iPod Shuffle Kerfuffle

I’ve seen the iPod Shuffle held up as a quintessential example of Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field”. Who, after all, would want an MP3 player with a relatively small capacity and no user interface to find a particular track? I would tend to agree that you have to be a pretty happy-go-lucky music listener to be satisfied with choosing a fraction of your music collection and then enduring whatever song happens to pop up at a given moment. Dr Dre comes on just when you’re trying to multiply two five-digit numbers in your head? Dying to listen to that new Celine Dior track you downloaded yesterday? Keep your finger on the Next button and hope for the best.

Be that as it may, for podcasts the Shuffle is brilliant. Hours and hours of audio entertainment fit easily in a sliver of my 2Gb unit. I only have a few podcasts at a time, so stepping through to find the one I want is not particularly onerous. And best of all my Shuffle is beautiful, tiny and has that amazing clip (pure genius) that lets me attach it to my man bag strap or to my pocket-less gym shorts.

One of my favorite jokes is about a couple who visits a counselor after years of marriage, so irked are they that their union is completely perfect in every respect except for one small thing. (Sorry, can’t say more about this since Peer Pressure is a family-friendly blog). Similarly, the Shuffle has one glaring weakness that is all the more annoying because it is otherwise without obvious flaw. Whenever you are listening to something and press the Previous button, it goes to the beginning of the current track. There’s no way to get back to where you are without laboriously fast forwarding while listening intently for the right spot and hoping that your thumb won’t seize up. I seem to do this at least once a day when I go for the Pause button or accidentally brush up against something.

I have two ideas for fixing this. One is to have Previous go to the last track, so Next takes you right back to where you were. Who needs to go to the beginning of a track anyway, whether music or speech? The other is to have a ten-second grace period after hitting Previous, during which Next which take you back to where you were. So if I hit Previous by mistake and find myself transported from minute 56 back to the beginning of my 60 minute podcast, instead of smashing furniture I can quickly hit Next to jump straight back. Perhaps I’m just a weirdo, but I can’t be the only one who’s bothered by this, right?

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3 Comments »

1. Hey, Matt,
   Agreed on your dilemma, although it strikes me as a podcast-centric issue. I listen primarily to music, and use the Previous button a LOT to get back to the beginning of the current track, usually to play it again as it’s fading out (yes, this is a personality flaw). Hence I like your second idea better, and it strikes me that it wouldn’t be all that hard for Apple to implement. They already have a timer of sorts, in that Previous only exhibits that behavior (beginning of the current track) if you’re past the first few seconds of the track, otherwise taking you to, well, the PREVIOUS track
   Great post.

   Comment by Peter Kretzman — 8/27/2007 @ 12:16 am

2. You are a weirdo.

   Comment by Your loving brother, Ben — 8/27/2007 @ 7:00 am

3. Yeah, Ben, I suppose I can’t argue with that.

   Peter - good point about the use case when listening to music. Not so sure about the timer though: I would imagine it’s different to measure how long since the user pressed a button as opposed to the example you mention which is really how long are we into this track (i.e. info that any music player is going to have). I had another idea which would be to have a quick double click on Previous go to the beginning of the track.

   Comment by Matt — 8/27/2007 @ 2:20 pm

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