from The Guts of a New Machine (NYT, free refgistration required)

''The Dells of the world don't spend money'' on design innovation, he (steve jobs) said. ''They don't think about these things.'' As he described it, the iPod did not begin with a specific technological breakthrough, but with a sense, in early 2001, that Apple could give this market something better than any rival could. So the starting point wasn't a chip or a design; the starting point was the question, What's the user experience?

Design innovation. What's the user experience?

That's where *I* want to go today.

The great thing about the iPod is that it gets form and function dead on. There are many products that aim for a beautiful user experience that fail on function. I love the current line of Apple products as they are beautiful and functional, actually more functional than competing products because of the design.

Apple has always cared about the design specifications and the contextual design elements. How will the product be used? Keep it simple. Focus on simplicity. Just make it work with out the user having to think about it.

The scroll wheel.

We were sitting around talking about presenting choices in a listbox and someone said "well, if you have thousands of choices you can't really present it in a listbox" adn then someone mentioned a listbox where the top and bottom and telescope down into unreadability (the obverse of having the selected area be magnified) and I just thought

"Hey! I can select from a thousand entries on my iPod -- the songs -- just by scrolling down through the entire alphabetical list and choosing the song.

And it works.

Too bad there isn't a similar scrolling doodad in computer interfaces, because this index-finger scroll wheel really works. Of course there are other category-based navigation entries into the song database; you're not forced to select from a list of thousands of songs. But you can.

There was a music synthesizer about 20 years ago called the SynClavier that had a similar selection device: The Knob. They basically used it for everything and people made fun of them for that, but I think it worked pretty well.

Sounds like you're talking about the Powermate by Griffin.

http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/powermate/index.html

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