Otaku No Zoku

What happens when you reach the complexity limitation of a piece of software?

I’ve talked about this a few times with colleagues and associates and for the past two years have constantly been running in to it with a piece of software I use on a daily basis. The software is iTunes, which works great if you’re like 99% of the people out there who have a few thousand music tracks and a couple of dozen music videos you’ve downloaded.

But what happens when you have over 80,000 music tracks ripped from your vast collection of CDs you own, more than 500 audio books, and weeks worth of music videos, literally thousands of music videos that you’ve ripped from your music DVDs and VHS tapes that you’ve acquired through the years?

iTunes was never built to handle a library like that. It takes forever to start-up and shutdown and becomes slow as molasses when scrolling through lists or attempting to do searches. And whilst Apple has made some performance improvements in the latest version to keep memory usage down, it still consumes upwards of a half-gigabyte to hold the index in memory.

When your entire audio and video life is digital, simple programs like iTunes are no longer able to keep up. Is there anything out there even remotely approaching the ability to make sense of that much personal content?

Ten Changes To iTunes

1. The PC port is atrocious. It is sluggish at best, and at its worst “like molasses in a Montana winter.” And it has been getting worse.
2. Reduce the amount of memory it uses. Hundreds of megabytes is ridiculous and whilst Apple have improved it with each version, it still takes up almost 200 megabytes on my current music collection.
3. Make it shut down faster. Saving the XML database at program exit takes several minutes. Use a real database to store all of the data. When iTunes crashes any changes you have made to your library since you last exited are gone forever.
4. The user interface or application code was never designed, at least on the PC, to handle 100,000 audio tracks. Trust me, I know this, I’ve tried it out and it is clunky at best.
5. The user interface needs to have “Don’t ever play this flag.” Trust me, I never, ever want to listen to any one of the fifteen variations of “Do you really want to hurt me?” that are on the various 80’s compilation CDs.
6. More granularity on “favourites” including a “thumbs down”
7. Better management of “dead tracks” and “duplicate tracks” and new tracks added to the library.
8. Share your database between multiple computers, especially important when trying to synchronize my laptops and workstations.
9. Make it smarter about handling multiple iPods.
10. Put some decent tag and rename functionality in to the application rather than the half-arsed interface it currently has.

Microsoft, stop attempting to make an inferior version of iTunes. I didn’t think it was possible but you achieved it with the latest version of Media Player.

Won’t somebody please innovate in their user interfaces and study the end-user’s “work flow” rather than the competition’s application?

iTunes. It’s a piece of crap. Unfortunately it is the best piece of crap available.

I want to test something out. I want you to remember these six faces, and I want you to remember the order in which they appeared.

Don’t spend too much time on studying them.

There will be a test later.

A large part of the human brain is dedicated to vision, and quite a large proportion of that area is dedicated to recognizing faces.

So my proposition is that you can use our brain’s facial recognition ability to remember long strings of numbers or other important information by associating elements of the information, e.g. individual digits, with a picture of a particular person’s face.

So now scroll the browser window so that the sequence faces above are no longer visible, and pick out the original six images from the following four dozen mug shots, and place them in the order that you first saw them.

How well did you do?

Every time I’ve tried it, with a selection list of hundreds of images of people, with sequences of images easily 30 images long, I’ve been able to get it right 100% of the time. And every person I’ve tried this out on is able to achieve the same results too. I’ve found that people on the second or third test only need a few seconds to learn a sequence of images 10 or 20 images long.

So the elevators in the building where I have my office now sport LCD panels that play adverts on a continuous loop.

I’m curious, in the future, will elevator operators claim that if we don’t watch the ads that we’re stealing elevator rides from them? Just like the TV execs do today when you record a TV show with your PVR and then skip through the ads. Will there be a camera placed in each elevator to ensure you watch at least your fair share of the ads? The only thing that a TV showing ads in an elevator guarantees is that it won’t kill the conversation. There never is any! Mundanes riding elevators never talk to each other, even if they know everybody around them, haven’t seen them in a long time, have some really important news to tell – like the building is collapsing – or they were having a conversation about some really deep subject just prior to stepping on the elevator.

Put a few mundanes in the stairwell of the same building and they’ll start talking to each other as they take the stairs up to their office – or at least they will for the first few floors, then the huffing and puffing starts and the conversation starts coming in gasped bursts.