Why is "up level" button greyed out when you're on the individual song screen? You cannot "go back" to the current playlist to scroll through and find another song - you must repeat the search process all over again. Numbing...

Alternatively, is there a way to keep the screen on the playlist screen, not, after 10 seconds or so, jump to the song detail screen? If this is licensed/approved technology from Apple, I can't believe they permitted Pioneer to omit this basic navigation functinality.

thrang said:

Why is "up level" button greyed out when you're on the individual song screen? You cannot "go back" to the current playlist to scroll through and find another song - you must repeat the search process all over again. Numbing..

Ah... Welcome to my pet peeve.

Using the "up" or "back" arrow was probably one of the first things you tried so how could they have made such a fundamental flaw in their design? Easy, there was no design. They clearly just tasked some newbie programmer with this and gave them no direction or guidance and so of course they made every user interface design mistake possible.

Even the horrible speed of the iPod interface (another bad design) could have been worked around using some simple caching. In fact that is the FIRST thing I would have done to help the painfully slow data retrieval where it appears the programmer went out of their way to NOT use any kind of caching.

thrang said:

Alternatively, is there a way to keep the screen on the playlist screen, not, after 10 seconds or so, jump to the song detail screen?

It has nothing to do with licensing, it has to to with a programmer that fell in love with a piece of their code (a timer) and failed to think if the code serves any purpose or if it's just "neat."

There is NO reason to default back to the main song page. What's especially annoying about this is that this was a conscious decision by the programmer, they had to write code to do this, and it makes no sense what-so-ever:

1) It makes using the unit less safe, not more safe, as you will be distracted more often and for longer times.

2) It serves no purpose. As a programmer you should always ask yourself why you are doing something, what problem are you solving? This was clearly not done as the answer would have been, "Uh, what? Look at the pretty colors..."

So as you use the iPod interface, and are stymied at every turn, please think of the programmer that wrote the UI and recite the following curse, "May your be infested by the fleas of a thousand camels."

Cirbirus said:

This was clearly not done as the answer would have been, "Uh, what? Look at the pretty colors..."

We used that in my last code review! :D

Cirbirus said:

It has nothing to do with licensing, it has to to with a programmer that fell in love with a piece of their code (a timer) and failed to think if the code serves any purpose or if it's just "neat."

Right - what I was saying was I was surprised Apple would not have some UI standards that licensing partners must adhere to, given Apple's relatively insane focus on the perfect user experience - and to use the dock connector, Pioneer had to license its use from Apple.

I had thought the same thing regarding a caching/read-ahead....why not? Further, you could probably store the playlist info on the hard drive one, and update the informaiton only as playlists change. Adding an alphabetical filter (though Apple may need to add this first, since it's not even on an iPod) would be a great feature.

Nonetheless, I'm curing someone in Japan rght now...