Wal-Mart Sells Universal MP3s without DRM Restrictions. No Mac Support!

Wether Universal is truly interested in selling DRM free music online remains to be seen. Starting yesterday, they made a selection of albums and song available at walmart.com until January 31st. Each song can be purchased for 94 cents. Other vendors, including Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Google Inc., Best Buy Co., RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody,..., were chosen for this test-run. Interestingly Apple‘s Musicstore was excluded, despite the fact that it is the largest platform for music downloads. Although MP3s are completely compatible with any music playing device – including the iPod and iPhone platforms, Mac Users are not welcome on Walmart‘s site. Instead they presented with this message:

We‘re sorry, your operating system is incompatible. .....visit again after you upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP.

Incompatible with DRM free music downloads?? Somebody willing to upgrade their system to download some crappy MP3s?

Then I asked a collegue with Parallels and WIN XP installed to load the site, I was curious to see the interface Walmart came up with:

Why is all type on the page so tiny?



Songs can be previewed, but there is no „player“ functionality. You have to listen to a song to the bitter end, even when you don‘t like it. Sad...

Typing on the iPhone, Practise Makes Perfect?

The first order of the day after my arrival in New York was to visit a store that sold the iPhone, in my case the Union Square location of AT&T. The store was almost empty and got access to an iPhone immediately. After studying the device exstensively online, I felt pretty comfortable using it right away, until I tried to enter a URL in Safari‘s address bar. Using the virtual keyboard is incredibly tough!! I mistyped constantly and everything. Forget about a two thumb approach. Thumbs are less of a pointing device, they hit the keyboard on an angle and force you to compensate for it, which is a hard thing to do. A few days later I met my friend Dave Carroll, associate professor at Parsons School of Design's graduate degree program Design and Technology. Dave is a notorious early adopter and has some great iPhone tips to share on his blog mercurious.com. He convinced me to trust the iPhone spell correction feature. So I tried to plow through writing text without regard to spelling. After a little while I was able to produced text fairly fluently.



However, the spell correction does not come into place when typing URLs. Get used to bookmarking URLs as fast as possible! I was disappointed that the iPhone doesn‘t have any other dictionary but the english one. Don‘t look for international keyboard layouts. They are not implemented with this first version. This iPhone is strictly for the english speaking market, which is weird because the States are so diverse as far as spoken languages go. Dave showed me javascript based keyboard layouts online, but their small button sizes are not suited for the iPhones finger-pointer approach.

Wholefoods Cuts the Dispatcher Person

Observe a new implemetation of interaction design: Already famous for their well thought out dispatch system that allows Wholefoods to get 100 customers through the registers in about 5 Minutes, they automated (improved?) the process. The store got rid of the dispatcher person in favor of a computerized service. Customers line up in up to 8 colorcoded ailes. A monitor overhead displays corresponding color bars that sequentially display as well as „call out“ the next available cash register. The system senses faster then a person could when a register has become available again.



Apparently the usefulness of the system is up for debate. The next day the dispatcher guy was back to work in „tandem“ with the system. In my personal opinion the system is clear enough, speeds up the waiting in line and relieves a person from a tedious dispatch job.