When I go to my local supermarket, I take my environmentally friendly green bags for the groceries. I always avoid the old guy that works there and go to another counter, as he is a serial underfiller. He puts about 2 items in each bag, and then at the end says “You don’t have enough bags”. No, I don’t, because you grossly underfilled the damn bags!

So yesterday I once again avoided him, and went to another counter. The checkout chick there also underfilled! Not as much as the old guy, but still a damn underfiller! Sure, you don’t want the overfill so that the bag breaks or requires two people to lift it, but how difficult is it to just not underfill the bag? This isn’t rocket science!

Hilarious find on a construction site fence in downtown Bourke Street, Melbourne, Australia. Click to enlarge.

Sadly, a member of the general public, who didn’t quite get the joke behind the art, had to add their own touch.

My 2007 Toyota Prius has a fairly good 5-disc slot-loading MP3 CD player. The trouble with it is the user interface is pretty poor. In particular the display of music track names.

Although you can set the user interface to display metadata from the mp3 files – whenever you accelerate, the information blanks out. Apparently the user interface designers felt looking at track names could be distracting! Incredible, I know.

The alternative interface is to actually look at filenames (these don’t blank out!). The trouble here is that you end up looking at something like the following:

Ugly. ROOT FOLDER? .mp3 extension?

The numbers at the start of the filenames is a common saved file convention in iTunes. The Prius adds its own numbers to the files when you look at the file list, so you end up seeing the following:

An ugly mess. No idea what band is playing either (well, you would if you liked Guns N’ Roses I guess).

Anyway, there is a trick to cleaning all this up.

First, if you put all your tracks inside a folder at the root level of the disk, the folder name will be displayed instead of ROOT FOLDER. That by itself is a huge improvement. Use the name of the band and things start to look up.

The next thing is that the filename actually displays only 16 characters. This is another example of how poor the user interface is – there is room probably for twice that. Anyway, the trick here is to remove any numbers from the start of track filenames, and add spaces BEFORE the .mp3 extension, so that the extension is out > 16 characters and thus not shown.

To do this, I wrote a quick Perl script on my Mac and ran it over the folder of MP3 files I created ready to burn to CD.

#!/usr/bin/perl
@files = <*.mp3>;
foreach $file (@files) {
    $orig = $file;
    $file =~ s/^\d* //;
    $file =~ /(.*)\.mp3/;
    $file = sprintf("%-40s", $1).".mp3";
    `mv "$orig" "$file"`;
}

I put all this in a folder named “Guns N' Roses“, and burnt it to CD. The result:

It’s not perfect, but it is a big improvement over the default display.

Where are all the good user interface designers? Do they all work at Apple?

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