MoHoyt.com

Just a brief festive message to wish everyone seasons greetings, and a happy new year!

Enjoy!

One of my last posts ended with me saying, ‘More on that another time…’
This time, I thought I should actually write more!

To start off, Shure are a brilliant company, I have nothing against them, and they make brilliant products. Not only in the microphone side of things – SM57 and SM58, two classic mics, but also with headphones.

I really really didn’t know what to think about this album when I first got it. Fair enough John Mayer is a superb guitarist, but I had got into him through listening to Continuum and not his earlier more Pop orientated works. In truth, I had got round to buying Heavier Things and Room For Squares, but I got them at the same time as this album so didn’t really give just one my attention. I also find listening to a live album when you don’t really know the artist’s music not great, especially so in this case, as the amount of long intros and extended solo parts, while very good, would not be of much interest to someone just getting into the artist.

Apropos Engadget’s story on a new iPod dock
(http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/201633238/) entitled “Jibe Audio’s Sound Machine iPhone dock — designed by Apple alumni.”

The article states that this company’s new iPod dock is, and I quote, “Designed in part by Robert Brunner who led Apple’s design team from 1989-1996, an era which birthed the Newton and the first Powerbooks.” Whilst this is true (I’m not contesting this fact), I don’t see the need to boast that this is by the same Apple alumni from ’89 to ’96 as this wasn’t particularly the best era of Apple products.

The basis of a UI should enable a user (specified by the ‘U’ in UI) to interact with a computer or similar device in a fashion which enables the user to control and assess the state of the system. This, these days on most computers and media players etc., is done through an interface (the ‘I’ part in UI). While it doesn’t have to be easy and coherent for a human to understand, having it understandable and useful is generally an advantage. What I mean is going out of your way to make it more difficult and less understandable to use is not generally a good thing!

Just to put everyone who sees this in a festive mood, I’ve included a picture my advent calendar. Isn’t it just so gratuitously childish!

I’m thinking up some interesting posts on UI and some also on ID (industrial design), I’m finding the design of these things pretty thrilling at the moment!