Jeff’s Musings

I recently purchased an Apple bluetooth keyboard and Magic Mouse for my Mac Mini (which I bought with the intention of using as a home theater media hub, but which gets almost as much use for ‘normal’ computer tasks).

When I first started test driving the Magic Mouse, I happened to be in iTunes, and happened to need to adjust the volume – which is a horizontal slider in the UI. I thought to myself, “This mouse has the ability to do scrolling in any direction – I wonder what happens if I hover over the volume control and swipe right?” Bam. Of course it worked. It’s Apple, and they think of *everything.*

I was truly impressed. And, being an engineer and naturally inquisitive, I took notice that I was impressed – particularly by such a “little thing.” I then realized that I was impressed not despite the fact that this was a little thing, but because it was a little thing. The sort of thing that other user interface and hardware designers might well have missed.

Which brings me to the moral of this story. I work in a consulting firm, and our goal is not merely to meet our customers’ expectations, but to surpass them. In short, to impress them. I think that sometimes we find this hard to do. We need to remind ourselves that sometimes it’s just the little things we do – things that others might have missed – that will make the biggest impression.

I stumbled across a very cool cloud-based music service called SoundCloud (http://www.soundcloud.com) today.  I love it for two very different reasons.  First, it’s a great (maybe even killer) application of cloud computing technology, taking advantage of the Great Server Farm In the Sky to solve a real problem.  Second, I love the solution itself.

See, technology is my day job.  When I’m not working (or walking the dog, or schlepping kids around town), I usually have some sort of musical instrument in my hands. or in front of me. Guitar, mandolin, bass, keyboards, drums and trumpet, for now.  Hope to add to the collection soon – I think I need a bouzouki.  Or maybe a dobro.  But I digress…

When I have a block of free time and a little peace and quite in the house, I like to break out my recording gear and see what I can throw together.  And, occasionally, share it with a few friends to see what they think.  Or even send a track to a friend who’s a real drummer to lay down a drum track for me to mix in later.

In the past, sharing music online has been inconvenient at best.  Oh, there are music sharing sites like SoundClick, or social sites like MySpace that cater to musicians.  But they all have some pretty serious limitations (like having to actually log into their service to find and listen to tracks).

SoundCloud is different.  It’s a seriously open, cloud-based music storage and publishing service.  I just signed up an hour ago, and within minutes I was uploading my first track.  (I love, by the way, that you specify the file to upload first, and it automatically starts uploading while you fill in the track info form.)

But the really cool part is the openness of the service.  There’s no need for anyone to go to their site to hear my music.  I can email it to them, or drop a widget into Facebook or a blog entry (as I’ve done here), and voila.  Music.  Where I want it.  No strings attached.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a recording project to dive into…