The (in)feasibility of Cover Flow
It’s been a while since I’ve talked tech on here, and there’s a number of reasons for that, which I won’t get into here, but I wanted to touch a bit on Cover Flow, a relatively new user interface that Apple is heavily promoting for both the iPhone and its next OS, Leopard (branded as Quick Look).
With Cover Flow, as Apple describes it, “you can flip through your digital music and video collection the same way you flip through CDs or DVDs” and it “displays all the album art in your music collection in one easy-to-navigate interface that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection.”
Designing a user interface as a metaphor to the real world is always risky business, and in this case I don’t know that it’s at all relevant. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t own a single music CD (well, that is beyond my “I’m cool and listen to music” stage of 12 years-old when I picked up Dance Mix 95 and many other rather embarrassing albums). So right away, the metaphor is lost on me. I have never, and I don’t anticipate ever flipping through CDs or DVDs. I’m also smack dab in the middle of the target demographic for both the iPhone and Mac, so what gives?
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Adam is a User Experience Specialist at IBM in Toronto and also produces content of all kinds around the Web.
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