Street Tech

On sci-tech author Steven Berlin Jognson’s blog, he makes a cool suggestion to Apple engineers about a future feature he’d like to see for the Shuffle. We’d like to second that emotion:

Here’s my idea: double-clicking on the forward or rewind button takes you to the next album when you’re in linear mode (not shuffle.) Because the shuffle doesn’t have that much music on it, given the small FlashRAM size, you might only have about 20-30 albums worth of material on the device. So finding a specific track on a specific album wouldn’t be all that difficult if you could double-click ahead. You’d double click through a few albums, find the one you were looking for, and then single-click to the track you wanted to hear. Sure, the scroll wheel/display approach is faster, but you could navigate through the Shuffle’s albums without actually looking at the device, which is nice when you’re driving or walking, etc. The other fringe benefit of this approach is that it would let you do something that’s strangely difficult to do with the regular iPod. When I’m listening in Shuffle mode, I often find myself hearing a song I’ve long forgotten about, and I suddenly want to hear the entire album that the song originated from. Getting to that album takes about four steps on a regular iPod. But with the shuffle it would be a two step process: flip the back switch out of shuffle mode, and then double click backwards to the beginning of the album. Neat, huh?

Looking for a cheap flat screen monitor to go with that Mac Mini you want to buy? Check out the LCD monitor deals at TigerDirect. They have 17″ models ranging from $180 to $260 (after rebate). Probably the best deal in the lot (price-to-performance-wise) is the BengQ FP731 (shown here) for $200. Get this and the Mac Mini through one of the dealers that’s throwing in a mouse and a keyboard with the Mini and you have a G4 Panther Mac with 17″ flat panel monitor for $700. Very tempting.