I’ve had this iPod since April. (One thing this blog is good for is that I can use it to check on the petty details of my life.) All this time I’ve had it in an incase leather case, which puts a rubber membrane on top of the scroll wheel. That membrane kind of slows down the scrolling, so I usually use the new “Search” function because scrolling through however many hundreds of artists or thousands of albums to find the one that’s been running through my head all night is too damn slow. But today I took it out of the case for some reason, and something amazing happened. I was scrolling though the list of artists, and suddenly I got a gigantic “A” in the middle of the screen, and each tick of the scroll wheel moved one letter instead of just one album. Once I got to the first letter of the artist I wanted (Captain Tractor, btw), I paused and it went back to slow scrolling through the individual items. This is very cool – it really speeds up scrolling to where I want. Once again, Apple pleasantly surrprises me with user interface delight.
Now if only they’d make it so that going fast goes to scrolling through the first letters, then one quick pause and you’re in quick scrolling through second letters, and such.