I recently came in possession of an 80 GB iPod Classic. That means my entire music collection is now sitting in a tiny silver box. When I listened to some music on it, one of the first things I noticed was the ease with which I could mark a song on a rating of five stars. My entire music collection, from time to time gets vetted like that. I mark songs when ever I feel like and the one star ones get deleted. This reduced the load on my Mac’s Hard disk, a 250 GB baby HD. So, as of now I’m really happy with this device because I can quickly audit songs and after syncing with my music library, weed out the ones I don’t like.
So, what’s this about? An article in the limelight these past few days is about rethinking the iPhone’s app switcher. You can read it here on The Verge. It’s a pretty neat article detailing how the process of switching apps can be made a lot more productive. It’s a beautiful design meets functionality idea. In fact, I can safely say that some of the ideas in the article have already been implemented on the iOS by coders who believe in jailbreaking. The recent example of the idea of a new way of editing text on the iPad and the quick response by the jailbreak community shows how the 3rd party developers are faster and more innovative than Apple on the iOS. The one thing, however, that’s missing in the article on The Verge, is the concept of music curation. The ease of marking songs on the click wheel iPods has not translated well to the touchscreen and it’s something Apple or the jailbreak community can fix. The idea that the app switcher can be a lot more than just a dock is an important one and must be explored a lot. Maybe some day, I’ll have a way to curate my music right there in my iPhone.