sammi says

Technology is pretty great. I am amazed at some of the stuff that people come up with and actually make function. But every so often I find myself thinking that something super simple could be done to improve said technology. Here are my ideas.

Sometimes I don't know what music I feel like listening to for day. I find myself resorting to the shuffle function on my iPod. Now, I have a lot of beef with the shuffle feature and how it decides what songs to play (see ***), but that's a whole other story. Anywho, when by chance it does bring up something interesting that feels right you have to go through about 5 different steps (including scrolling to through albums and artists) to get to the album the song is on or the artist who made it...Not the best idea when you're driving. Why isn't there a feature that lets you click a button when you're in the shuffle function and displays that artist's albums? That way you could just click a button scroll through a limited number of albums and songs until you find exactly what you're looking for.

Next on the list of things to make better is Twitter. I am completely obsessed with Twitter. While personally I don't "tweet" very often I love reading my twitter feed. It really is an amazing way to get information. While I subscribe to the personal Twitter feeds of celebrities like John Mayer, "The Office" writer and actress Mindy Kaling and a few friends but what I love the most are the feeds from places like E! and the Riverfront Times giving all the latest updates in a short, concise manner.

When I come home from work in the afternoon and sit down and check Twitter I have to scroll down several pages to find where I left off last (usually the previous evening) and read from the bottom to the top as to not miss any information. What Twitter should offer is a function to type in a time and date and then post all tweets since that time and allow you to switch the order to display the oldest at the top of the page and the most recent towards the bottom. Ok, this sounds like I am a Twitter freak to read every bit of information but if you don't use twitter you don't understand- reading an entire days worth of tweets from the 58 people/websites I follow at most takes about 15 minutes. Twitter makes it so easy for me to get a lot of information in a small amount of time but they could make it even easier if they developed my idea.

These changes are good ideas and would seriously take some computer genius only a couple of hours to make available to the world. Be sure to read below for my unrelated rant about iTunes Shuffle.


***How the hell does the shuffle even work? I want to know what it's thinking when it decides to play basically all the shittiest songs on my iPod one right after another. I have what some may say is an interesting taste in music which sometimes means I have live bootleg audio of Broadway shows in my library and shuffle decides to play a dialogue scene from "Wicked," and when you skip it then next song up to bat is an obscure tune from a imported German Backstreet Boys album. Using shuffle when in the presence of friends is a bad idea, at least with my iTunes library. I know it is just a machine but it really has a knack for playing the most annoying songs on my iPod.