Clutter by Sprote Rsrch.
Beautiful little application that lets you have a clutter of album covers on your desktop. It has some relevance here (honestly, I’m not just posing about how cool macs are :-) – as I’m now interacting with my music in a very different way. Gone is text only, well organised listings of music, I’m now browsing through music visually, remembering CD covers and emotionally feeling like I want to listen to so and so.
Two lessons for me:
* visual recall is very powerful – far more emotive, fun, stimulating than plain ‘ol text. Obvious, I suppose, but often one I take for granted.
* The clutter approach is interesting and actually quite manageable. Partly, this is due to the excellent implentation of the application, but I initially thought dragging hundreds of little squares would be super innefficient. In fact, I subconciously moved the covers into piles and quickly could recall where certain albums were.
Maybe we try too much to order information in a structured way, and don’t give learners/users the ability to manage stuff as they wish. Indeed, clutter may be the “answer”:http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2001/121201/Neat_not_always_organized_121201.html .