Album art is perhaps the greatest casualty of the digital music revolution. Nowadays, a CD bought is quickly ripped and stuffed in a closet, or perhaps hung on the wall (as an aside, I really want some of those).
And yet, as Adrian Shaughnessy remarks in his excellent piece about the future of album art:
There is an undeniable sense of completeness when music comes with handsome packaging and engaging graphical material.
Luckily, there are also promising signs that alternatives will emerge in the digital world. Apple’s CoverFlow technology, which they acquired from a shareware developer, brings back some warmth to your iTunes library, and the iPhone has it too (scroll to the bottom). The labels are apparently interested as well, though I’m worried that they’re going to come up with something horribly kludgy. There’s something nice about the constraint of an album cover.
However, I’m most excited by physical representations of digital album art. David from Ironic Sans suggests a Digital Jewelbox, basically an LCD screen that displays the artwork from the currently playing song and acts as a remote control.
My all time favorite is Michael Kennedy’s i-Deck prototype. I love the retro-gramophone look, and the way the album art is displayed on the “cd”. The i-Deck has a physical charm that is impossible to match with pure software, and I would pay a lot to have one of these in my living room.
The reason I haven’t posted this week is that I was lucky enough to attend Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld on Tuesday. My entire group camped out the night before (we we’re second in line!)… and of course I ended up sleeping for 12 hours straight last night. While the iPhone has already been extensively dissected on the web, I wanted to post some thoughts and a round-up of relevant links.
Being at the keynote was an incredible experience. Jobs is an amazing salesman, and you could just see the sparkle in his eyes as he revealed his new baby. His demo was perfectly polished, with a strong consistent message (”5 years ahead of any other phone”) and lots of nice one-liners (”and boy have we patented it”). He had phone conversations with Jonathan Ive and Phil Schiller in the audience. Eric Schmidt made a guest appearance (we all clapped extra hard), as did Jerry Yang from Yahoo and Stan Sigman, the CEO of Cingular (whose speech was awful). It all concluded with a live performance by John Mayer.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the product itself is fantastic. As a designer, I’m most intrigued by the touch screen user interface, which has tremendous potential for novel interactions. Something as simple as unlocking the phone becomes a slick swipe, and don’t even get me started on the zooming gesture. The industrial design is beautiful as well, with a huge high-resolution 3.5 inch touchscreen and only one button on the front face (one too many, if you ask me). It’s not tiny, but it’s very thin. All in all, a very very nice object.
Now of course it isn’t perfect. Here are my gripes:
- No tactile feedback I’m very worried that the keyboard will be hard to use. The early reviews say that the error correction software helps, but I could still see it being clumsy. My only hope is that Jonathan Ive put enough work into it as to make it useable.
- No proper Gmail integration I don’t think I can live without the fantastic Gmail mobile client. While they’ll hopefully get it working on the iPhone in time for the release, I’ll be torn between seamless Gmail integration and seamless OS integration (including fancy touchscreen interactions).
- No third-party apps Apparently, the software is locked down. I’m hoping this isn’t the case.
- No wireless sync Apparently, it won’t sync wirelessly with your computer. I have to believe this will change in time for the launch.
- No detachable battery Given the roughly 1 day of battery life, it would have been nice to be able to pop in a spare battery. I know I’ve done it on my blackberry before.
- No flash The only cameraphones that produce even remotely useable pictures at night are those with an LED flash. While we’re at it, 2 megapixels is going to be pretty standard by the time it launches.
- A couple of unfair complaints I’d like to say that 8GB isn’t enough if you expect to store videos, pictures, music, etc… but I’d feel a bit snide given that it’s a lot more memory than any other phone, and anything bigger would have made it bulkier, more expensive and more power hungry. I’d also have liked a GPS, which would have enabled even more innovative applications.
- Price point By the way he led up to it, I expected Jobs to announce a price point lower than current smartphones, something like $399 for the 4GB version. It has a lot of features, but $600 is still a lot of money for a phone. I also wonder how much it will cost without a new contract (I’m already with Cingular).
- June?? WTF? Despite all of the above, I would definitely have bought one if they’d been available. I guess the FCC made that impossible, but still disappointing.
If you haven’t overdosed on the iPhone coverage yet, below is a list of links to give you a good overview of the product.
The Concerto Table is shaped like a grand piano and integrates an ipod. Witty.
Apple patent on virtual surround sound. Imagine an iPod Hi-Fi that would instantly provide surround sound when you placed it in a room.
Apple Keynote Bloopers, a video of keynotes gone awry…
