A Medium publication of essays on consumer technology, Apple, design critiques such as SoundCloud, time zones and the tech industry.
HN commenters discuss its SoundCloud redesign and its theories of Apple's pricing and luxury positioning, and the author notes a Safari keyboard input bug.
I absolutely love Soundcloud and also use it daily - I am listening to it right now - but it's an absolute disgrace how little they've done to improve the platform. It seems like such a total waste of potential.
The issues with the UI/UX are obvious and there are clear ways to improve on the situation. A number of people have done unsolicited Soundcloud redesigns, but there was an excellent one in December 2014 that is worth taking a look at:
https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/redesigning-soundcloud-d52b4baf17a4#.280qdu5d1
In addition to showcasing a beautiful, thoughtful redesign, this post makes a series of criticisms that are both justified and still in urgent need of rectification. For example, in the stream:
* It’s hard to discern which song is playing.
* Only three to five songs are visible at once.
* The Stream doesn’t automatically scroll.
* The avatars [of commenters] on the waveform are virtually meaningless.
* Reloading the Stream is slow and clunky.
I would really hate to lose Soundcloud, as a long time fan of electronic music (going on 20 years now!) it's been a big part of my life for years now and I love it.
For most use cases, current hardware is sufficient. This will have a profound effect on wearable devices as we use exponential improvement to make devices smaller and more battery efficient rather than faster. This is exactly what Intel and Apple did with the new Macbook Air. They made it slightly faster, but much more power efficient.
If you look into the future and imagine that every 1.5 years Google Glass will half in size instead of getting faster, it doesn't take the long before it's the size of a dime (~4.5 years).
That's why Glass matters: it's just the beginning.
Short blog on Medium about this: https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/74c201b4f331
Not a bad idea at all. I'm sure we can tackle that. I actually played around with another concept as well which is using the Sun's location as our reference instead of UTC. This then gives our solar system a unified time, not only Earth. It's an incomplete concept still. I have it here in this blog post https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/introducing-solutions-to-solve-the-mess-of-time-zones-cdf44a7ee4ae
Would love to hear what you think.
Two theories
[1] Luxury: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBHY_Qaw5AI&ab_channel=MarquesBrownlee
[2] Target demographic: https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/here-is-why-apple-sells-mac-pro-wheels-for-700-8fe4d208460b
I am more convinced by the business argument, both only cater to a small market of high-end spenders
It's a Safari bug unfortunately.
https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/allow-keyboard-input-968a142b5b9b
Seems like the best recourse is to disable the feature in Safari. Bummer.
URL should be: https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/235adb58ce40