Sucks.

Sure, Apple’s money-maker has been praised the world over for both hardware design and ease of use, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a few suggestions.

My music library is over 12000 songs large, and growing. I have over 300 separate artists, and almost 800 albums. Getting to what I want to listen on a small screen with no alphanumerics is a feat that I am so happy that Apple spent some time making easy. However, the system is far from perfect. Here is a list of three features I want to see in the future regarding iPod navigation.

Album art-based navigation in both Artist and Album categories

This is sorely needed. With the newest iPods able to play video, it should be relatively easy to transfer that nifty photo navigation system to album art. Put the album title in the title bar at the top of the screen, and have a generic placeholder image for albums that don’t have album art, and we could really have portable jukeboxes!

Descending Sort

Just put an option at the top of every screen to re-sort in ascending or descending order. Please.

Better Playlist Navigation

The current way of navigating playlists is horrific for playlists longer than about twenty songs. My Recently Added and Genre-based playlists are totally useless on the iPod. What about giving options for a multi-line display, showing artist and album in addition to track name, on the iPod? Sure, there would be less items on the small screen, but that is a fair tradeoff for the benefit of being able to actually use large playlists. There is one thing that I do think that Apple got one hundred percent right, and that is the ability of the click wheel to navigate large lists efficiently.

I am sure that I will come up with something else as the issues that are associated with large music libraries surface during my use of my iPod. I know that Apple will probably never see this, but here’s to hoping!

Seth Godin recently posted about his trouble generating a bibliography for a student friend of his. This got me thinking.

With all this hoo-hah about Web 2.0 and AJAX and GTD and this or that new buzzword, I feel that sometimes we lose sight of the fact that all of this technology is supposed to help us. Sometimes I get so bogged down with the newest web-based utility offering from Google or the next new feature on Flickr that I forget that I actually don’t know what this is all for. Don’t get me wrong: there are some awesomely useful apps out there (Gmail, Quicksilver, Adium, NetNewsWire, etc.), but they can all be so overwhelming in their newness that we forget how to take advantage of their usefulness.

Seth Godin comes up with a great point: no one has come up with one of the most obviously useful applications for one of the most obviously mundane and useless tasks that students are required to do. Who actually looks at a bibliography, and cannot function if it is not meticulously written and formatted perfectly? Sure, it’s useful to see sources, but not in that form. Like Mr. Godin says, cities of publication are not intrinsic upon knowing the material.

However, the fact remains that bibliographies are used in scholarly papers and middle school book reports alike. They are a necessity. So why hasn’t anyone built a simple little webapp that queries an ISBN and page numbers, and returns a bibliography. While we’re at it, why not include an automated bibliography for web pages, too?

Kudos to the person who does this and gets it right. We all need it. Just make sure it has enough eye-candy and extra whistles and bells to keep us away from those papers just a bit longer.

And a Happy New Year!

Om Malik on Broadband : » Performancing for Firefox, Awesome

Wow. I’m posting from Firefox. Performancing lets you blog about any page, right in the browser! There’s also drag and drop of links, among other neat features. It looks like I’ll be using this quite a bit from now on!

Since the advent of Firefox 1.5, my extension list has changed considerably since last time. I’ll link to all of them, but I’ll just describe the new ones.

• DOM Inspector - This extension comes with Firefox, but on Windows you need to ask for it explicitly. The extension itself lets you look at the document in the browser. You can inspect the HTML and CSS of the web page, among other things.

• Adblock Filterset.G Updater - This automatically uses the excellent Filterset.G in Adblock. It can run in the background, and you’ll never see an ad again!

• Adblock

• Last Tab

• Super DragAndGo - This extension allows you to drag links up or down and open them in a foreground or background tab. It’s wonderful for opening many news items at once.

• Sage

• Disable Targets For Download

• Undoclosetab - Just a quick note on this one, even though it’s not new. In about:config, I changed “undoclosetab.tabmenu_position” to “5” to categorize the menu item with the other tab commands in the tab bar’s contextual menu.

• del.icio.us - An excellent extension from the del.icio.us developers, this extension makes it easy to post and manage your bookmarks with Firefox. I only wish the extension came with a keyboard shortcut to post bookmarks.

• Viamatic Foxposé - Adds a status bar icon and a keyboard shortcut to view all tabs at once, à la OS X’s Exposé. Very neat, and quite useful.

• Tab Sidebar - This extension adds sidebar support for tabs, complete with thumbnails and navigation buttons. I made an OS X skin for it, available here.

• Talkback This extension comes with Firefox. It is a crash-logger and data-collector for the Mozilla foundation. They can analyze crash data if it is utilized.

• Tab Preview - Using a quick drawing method, this extension gives a thumbnail preview of each tab when you mouse over the tab at the top of the window. It’s very useful, and doesn’t clutter the UI like you think it would.

• Greasemonkey - Greasemonkey was recently updated with full compatability with FF1.5.

• Tab X - This extension removes the default “close tab” buttom from the upper right of the browser window and places a close button on every tab. It was recently updated to work on OS X, and I think it’s wonderful. It’s much easier to hit that button than it is to have to move the mouse over so far for each tab.

A lot of these extensions require Firefox 1.5, so don’t go trying to install these if you’re still using a 1.0.x release.

The amazing Tab Sidebar Firefox extension was recently updated, breaking my earlier Mac OS X UI improvements. I’ve updated the images that are needed; simply replace (but don’t forget to save!) the original images in the extension folder, as explained previously.

Here are the new files. They are based on the GrApple Firefox Theme; if anyone knows of any restrictions on these images, then please let me know.

Earlier today, I posted about a Last.fm recently played tracks image generator, but I expressed an interest in an HTML-generating method of showing these tracks. Well, I found one.

I’ll outline the steps that I took to make this work, because that wiki is not so helpful.

1. Go to Feed Digest. This is a website that takes an RSS feed and parses it how you want into HTML. The service also offers a mix of multiple feeds, but we don’t need that for Last.fm.

2. Create a digest from your Last.fm feed. The format is http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user//recenttracks.rss, where is replaced by your Last.fm user name.

3. Edit the template of your feed. I used

<li class="music">
<span><a href="%URL%" >%TITLE%</a></span>
</li>

for the per-item template and

<p><a href="http://last.fm/user/Tupton">Recently Played Tracks</a></p>

for the header template. This makes a list out of your tracks, allowing for better CSS styling.

1. Get the code for your feed. After creating the feed, you can get a Javascript implementation of your feed to include in your site. All the code you need is offered on the site.

2. Put the HTML in your web page. I enclosed the Javascript include in a div, for greater editing ease.

3. Style, baby! Here is the CSS I used to make this work:

#lastfm {
padding: 3px;
margin-top: 5px;
border: #ddd solid 1px;
background-color: #f8f8f8;
font-size: 1em;
}
 #lastfm a:hover {
color: #fff;
background-color: #39c;
}
 #lastfm p {
font-size: 12px;
font-weight: bold;
}
 #lastfm ul {
margin-left: -40px;
}
 #lastfm li.music {
font-size: 10px;
line-height: 2em;
padding: 2px;
margin-bottom: 3px;
background-color: #fff;
border-top: 1px #ddd solid;
border-bottom: 1px #ddd solid;
list-style-image:url('http://www.fiveuptons.com/thomas/images/audio.gif');
}
 #lastfm li.music:hover {
background-color: #39c;
}
 #lastfm li.music:hover a {
color: #fff;
}
 #lastfm li.music a {
display: block;
}

The image I used for the list bullet was an edited image from the BBC. Feel free to use it, but just save it on your own server so you aren’t hot-linking to my images, please. Also, a Google search for speaker.gif yields some nice results. You can see the image I used is the third one there.

You can see the final result of what I did on my main page. Enjoy!

Last.fm is a site that keeps track of all the songs that you play, in a media player of your choice. It’s a pretty neat site for personal use, but I wanted to put some information about my recently played tracks on my main page. I found this page on the Audioscrobbler wiki, which is a great help. You can see the results on my main page. Eventually I want to modify the script to output HTML that I can style myself, but I do not know a lick of PHP and I wouldn’t know where to start.

My site now has a brand spanking new style, courtesy of Blogger Templates. I added a new navigation menu to the top of all my pages. This includes links to my internal pages as well as my “social pages” such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and Last.fm. My most recent bookmarks and pictures are on the front page, and you can check out new music that I have added in the past month, too. I’m going to try to update it every month; eventually I should get around to automating the task daily.

I hope the new template is enjoyable!

Recently, del.icio.us revamped their help section and added tag rolls to their website integration tools. I thought I’d post my top ten most popular tags here, via this nifty new tool. My top 50 tags, along with my most recent bookmarks and Flickr photos can be found on my website.