"Apple's stupidest interface innovation ever" 14 Sep 2007

Kirk McElhearn on the new iPod Interface:

"When you are on the main menu (the top-level menu), or the Music menu (which leads to Playlists, Artists, Albums, etc.), you see album art on the right half of the iPod screen. This is a random cover from your music, and it changes about ever 8 seconds. It also moves around; you know, like those annoying Flash ads on web pages that distract you so you can't read articles?

"I mean, what's the point of this? Okay, they wanted to fill up space with something 'dynamic', and I guess I could find worse images than the one of Nelly Furtado in the graphic above...But the whole concept here is stupid: first, it chooses random art. Why do you want to see your album art at random? Perhaps if you could choose one album to use as a kind of wallpaper, that might be useful. But even if you could, this stuff is moving. Nothing is more distracting than a moving image, especially when you want to read text. There's not much text to read in these menus, but when I see these moving images, I just want to drill down a level to get rid of them. Would that there were an option to remove this stupid feature. "