tangentalizingly delicious

Thursday January 8, 2009

First, a definition since perhaps I am making this up out of whole cloth. A ‘scrubber’, to me, is the part of a media player that indicates one’s location in the media. An appropriate turn of phrase may be ‘seek bar’.

Typically speaking, it is a horizontal scroll bar jobby, where the left-most position indicates 0 seconds into the loaded media and the right-most position is fully complete.

I hate these fucking things.

Or rather, I hate the limited level of control for timestop accuracy most offer. See, most of the media I consume these days is longer-form stuff. iTunes in specific was certainly developed with 3-minute media chunks in mind, and for that the scrubber works great but I mostly listen to podcasts which run 1 or 2 minutes in length. At that point, accuracy breaks down.

The iPod wheel was a tremendous interface element for this, since the degree of accuracy could be related to the speed with which one spun their finger around it, but my iPod battery died a little while ago so now I am listening mostly in iTunes. And iTunes doesn’t offer a convenient little wheel to spin, it offers a horizontal scroll bar jobby that doesn’t allow for to-the-second accuracy.

Even more frustrating to me, I spent a bit of time last week poking around at my office’s iPod Touch (as that is the logical, if currently out-of-reach-financially option, for replacement) and the scrubber on them is even worse. The smallest little finger movement jumps around in erratic and unpredictable increments of 3 to 5 minute chunks. That is no good!

I’ve also noticed it on YouTube’s scrubber, if I want to jump back to a specific point in time, no go. There is some kind of chunking going on that seems to offer only discrete stopping points along the timeline, not a high enough degree of resolution to get to a specific second in something that is a lecture-length piece of video.