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

Enjoy!

One of my last posts ended with

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’m not sure whether the whole headphone (esp. the noise cancelling isolating variety) department is a new one at Shure, but they have some things right, and others wrong.

For starters, even if the headphone (or should I say earphone) department is flawed, then the PR/Customer Service side makes up for it. Then again, if you buy a product that doesn’t work well then you should expect a replacement or a refund, so on second thought; customer service is merely just doing its job.

Getting back to the point, I have bought or rather received two Shure products recently, the Shure SE210 noise isolating earphones, and the Shure MPA-3C adaptor. The former was a replacement for my Shure E3-C earphones that, well, decided to separate in my ear so the little rubber bit got lodged pretty far down inside… not good! The Shure E3-C earphones were a replacement themselves for a pair of E2-C earphones which frayed around the ear part and stopped working (that happened with two pairs). You might now be thinking that these headphones aren’t particularly reliable and not very good. Personally I don’t think this is the case. I was just unlucky with the first generation of earphones (I think the E2-C and E3-C may have been after all). At the end of the day though I keep coming back for a few reasons,

I can’t afford Bose headphones.

I doubt Bose headphones are better, I know their in ear ones aren’t.

Sennheiser suck in comparison to Shure.

You don’t realise how bad ‘normal’ headphones are until you change back and hear all the background noise.

I don’t have to pay any extra to get them replaced, thus continuing to use them is a free option, unless of course they break outside of the 2 years, in which case I’ll be screwed. That won’t happen though, will it?

They’re damn decent to listen to music through!

Overall, the E3-C headphones are very similar to the E2-Cs that I originally reviewed except that they sound better, cost more and hopefully shouldn’t break. They’re also modular, which leads me onto my next point, the Shure Music Phone Adaptor.

I knew my solution to the iPhone headphone socket problem was not going to be great and flawless for ever (even though it wasn’t particularly at the moment), so I splashed out on one of these bad boys, a Shure MPA-3C. I say splashed out, I mean that it cost me almost £50 to get it, that’s a lot for a cable, then again it has a Shure mic in it, which is generally a pretty good thing! It does make for an expensive headphone cable overall though at about £150! Summing it up in a few words, I would say that it does its job. It lets you use your Shure headphones (or any others in fact) with the iPhone. It will be a horrifically long cable when using anything other than modular headphones and even then the mic is far away from your mouth. It will also sound damn weird (and you’ll look really stupid) when you’re speaking to someone through them. I’m over it…

I would recommend both products to the iPhone user who cares about the quality of what they hear and wants functionality and style at the same time. The only criticism is that they’re quite expensive so you should work your way up through the various Shure products, getting them replaced one by one. Soon enough you’ll have the SE530s!

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.

Eventually though, I did start to quite like Heavier Things, especially the first few songs, but primarily the last three - ‘Daughters’, ‘Wheel’ and ‘Only Heart’. The songs in between were good too, but they just didn’t stand out like the end of the album. Moving onto ‘Room For Squares’, at first I thought it was a bit mediocre, a bit average, know what I mean. After a few listens though you start to like it, getting into such songs as ‘Neon’, ‘Your Body Is A Wonderland’ and the Daughters-like track, ‘St. Patrick’s Day’. Having listened to these albums now, and ultimately realising that John Mayer wasn’t just some Blues aficionado, I thought I’d give a ‘Any Given Thursday’ a listen (eventually).

As with listening to most albums (live ones espesh) the first few times, you do recognise some songs, and think, ‘Yeah, they’re pretty good.’ But with the rest, you don’t really get into them and think they’re a bit self indulgent. Yeah, at the end of the day they probably are pretty self indulgent, but you know what, I love it! He’s a great guitarist, so why not show it off? Anyhoo, getting round to the actual point of this paragraph, the songs which I haven’t heard before on the album, primarily ‘Lenny/Man On The Side’ and ‘Comfortable’ are some of the best, in fact they’re just brilliant. Fair enough ‘Comfortable’ is on the ‘Inside Wants Out EP’, which I should really have, but ‘Lenny/Man On The Side’, half of which is a Stevie Ray Vaughn song, is awesome!

The only criticism that I have with Any Given Thursday is that it doesn’t contain many of his newer songs. In essence it is primarily ‘Room For Squares’ that is featured, and one song from ‘Heavier Things’. There are no Continuum songs, but I guess at that point, the majority hadn’t been written, so why should I expect there to be any? Overall though, with what is there is, it’s brilliant and definitely due a listen if you’re any sort of John Mayer fan!

Apropos Engadget’s story on a new iPod dock 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. Think Performas, think Quadras, think unreliability, think no Steve Jobs and most importantly think different from what Apple is now… Why boast this? Seriously, I wouldn’t buy one of these having known it was from the same design team that let the Performas be produced. What a bummer for that company… Then again, maybe they’re proud of the Performas that they made and after all (according to the article) they did make the first Powerbooks, so they can’t be that bad can they?

Other exciting things that I have found all around include a glaring grammar mistake in Leopard! I mean a huge one! I’m not on my iMac at the moment, so I can’t grab a screenshot right now, but it involves this grammatically incorrect sentence:

‘None of your preferred wireless networks are (sic) available.’

Terrible…

In other news, I have some freakin’ sweet concert tickets for next year already lined up (at some cost). These would include The Mars Volta, Radiohead and Neil Young and Crazy Horse!

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!

Then again, usability is a very relative thing. In the same way that speaking Catalan to a person fluent in English (with no knowledge of Catalan by the way) means nothing, the usability of a product primarily aimed at English speakers could mean absolutely nothing to someone speaking Catalan. The same applies within a UI, not all end users of a product are going to be the same, not everyone thinks alike (great minds do apparently though!). A world renowned professor in gene sequencing technology is much more likely to understand a gene sequencing machine than an accountant. In this case though, the differences between the two people (assuming they are from roughly the same background and understand the same language) are as a result of what they’ve learnt or done with their lives – the accountant could learn how to operate the gene sequencing machine if he/she wanted. Yes, it would require some effort most likely, but compare that with the previous example, involving language boundaries. In this case, the difference is much more inherent. In order to work the gene sequencing machine, a native Catalan speaker would have to firstly understand English, and then learn how to operate the gene sequencing machine, a considerably steeper learning curve, one which most likely would not be worthwhile just to learn how to use a gene sequencing machine. The point that arises here is thus, there are two such differences in levels of not-understanding. These are an inherent difference related to language or huge cultural boundaries, and a learned difference, one that is a difference only because of occupation or lifestyle.

So in creating a successful UI (in successful I mean universally understandable), another way is needed to communicate the status of the system or the meanings of any control surfaces to the user. This is commonly accomplished with icons. Icons, essentially small pictures (or graphical entities), should allow interfaces to become fairly universal. Good icons should satisfy two main criteria, a) They shouldn’t be language specific (the French shouldn’t have one image for a drawing tool and the German’s another in order for them to both understand the concept) and b) They should be immediately obvious and recognisable (a pen should signify some kind of drawing tool, a scissors some sort of cutting tool…).

Though icons are infinitely usable in the right scenarios, there are some things that cannot be replaced easily by pictures. A menu bar on a computer OS generally requires some form of text in it to understand, as does a user manual (though with a sufficiently understandable UI, the user manual should only need to explain non-explicitly obvious things). For example, looking at the menu bar in an application, the File, Edit, View etc. items really need to be in text so to speak. In my opinion, using icons in place would decrease the usability of that feature as there would be too many icons to understand each ones’ meaning. How would you represent the menu item ‘Fix Broken Text’? It would be like a game of Pictionary. What about the menu item ‘Update Field’? You could have a picture of a field and something which represents updating, but what happens in a language other than English, the word for field (as in a farmer’s field) may not be the same as a computer field. In these scenarios, a degree of localization would be required, which is understandable.

To be continued…

Just to put everyone who sees this in a festive mood, I’ve included a picture of 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!

As for music, some awesome stuff is coming our way in 2008! Firstly, The Bedlam In Goliath, the Mars Volta’s new album will be joining us. I also have Mars Volta tickets for their next tour in March, so I’m pretty thrilled about that! Actually seriously thrilled - they’re just one of those groups that I really wanted to see live but never really had the opportunity to. I also have some Radiohead tickets (second time to see them!) which will be pretty incredible, due to their recent album sounding so great!

As for the album of the week, I’ve really been into lots of different things this week, Massive Attack, Air, Neil Young, Esteban Morgado and Wolfmother to name but a few. But the best album that I’ve been ‘tapping’ is Ibrahim Ferrer’s solo album from Buena Vista Social Club. It’s absolutely fantastically mastered and mixed, producing such a brilliant sound. The track ‘Cienfuegos Tiene Su Guaguanco’ being generally unbelievable… Especially the piano solo and the horns!