![]() ![]() ![]() Apple undermines this convention because now how much you scroll depends on where you click. Think trying to distinguish Enya’s Amarantine from the Beatle’s White Album.Īs for the scrolling, the convention for “paging” with scrollbars is to click the “track” for the slider. Even with music cover art, I wonder if it would work better to horizontally squish the objects on the sides so that the most distinguishing regions of the images remains visible in some form. Still, it will be interesting to see if it’s really enough to get the masses to adjust to the weirdness of horizontal scrolling on the web.Īt least there’s more conventional text links in the footer:Ĭoverflow strikes me as a slick way to do a fish-eye view for visually diverse data objects (not for, say, files dominated by text), but it relies on the margins of the data objects being recognizable. The motion is a nice, fairly unobtrusive way to drop the hint. (The Mac section slider goes from Accessories to Macs.) once the page loads, it quickly slides to the second (and more important) area, Products. When you land on the iPod + iTunes page, the slider is all the way to the left, on iTunes… On the plus side, Apple uses a neat touch of motion at the site to get across the idea. And while you can also jump to the section you want by clicking on its name, this less jarring alternative isn’t totally obvious at first glance. Arrow clicks seem like they should work like page up/down keys and scroll you to the next set of entries, but they don’t (you see four new choices, and three old ones remain). Thanks, Cover Flow, for reminding me of that.The cons in this case: Finding a specific app, say Logic Express, amidst the flying text in that Apple Mac section menu can bring on a headache. I’ve been in Boston for over five years now, but as long as I have the music that my dad introduced me to, I feel like I’m not that far from home. ![]() Every so often he’d take out his flute and use some Jethro Tull to practice (Jethro Tull bears the odd distinction of being one of the few rock ensembles to feature a lead flautist). He had all of their old records, and I used to love looking at them whenever he pulled them out. In fact, in the early days of the Interweb, he went by the username jtull. Staring at the old covers, I was instantly taken back to my family’s basement in Jersey. I didn’t think much of it until I successfully added the album art for all of my Jethro Tull. Using Cover Flow is almost, almost, like flipping through a rack of LPs or CDs. More importantly, however, Cover Flow adds a certain tactile charm that’s been missing from the mp3 experience for as long as there have been mp3s. ![]() Album art is one way of reminding us that Apple traffics in photos, TV shows, and soon, feature films. Its primary purpose is, I think, to draw attention to the fact that Apple isn’t just in the business of sound anymore. Also, iTunes got a slew of new features, including Cover Flow.Ĭover Flow might seem like a piece of superfluous fluff added to an already bloated program, but it’s so much more. So there was a series of amazing iTunes/iPod announcements this week. ![]()
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