Hey all. I thought of these ideas a while ago, but only got around to typing them up quite recently. I thought they were pretty good, so I sent 'em to sjobs@apple.com to see if the PR department had any views on them. I didn't get a response, so I thought I'd post them here instead to get some feedback on them. Clearly, nothing is going to come of them, but I thought I would share them anyway.
Email reads-
Email reads-
Dear Steve [Har Har],
I thought I'd send this e-mail to let you guys know of two ideas for iTunes/iPod functionality that I have come up with. Neither of them are exactly 'breakthrough' ideas, but I think they would improve the user experience and ease-of-use.
The first is a pretty simple one. It is the ability to order an Artist's albums in your iTunes/iPod library by date of release. Of course, by alphabetical order is useful, but - particularly when having a look through someone else's iPod - having the albums in order of release could be a handy feature. It sometimes happens that you recognize an artist, have heard their latest single and want to hear more. The artist has seven albums; it's a bit of a problem guessing if you don't know the album name.
The other idea - and it has a name - is Seamless Eject. To explain this, I've come up with a scenario-
You're on your computer, on iTunes. You head to the iTunes store, and download In Rainbows, Radiohead's latest album. After syncing it to your iPod, you put the album on in iTunes while you surf the net. Halfway through the album, you get a text from your friend saying: "Let's meet up in town for lunch, see you in Wagamama in 20 mins, yeah?".
So you you eject your iPod, stick in your headphones, and stroll out the door. You were enjoying Radiohead, so you go back to it in your library and click on 'All I Need'. It starts from the beginning.
This is where Seamless Eject comes in. Rewind back to the text message. You're halfway through an album in iTunes, which you also have on your iPod. You Ctrl+Click/Right-Click your iPod in the source list, and click Seamless Eject. [Alternatively, you Alt+Click the eject button next to your iPod's name, whose icon changes to some funky smooth-motion evoking image.]
The music stops playing in iTunes, and your iPod ejects. You pick up your iPod, and scroll down to Now Playing. Hit the Select/Play button, and bang, All I Need picks up 36 seconds through - right where it was in iTunes when you ejected your iPod.
I'm not clued-in on how iTunes works, but I'll try and explain how I think this feature could be implemented. When you click Seamless Eject, iTunes checks the Title, Artist, and Album of the track you are playing. It then searches the plugged-in iPod for a song matching this information. I know you can easily do this through the iTunes GUI, so I imagine it would be fairly simple to automate through the software code also. Once it's found the track, it [somehow] sets this as the currently playing song on your iPod when you eject it.
As a side note, if this feature is ever actually realised - a long shot - I'd ask that it works on both Auto-Sync and Manual-Sync iPods. Please
So that's it. I realise that for the first idea you could just ask your friend, and for the second you could take note of how far through the song you were in iTunes, and fast-forward on your iPod. That said, features like Album Art and Cover Flow on the iPod aren't necessary to just listen to your music, but they add to the overall experience. That's what I hope my ideas would do.
Thank you very much for your time, and I would be very appreciative of any feedback on these ideas.
-Brian