Reading the Apple tea leaves

OK, so there’s already an army of Apple watchers out there who are blogging the minutest speck of black or white smoke coming out of the chimneys of 1 Infinite Loop so the last thing I want to do is add to the hype surrounding this non-product that may or may not exist.

However, since my career wagon has been hitched up to Apple for so long I do have to comment on the rumored touch-screen iPod. The various mockups all look cool, but I have to go all Donald Norman here for a minute. One thing that I’ve liked about the iPod’s design (I’ll ignore the aberrent 3rd-gen iPod) is how it feedbacks to you – the “click” noise it makes when you scroll and the decisive “whunk” when you make a selection on the contoured click wheel. Stuff like this is a big deal for me because without glasses or contacts I’m effectively blind. I often listen to my iPod as I’m falling asleep and navigating blind is easy: I know where to go to skip a song, go up a level, move ahead, and so on all without having to physically look at it. I wonder how the heck I’m going to find the mark on one of these touch-screen models.

I blame this……….

Ever since that damned desk showed up in Tron, tech manufacturers have been obsessed over impressive-looking touch-screen controls that are utterly non-usuable. I still have nightmares trying to code on the Atari 400 which has the most user-hostile keyboard of any computer ever made. Remember the all-black stereo craze of the 1990s? They all looked great in a stereo store, but the controls were impossible to see or use in anything other than direct sunlight.

I wonder if there’s also a “non-brightness” mode to the screen. Call it reverse-aesthetics… I want to be able to use it without having a television screen light up. I’ll give you even money that the next iPod accessory line will be a red translucent bag for amateur astronomers to put their iPod in.

Anyway, I hope there’s a slight contour to the “screen wheel” in the new iPod (if there is in fact a new one on the way). If there are any Apple engineers out there that run across this, please give us mole-visioned a break. k thx bye!