I love technology, and technology loves me.
I’ve been working on some new ideas for iTunes 8. The text at the bottom will be replaced by icons & text in future versions.
This work is an extention of my previous iTunes 8 mockups.
At the bottom of the page you will see a horizontal playlist and below that a horizontal library list. Both would be replaced by icons and would scroll left and right.
Its been a few days now since Macworld 2008, and it’s time to digest what might be going on with Apple in 2008. Stepping away from the speculation that we’ve all, myself included, induldged in we remind ourselves that Apple Inc. has not perfect employees, they make mistakes, and will continue to do so, just like the rest of us. One hopes that one learns from ones mistakes, and time will tell if Apple keeps this lesson to heart.
Currently led by a man frequently said to be of genius, Jobs is a man with vision, and purpose, but we must not forget that Apple only has a duty to shareholders, not consumers directly. Perhaps it is lucky then that we the consumers have a choice, are free to exersize that choice, a lesson easily forgotten if we get too carried away with our rabid speculation of what we might be getting, rather than what we have. With Apple we see a company that is human, and responsive to our touch. Every public company must weigh shareholders demands, against those of the consumer, with Apple we believe we have found a company that gives the consumer more weight than the shareholder, or so we hope.
Macworld 2008 delivered us the Macbook Air, another luxury product with reduced functionlity that consumers busy starving off a recession are finding increasingly hard to justify. Could we be seeing less of the.. “its soo shiney and its new, and thin and /gurgle/dribble/ and if i’m really good and don’t spend any money on clothes or food for X then i can.. /dribble/”, and a little more of the..“well, i could really do with out a screen, i’ve got that already.. and i could do without a keyboard and mouse, mine aren’t that bad, and i should set my limit at around £500-600max”.
So dude.. i find myself asking, “where is the Apple Mac Mini update?” A product (along with Apple Monitors) that has yet to see any major change to its design since its inception.
The answer.. i’m not waiting for it any more. I’ve just purshased the Mac Mini 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo. If an update does arrive this year, i’m hopeful an update does arrive, but something tells me Apple may have its hands full with other things, and my poor AMD Sempron needs replacing yesterday.
No doubt the new iMac launched 7th August 2007 is a beautiful machine. My jaw hit the flaw, and I couldn’t type in www.apple.com fast enough to have a better look, after catching a glimpse of it on another website. But for the first time in many years of gorgeous looking Macs I’ve seen a product which doesn’t have that timeless quality to it. Similar to modern BMW design, every new iteration looks compelling whist still having the look and feel you expect from a BMW, but in my eyes, they don’t last the test of time. Often BMW designs look dated as soon as they launch a new design, where as an older Mercedes will look great even when a new Mercedes design comes along.
So with some spare time to burn in my lunch hour, I thought I’d make some changes to the new iMac and give it a multi-touch interface. Yes I’ve been reading how a great many people can’t stand the idea of multi-touch on large scale computer screens, recommending the technology be relegated to handheld devices. I think that is short sighted. Smudgy finger prints can be wiped clean, and if you’re really sweaty you can wear latex gloves! Also as I have 8 fingers and two thumbs I can point and click 10 times faster than anyone using a mouse. Alright I’m exaggerating, its unlikely there would be an application any time soon requiring me to use all my fingers and thumbs simultaneously, but you get the point that making an argument for staying with a mouse over multi-touch is limited to the screen being covered in paw marks and your hands getting in the way of what you trying to look at etc. I think remarks like that come from people with a limited amount of imagination. Yes applications of today would not work well without the mouse, but iLife ’08 hints at a shift of direction to multi-touch using large event grouped buttons with left to right flip through functionality.
This is a chicken or the egg argument. Without large screen multi-touch technology we don’t develop applications suitable to use the technology. If we rollout large screen multi-touch technology without the applications suitable to use the technology we might be frustrated with the functionality. For these reasons I believe the perfect device to bridge the gap is a tablet based Mac.
Running on XP Pro V.2002 SP2
Safari doesn’t appear to support importing digital certificates. The help file has the following;
“If you need to access a website that requires a personal certificate, you will be provided with a certificate and instructions for installing it in your keychain. Once your certificate is installed in your keychain, you can gain authenticated access to the website automatically”.
Only problem is i don’t have this keychain, i think this is something on a Mac to store certificates? Anyone know?
Also i can’t get around the proxy settings button being greyed out, i thought they might be a registry setting but i’ve not found anything so far.. any ideas? I’d like to get the certifcates and proxy setting worked out, otherwise its useless for me at work, and we would definately like to do some testing on this browser.
Part IV of iTunes 8 mock ups is now available. Its development has evolved into a full blown next generation graphical user interface so it includes music management but extends for reasons explained in the new post to all forms of data management. Check out the next level in this evolution here.
Part III
My aim is to bring existing functionality and new functionality into iTunes without adding additional complexity to its aesthetic design. This is a problem, because with each incarnation of iTunes Apple has added complexity (presumably at the users request). My answer to keeping the design clean and simple, whilst adding complexity to the product, involves using a 3D cube as part of the programs main window. I’m aware it still need to be intuitive, so I’m keeping that in mind whilst building the mock ups.
Also I don’t expect to get this right straight away. I’ve very little time to devote to this as an ongoing project, so i will publish small updates often, rather than wait for the final version before publishing. That way any feedback I get along the way, can be absorbed into the next mockup.
As of Today 8th February 2007 i still need to do the following;
1) clear up the volume control (not great).
2) Add to the iTunes dock additional icons.
Part II
I went back to work and created a second draft of my proposal for the GUI of iTunes 8. The above image hasn’t changed much from the original. I’ve intergrated the previous, play/pause, next song buttons in the dock at the bottom. I realise the icons aren’t much to look at but i’ve no time to create decent ones. If i find the time i will change all the dock icons.
This image gives you an idea of how i’d like iTunes 8 to behave when switching between the album view and the text view. The center area of the screen would rotate back like a 3D rectangle. Pottentially you could have images, and movies on two spare sides of the rectangle. If you need more than four sides, you’d move to a 3D hexagon etc. The button to switch views, would also be in the dock. I did create one, but i was awful, so i took it out. As before if i get the time, i will change the icons on the dock.
Part I
I think the new view in iTunes 7 is fantastic, although memory hungry, my PC is not new AMD Athlon 1800 1GB RAM GFX 5200, and seems to cope well with it. The one thing i do want is to be able to view the album covers full screen, which unless i’m missing something i can’t. Therefore i thought i come up with this mock up of what i would like in iTunes 8. The File, edit, controls, view options are at the top, giving you access to all the options iTunes 7 does now, but i’ve got rid of all those annoying frames and buttons, and simply used the idea of a Mac Dock at the bottom. Any menu or submenu can be added to the dock. Most of your screen can then be devoted to showing your album art, as seen on the top mock up image. The bottom mockup is a view of your albums in text view. You can right click and save the image for a larger view. I did not create the icons, but found them on google images. I do not know whom they belong to.
Recent Comments