks until mid 2003 - that's what? two years and a bit ago? hell, who keeps a laptop for that long!)
The ipod itself is also so thin it seems there's no room for that extra bit around the earphone jack to support a remote control dongle.
Want to turn the volume down or change track? be prepared to pull the ipod out of your jacket, pack, bag, wherever to make this simple adjustment that just about every other mp3 player - including the previous ipod - supports.
400USD for no charger, no docking stand, and now, featuring no remote control - not even the option of one. But heh, you can still buy ipod Sox. That's great, eh?
I was thinking of bagging my old 2nd gen, not quite three year old iPod since it holds oh, about, 5 mins of charge now. But instead, i think i'll just get the battery replaced. It may not be anorexic, heroin super model thin, but it uses a regular firewire cable to hook up to a computer to get charged and transfer tunes, and even tho it came in a much bigger box that box accommodated an external power supply and remote control.
Wow.
wow
wow
I suppose that could be me quoting a Kate Bush song, but it's not - or not only that: it's the response after half a dozen listens to the new (double) album. It's been great reading other folks' reviews too because they're pulling out things (this one at Play Louder is great)- a flamenco at the end of Somewhere in Between for instance; the lyrics of Mrs. Bartolozzi - that get missed in the first listen- make a track worth going back to, and there is so much to go back to.
My current fave is Nocturn/Aerial. Two songs but they blend into each other in a way that just makes a listener want to run and run and run, the build is so expressive, so explosive. Bush's vocal layerings - her mixes in these her productions are so compelling. Find Nocturn, find someplace where you can play it loud and see if it doesn't make you want to yell! (in a good way).
Here's one thing i haven't found other reviewers talking about but in passing: Bush's laughter in Aerial, or just the recurrence of bird song throughout. In an interview this month in Mojo, Bush talks about her interest in this other language. The album asks repeatedly what is this language - either explicitly in Sunset, or implicitly just by its presence throughout the album Aerial Tal is filled with it), or Bush's call and response laughing against bird calls in Aerial "all the birds are laughing, come on let's join in." Excuse me? Not the way i'd thought of bird song, or what to do with it, before, to be sure. it's GREAT!.
One of the best lines (why, i dunno) in a song i've heard lately is Bush singing in Aerial "i feel i wanna be up on the roof; i feel i gotta be up on the roof up on the roof up on the roof" With its insistent ryhthmn, it's another yell, another ya ya ya!
Bush has a small web site to support the album. One of the best attributes of it (one of the only ones so far. Where's the back button, Kate?) is access to the lyrics to share with people while you're playing your tunes.
Though the site currently has very little content, the way it's put together sets a tone, creates a pace: the animation is subtle (birds flying over the water).
The cover art completes the whole: the frequency pattern on the cover of the cd connects to the theme of the aerial, and also - as shown on the site - blends/fades into the shape of a honey colored sunset across the water.
There is such a completeness or connectedness to each of these elements, that again, the pleasure just grows in the seeing a little more each time. If you're into these tunes, do search for other reviews. They'll help find those precious bits in Bush's a sky of honey a sea of honey.
wow wow wow
In the vein of stating the blindingly obvious:
designing useful and usable tools isn't just about good widgets. There can be great widgets that will let a person carry out a task.
But what if the person doesn't want to carry out that task?
For insance,
In the UK there's a requirement to make publicly funded research publicly available - many places are turning to repositories like Eprints that will enable this process to happen. But right now, getting papers into Eprints is a manual, tedious process: filling in fields and fields in forms.
The "pro bono" argument is that increased access to the data will enable better access to cutting edge research.
A slightly more self- interested benefit is that there is research to show that openly available papers are more than twice as likely to be sited than those that are not.
But that petition to self-interest to leverage future benefit to off-set current pain does not have an immediate, perceivable benefit for the person stuck with uploading papers. We've seen that people just don't do it.
As Alan Dix might put it, the perceived cost is higher than the perceived benefit. The What's in It for Me effect only works, it seems, when that benefit is immediately perceivable. For instance: take these steps now to upload these papers and you'll never have to add them to your cv again: they will automatically update; also, one line in a web page will let you publish all your papers formatted anyway you want.
So either the benefit must outweigh the cost or the cost must be reduced to the point where future benefit is sufficient to cost. Seems obvious, eh? But the idea does suggest that usability is about perceived usefulness as well as usable-ness.
about "what's in it for me - NOW" not just "what can i do with it"
This might also be seen as where affect meets effect. This again is not new in the design community: Dillon's proposed model for assessing applications, Process, Outcome, Affect, formalizes the role of affect - how the user feels about their experience in using a system: do they feel empowered. Ethnography has also always looked at what is the cultural context of the planned artefacts to be developed?
One thing that may be new, however, about using "what's in it for me" as a design query, is that it asks the question of affect before the system is developed - but i won't claim that for certain. What i will suggest is that putting design issues in terms of "what's in it for me" is an easy way to translate the iimportance of effective/affective design to non-hci specialists (ie, software engineers).
If your software cannot pass the test of what's in it for me? of the perceived cost being balanced by the perceived benefit, then it's time to rethink the design.
i was at a talk lately where an interesting tool was presented that all the people in the audience said "wow that looks really complicated to try to set up" - and these were rocket scientist type people. The challenge to the presenter was "would it perhaps not have been better to talk with your stakeholders about how they already do what they do and then design the tool to support that, rather than what seems to be the other way around: designing a tool and asking the community to adapt to it?"
The response was a gob-smacker: that if we had designed for one community, then we would have a custom tool not a general tool.
Perhaps having a tool that was useful and useable by one community would provide a path to a tool that was more generally useable - rather than a tool which now is general but that puts the fear of god into anyone who goes near it - where the what's in it for me - the perceived benefit - is (a) unknown and (b) not even approached because the perceived cost is far too obvious.
So, take away: start with finding a me to whom you can ask "what is in it for me" - and test the answers against the push back of cost. it'll likely end up being pro bono, too.