I was recently going to join the cult and buy an iPod, but then I saw the Archos AV4320 and knew it was what I wanted. So what’s it packing?

• A very good LCD screen (clear and crisp).
• Miniscule start-up time (good for what is essentially a stripped down computer).
• Video recording stuff (including a cradle to hook it up to the TV).
• Fairly intuitive UI.
• It’s small.
• A day’s battery. The battery has only cut out once on me, and that was after a full day’s use and then hours loading stuff onto it.
• Video and audio playback and recording (it has it’s own mic and a selection of inputs and outputs that can be used with the correct wires).
• The easiest firmware update I’ve ever seen.

All the good stuff you’d want in a pocket video and MP3 player. Downsides?

• No AC3 support, making watching some videos impossible.
• Default headphones are shite. Really bad. Thankfully, I have a nice pair of Sony Fontopia. If you get one, bin the headphones immediately.
• The built-in speaker is a touch quiet. This probably won’t matter.

All in all, I’m happy. The commute to work and back has become a much more pleasant time.

One of the many strong principles in interface design is that of consistency: the idea that the interface components use obvious language, behave as expected given the context and similar components elsewhere, and generally fit in with the users expectations. A million books, lectures and workshops have been devoted to this subject, so discovering more on this is left as an exercise for the reader. As important as consistency is, sometimes user interfaces are best sculpted through inconsistency.

Mobile phones represent a good counter-example to traditional thinking. Many of the important cues provided by the interface are not in the form of visuals, rather they are audio based. Since your phone likely spends most of its life in a pocket, ringtones and beeps are used to communicate information. If the phone rings, you know someone is calling. If it makes a certain series of beeps, a text message is waiting.

Let me tell you a little story though: a few weeks ago I was at a fairly relaxed but sizable gathering. As one would expect, everyone had a mobile. As one might not have guessed, there was an improbable number of Motorola phones present. This would have been fine if one of the batteries hadn’t gone flat; a low battery warning beep is standard across most Motorola phones. Every 5 minutes when this beep went, everyone checked their phone like their Pavlovian training had taught them. Amusing, but not particularly great design (especially since you can’t turn it off without switching the offending phone off, and that is outwith your control).

What can you do about this? I’m not sure. The first suggestion I have is to create a multiple cues for each major interaction. Say you have 10 ringtones, 10 alerts for messages, and so forth. You can them take the phones in-built ID’s (they have several that are unique for our purposes) and hash them to a set of these cues. Most of the time, chances are that users won’t get cues that are not for them.

Beyond that, I’m not sure. It’s an interesting area though.

A simple two way film fight this month.

First up is Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds, another film that was good the first time but they decided to mess with anyway. Genius. In all honesty, it’s not a terrible film, when taken as a dumb visual spectacle. There are plot holes you could drive a tripod through (camcorders unaffected by EMP, plot important streets being the only ones unaffected, etc), and the story surrounding our heroe’s family is annoying and superflous, but it doesn’t matter all that much. It’s still a good watch.

The contender is Silver City: a film that opens with some very subtle humour and, unusually for American films, dry wit. It degenerates into a total farce featuring some of the worst acting and dialogue imaginable. Who, I ask you, who thought it was a neat idea to make a joke out of irregular verbs? You, my friend, are wrong. Worse than this is the fact the plot begins to move in so many directions that it gets nowhere and falls on its arse. The director should’ve cut, oh, minutes into the film. Abysmal.

Strangely, War of the Worlds wins.

First bit of news for the month is that new band Institute have finished work on their debut album. Featuring ex-Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, it’s expected to be pretty decent and the first track, “Bullet-Proof Skin”, seems to indicate that (albeit only a portion of the track has emerged).

This month saw the finals of the Emergenza UK new band competition. Although I saw relatively little, what I did see was disappointing; a lot of derivative, talentless bands, doing nothing very interesting at all. The exception was Edinburgh’s Amplifico who burst their way through in terms of both style, energy and performance. Pretty songs and a catchy chorus do a good band make. Ones to watch.

Epitaph released the tenth annual Punk-O-Rama compilation CD at the start of the month. While it features far fewer exclusive tracks than in previous years, the quality remains high and the bonus DVD is, well, a bonus. It’s also in the mid-price sampler range, so should be fairly cheap.

Both Idlewild and The Mars Volta released new singles this month; “El Capitan” and “L’via L’viaquez” respectively. Neither is worth getting. While the album the Mars Volta track is taken from is excellent, “The Bible and The Breathalyzer”is a typical piece of Mars Volta editing room trash put out as a B-side. The guys have serious talent, but they don’t make much of an effort for singles.

That’s all I know about this month, haven’t been paying a great deal of attention to music.

Consistency. One of the cornerstones of design. Things do as you expect them to. Simple. If you see something act one way, you expect and identical item to act the same way. It’s not unreasonable.

Internet Explorer though, it has other ideas.

You see, when I open up a new window I expect it to act the same regardless of how it is opened. Clicking the IE icon in my Quick Launch bar should be the same as using Ctrl + N. Sadly, it’s not so. The latter of these methods opens up another window in the context of the currently in-use IE process. This means that, rightly, all cookies and such are propagated through that have been set during the current browser session.

However, if you click the IE Quick Launch (or any other shortcut to the executable) to start new windows, then it launches an entirely separate process. In this context, no cookies and other information are propagated through. The up and downsides of this behaviour is that you have to be bloody careful if you’re testing out a webapp in different accounts; you might not get the login behaviour you expect.