One of my favorite features of Songpocket is something it doesn’t do: immediately demand access to your Music library the first time you open it.
Instead, it only asks you for permission after you tap “Allow Access to Music”.
Don’t you hate when the very first thing an app does is throw a permission alert in your face? Before you even get to see what the app looks lik—
Hey! That’s just a rude first impression. And why would I let you send me notifications when I don’t even know what those notifications will be for yet?
Have you ever kept a physical music collection? It has this neat feature called “you can organize it however you want.”
But now, think about your digital music collection. It’s locked in place by the automatic grouping and sorting in your music app.
Now, this is peculiar. How come our digital music collections give us less freedom than physical ones?
Hell, even your to-do app probably lets you reorder tasks and move them between lists. Since when is your music collection less personalizable than your to-do list?
Introducing Songpocket, a music player that lets you organize your music manually.
The other day, I had a moment that reminded me why I love UI design.
I was editing some metadata in Apple Music on my Mac: things like fixing the artist and composer, and the punctuation, like replacing straight quotes with curly quotes, and triple periods with proper ellipses. I appreciate those details.
In short, Apple Music is unusably glitchy. I was fighting a new bug almost every five seconds. Apple should be ashamed of this level of carelessness.
So I switched to Meta, which is a third-party metadata editor that I’d previously picked out and bought, but still hadn’t explored completely.
Meta is “Mac-like”. It uses mostly system UI elements, and it follows Mac design conventions. I immediately started working more efficiently in Meta than I could in Apple Music.
But then, Meta gave me two a-ha moments that made my day.
Five hundred years ago, the Korean writing system was specifically designed to be easy to learn. Similar sounds are written with similar characters, and related with consistent patterns. Some characters are actually pictures of the way your mouth pronounces them. Seriously, check out this video:
Many years later, the Korean keyboard layout seems to have been designed according to the same philosophy.
Consonant–vowel split
First, the left hand takes all the consonants and the right hand takes all the vowels. You can’t do this with English, but you can with Korean, because it happens to have a similar number of consonants and vowels: 14 of each, not including combinations.