Saturday, December 27, 2008
After showering this morning, I realized what bothers me about the user interfaces for iTunes 8.0.2 (20) and Songbird 1.0.0. In both, it seems to be impossible to see the contents of a playlist you're building side by side with the contents of the music library from which you're trying to build it. Also, in both, after you begin playing music you can't have a constantly-open window that shows the current playlist. Both permit you to navigate to other views while music plays, and those actions replace your current playlist view with the view of the thing to which you're navigating. Both permit you to work around this problem. iTunes has the Show Current Song command (Command+L) and Songbird has a not-obvious feature: select the currently playing song in the player controls panel to view it in its current playlist context. But in both if you've navigated elsewhere, you need to invoke a command or perform an action to see the current playlist. The checkboxes in iTunes have always confused me, too. Why have both checkboxes and playlists? The probably-best answer to this question can be found with Google [itunes checkboxes james philp], but nonetheless I found the rationale of this user interface design unsatisfying. UI design that requires explanation is poor design. I grew up with and am most comfortable with how Winamp works—separate windows for playlist and library, and the currently playing playlist window can optionally remain open even if you navigate to another view. But Winamp has become bloated even when you install a minimal configuration, and to me that's why foobar2000 is becoming an increasingly appealing alternative to Winamp. Uploaded photos and video to Flickr. Office install and Windows updates for Vista. Lunch with the parents and my brother and Patrick at Cafe for All Seasons. Grocery shopping with Patrick. Edited photos, uploaded photos to Flickr. Put touch-up paint on the car. Organized stuff into cardboard boxes. Paid bills. Recharge Spa website work: added Stephen Bruce. More occurrences of the Time Machine error "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume." Troubleshot this. Repaired disk permissions—it found a number of incorrect permissions and fixed them all. Verified internal hard disk: no problems. Verified external Time Machine hard disk: no problems. Reviewed Sophos Anti-Virus preferences and found that it was excluding the former name of my backup hard disk volume, so I updated it to reflect the new name. Most likely this last reason was the problem. Confirmed Time Machine preferences were set correctly. Reformatted the Time Machine hard drive. Requested an immediate backup.