HA HA, you’re all blurry!
Archive for April, 2009
Knickerbocker Glory
Rosa's first (and possibly last) KBG - as they call it in Wimpy. Its a right of passage thing in my family. "It's not food" she said, "but I like it!".
We bought 20 flying saucers on the way home.
Its a shame the easter break is coming to an end and the girls have to go back to school.
Here's the song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0E8MWb3hgo&fmt=18
7th Generation Apple iPod Shuffle: Introducing the iLobe!
I got one of those new iPod Shuffles last week and I am impressed with the size of the thing and the fidelity of the sound given just how tiny it is - it can hold around 1000 songs!
Apparently there has been a bit of a hooha on the internet about Apple abolishing the controls and sticking an inline 'thumb-remote' on the headphones but after a couple of minutes I found it quite intuitive pressing the button twice to change tracks or three times to step back. The technology is nothing new, resistive multiplexors as they are called have been around in remotes since the days of cassette players (My 7 year-old daughter Ella asked me the other day what a cassette was!)
There's a neat little feature that when you hold down the button on the remote for a few seconds a pre-recorded digital voice tells you the name of the artist and track - this makes up for the lack of display and is in keeping with the new wave of design and engineering that says strip it back as far as you can go. Its in these disciplined and self-imposed limitations that designers are finding freedom from unlimited choice. You can also see this phenomena happening with Nintendo (with their new DSi) and Twitter (160 characters). Boundaries force people to think creatively which is the reason I set up the Flickr group Stop.Draw.Run where the artist must only take 10 minutes to capture the essence of what they are drawing.
The tide of miniaturisation is inevitable and the advent of Apples inline remote removes the one limitation on size that they had with the previous generation of iPod shuffles - buttons were required to change tracks. What's to follow are smaller and smaller iPods until, like their musical kinder, iPod will eventually become an intangible idea. The Apple logo will be laser etched on to our ears and we will be able to change tracks with a blink.
