Thursday
11 Oct 2007
Play That Song, Without Looking
Our Products UI Design Fundamentals
Today is a good day to listen to music: Enso Media Remote Control now has six new commands in it. Remote Control has been the most popular beta product, so we chose to revisit it first. Like all of our other beta products, the new Remote Control is completely free. (Unlike our full products Enso Launcher and Enso Words, our beta products do not automatically update, so whether you already have Remote Control or not, you’ll need to download the new installer if you want to try it out.)
Play me a song, Enso
The whole point of Media Remote Control is to let you control your music without having to switch applications. With the old Media Remote Control, if you wanted to hear a specific song, you would still have to go back to your media player and then click around to find the song you wanted, breaking your train of thought. With the new commands, you can tell Enso to play a specific song without having to switch applications, or indeed, even take your hands off the keyboard.
How does it work? If you know the exact song you want, you can say play song heart of the sunrise (for instance). If you want to hear a certain artist but don’t care what song, you can say play artist zappa and let Enso pick a random song by Frank Zappa. You can do the same thing with albums and genres: use play jazz and let Enso surprise me with a random jazz song.
Before you get too excited, right now these commands only work with iTunes. That’s why Media Remote Control is still a beta product. (Why iTunes? It’s not kickbacks from Apple. It’s for purely technical reasons: it was easier to make this work with iTunes than with any other media players.)
Silence and Noise
Besides play song, play artist, play album, and play genre, there are also two more commands: mute and unmute. It should be pretty obvious what mute and unmute do.
Why we chose to make them two separate commands? The rest of the world — from TV remote controls to media-enhanced computer keyboards — implements the “mute” command as a toggle: one push mutes the volume, a second push un-mutes it. So why does Enso Media Controller buck this trend and have two commands instead of one? It’s because of one of our general principles of interface design: we don’t like toggles.
A “toggle” is any command or button which flips a system back and forth between two states each time you use it. The problem with a toggle is that you
don’t know what it’s going to do unless you first check the system state. Unfortunately, the system mute state is usually invisible. If your computer
isn’t currently making noise, there’s no easy way to tell if it’s muted or not. This has burned me before. One day at work, I was about to do something that
would result in my computer beeping, and I didn’t want to annoy my coworkers, so I hit the mute button first. But my computer was already muted and
had in fact been silently playing an all-day music marathon, so as soon as I hit “mute” my speakers started blasting out Björk tunes at full volume — the exact opposite of what I intended. Separate mute and unmute commands don’t have this problem. Each command does only one thing, so you always know what it’s going to do. That’s why we prefer non-toggle-based interfaces whenever possible.
The Future
What’s in the future for Media Remote Control? We’d like to add full support for more media players, such as the popular VLC and Foobar 2000.Thanks to all of you who submitted bug reports and feature requests for Media Remote Control. I’d also like to thank you for the many excellent suggestions for new Beta Products that you’ve left in the comment thread. Even though we don’t always respond to these suggestions, we read every one and we keep track of which feature sets are most often requested. In another few weeks we plan to release our sixth Beta Product — one that does something you’ve been asking for (and we’ve been promising) for a long time.
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