5 ms·

RIM wasn't the first one to be schooled by Apple in the "UI matters" lesson. Did anyone else own one of those Archos 20gig Jukebox players in 2000?

by bayleo 16y ago

sandipc 16y ago
Or the Creative Nomad Jukebox...
- forensic 16y ago
  what? the UI really wasn't very good at all on it. The old school iPod UI was superior The Nomad Jukebox was great for the tactile-feedback buttons and it's durability. It was a tank.
  - sjs 16y ago
    It took forever to boot. When I dropped mine and broke its disk I then swapped in a 6GB disk and it took even longer, around 2 minutes. I went back to an mp3 discman instead before getting a Mac mini in 2005, which opened my eyes to the fact that Apple made more than just pretty devices, they cared about UI and paid attention to details like having different volume settings for headphones. I then bought a 60gb iPod w/ video and haven't looked back.
ugh 16y ago
I had one of their cheap new 10" Android tablets in my hands today. We have come so far and they have learned so little (Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has much better hardware but Android just doesn’t feel right for tablets. At least not right now.)
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has much better hardware but Android just doesn’t feel right for tablets. At least not right now. And people keep wondering why there's both Android and Chrome.
- azernik 16y ago
  (Just a reply to the parenthetical - probably because Android hasn't been tuned for/doesn't support tablet-sized screens yet - 2.3 is the first release to be designed for tablets.)
  - jbrennan 16y ago
    People keep saying that as a defence, and I agree 2.2 isn't made for tablets. But it makes me wonder: why did Samsung even ship it then?
Samuel_Michon 16y ago
"Did anyone else own one of those Archos 20gig Jukebox players in 2000?" I doubt it. The 20GB Archos Jukebox was released in October 2001. Archos' models from 2000 had 5GB and 6GB hard drives. [1] Just like the 20GB Archos Jukebox, Apple's 5GB iPod was released in October 2001. [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_classic#First_generation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_classic#First_generation
tzs 16y ago
I had an Archos 15 gig when the iPod came out. Although it is now long gone and I have an iPod 40 gig from a few generations ago, a nano from the tall thin era, am on my second iPhone and have an iPad, I'll say this for Archos: It still totally takes any Apple music playing device completely to school when it comes to classical music. iPods are really wrapped up in the idea that you have artists, who produce albums, which contain songs, and if you don't want to organize your collection around those three dimensions, screw you. In classical, we want six dimensions, not three: composer, orchestra, conductor, soloists, composition, and movement or piece within the composition. Yes, iPod lets you list by composer. However, that just brings up a list of songs (tracks). However, most (all?) iPods have arbitrary and small limits on how long a title can be and still allow you to see everything in it. For instance, on my Vivaldi list, I see 3 different "Concerto für Laute, Violi...". If I'm lucky, maybe I can remember that the one I'm looking for is relatively short, so the 2:06 one is the one I want, not the 3:30 or the 5:03. Let's compare to my old Archos. With the Archos, one option was to simply put a directory hierarchy on the device, and then access it via a simple file browser interface. If you hit "play" in a directory without a particular track selected, it would play everything in that directory, in alphabetical order. So, I'd rip each CD into its own directory, with each track file starting with its track number (padded with a leading 0 if less than two digits). I could then organize these directories in a tree any way I wanted. For my rock, folk, and pop, I could use artist/album. For classical I could do composer/conductor/orchestra/composition for those that did not feature a soloist. For those with a soloist, I could toss in a directory in there to organize by soloist. With the Archos, I never had to fish around to find what I wanted to find. With iPod I've sometimes spent several minutes trying to find something I know is there. BTW, I used the same organization on my desktop machine, and made sure to use a music player that would handle drag-and-drop reasonably--drop a track on it and it plays it, drop a directory on it and it plays all tracks in alphabetical order. Then all I needed was a file browser on the desktop and music playback was dealt with there, too. People have made classical work reasonably with iTunes on the desktop, by repurposing some of the fields. But that doesn't stop the suckage on iPods.
- ugh 16y ago
  While brilliant in some respects, Apple’s sometimes selective attention is also pretty well known ;-) The popular thing to do is to speculate that Jobs just doesn’t care about classical music at all and for that reason it’s neglected.

RIM wasn't the first one to be schooled by Apple in the "UI matters" lesson. Did anyone else own one of those Archos 20gig Jukebox players in 2000?

by bayleo 16y ago

RIM wasn't the first one to be schooled by Apple in the "UI matters" lesson. Did anyone else own one of those Archos 20gig Jukebox players in 2000?

sandipc 16y ago

Or the Creative Nomad Jukebox...

forensic 16y ago
what? the UI really wasn't very good at all on it. The old school iPod UI was superior The Nomad Jukebox was great for the tactile-feedback buttons and it's durability. It was a tank.
- sjs 16y ago
  It took forever to boot. When I dropped mine and broke its disk I then swapped in a 6GB disk and it took even longer, around 2 minutes. I went back to an mp3 discman instead before getting a Mac mini in 2005, which opened my eyes to the fact that Apple made more than just pretty devices, they cared about UI and paid attention to details like having different volume settings for headphones. I then bought a 60gb iPod w/ video and haven't looked back.

ugh 16y ago

I had one of their cheap new 10" Android tablets in my hands today. We have come so far and they have learned so little (Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has much better hardware but Android just doesn’t feel right for tablets. At least not right now.)

stcredzero 16y ago
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has much better hardware but Android just doesn’t feel right for tablets. At least not right now. And people keep wondering why there's both Android and Chrome.
azernik 16y ago
(Just a reply to the parenthetical - probably because Android hasn't been tuned for/doesn't support tablet-sized screens yet - 2.3 is the first release to be designed for tablets.)
- jbrennan 16y ago
  People keep saying that as a defence, and I agree 2.2 isn't made for tablets. But it makes me wonder: why did Samsung even ship it then?

Samuel_Michon 16y ago

"Did anyone else own one of those Archos 20gig Jukebox players in 2000?" I doubt it. The 20GB Archos Jukebox was released in October 2001. Archos' models from 2000 had 5GB and 6GB hard drives. [1] Just like the 20GB Archos Jukebox, Apple's 5GB iPod was released in October 2001. [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_classic#First_generation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_classic#First_generation

tzs 16y ago

I had an Archos 15 gig when the iPod came out. Although it is now long gone and I have an iPod 40 gig from a few generations ago, a nano from the tall thin era, am on my second iPhone and have an iPad, I'll say this for Archos: It still totally takes any Apple music playing device completely to school when it comes to classical music. iPods are really wrapped up in the idea that you have artists, who produce albums, which contain songs, and if you don't want to organize your collection around those three dimensions, screw you. In classical, we want six dimensions, not three: composer, orchestra, conductor, soloists, composition, and movement or piece within the composition. Yes, iPod lets you list by composer. However, that just brings up a list of songs (tracks). However, most (all?) iPods have arbitrary and small limits on how long a title can be and still allow you to see everything in it. For instance, on my Vivaldi list, I see 3 different "Concerto für Laute, Violi...". If I'm lucky, maybe I can remember that the one I'm looking for is relatively short, so the 2:06 one is the one I want, not the 3:30 or the 5:03. Let's compare to my old Archos. With the Archos, one option was to simply put a directory hierarchy on the device, and then access it via a simple file browser interface. If you hit "play" in a directory without a particular track selected, it would play everything in that directory, in alphabetical order. So, I'd rip each CD into its own directory, with each track file starting with its track number (padded with a leading 0 if less than two digits). I could then organize these directories in a tree any way I wanted. For my rock, folk, and pop, I could use artist/album. For classical I could do composer/conductor/orchestra/composition for those that did not feature a soloist. For those with a soloist, I could toss in a directory in there to organize by soloist. With the Archos, I never had to fish around to find what I wanted to find. With iPod I've sometimes spent several minutes trying to find something I know is there. BTW, I used the same organization on my desktop machine, and made sure to use a music player that would handle drag-and-drop reasonably--drop a track on it and it plays it, drop a directory on it and it plays all tracks in alphabetical order. Then all I needed was a file browser on the desktop and music playback was dealt with there, too. People have made classical work reasonably with iTunes on the desktop, by repurposing some of the fields. But that doesn't stop the suckage on iPods.

ugh 16y ago
While brilliant in some respects, Apple’s sometimes selective attention is also pretty well known ;-) The popular thing to do is to speculate that Jobs just doesn’t care about classical music at all and for that reason it’s neglected.