Copying Apple… the Wrong Way

A long time ago I complained about widespread usage of the iTunes play/pause button combo and why I think it is a bad idea. Seems that history has the tendency to repeat itself, but this time in a slightly different form (and arguably this time for the worse).

If you have ever used an iPhone you’ll notice that there are some really cool gestures that you can do.  Amongst them is this cool little On/Off gesture. It works really well on the iPhone, the gesture is natural and very clear when you have tried it once or twice. Great.

Lately I have started to encounter this little interaction in different places that are certainly not gesture based. Prime example of this was Spotify. The latest Spotify builds allow you to sync some playlists to you hard drive giving you access to it offline (which is great). Instead of using a good old checkbox to do the trick, they have resorted to copying the iPhone’s way of of doing it, with a slider. The massive difference is though that sliding with your mouse is a lot harder to do than swiping with your finger on a screen.

The kicker however is the fact that this little slider is not even a slider, although you’ll forgive anyone for thinking it is one. It actually behaves rather differently from the iPhone slider, namely that you have to click it to change its state.

My guess is that when they developed the iPhone client of Spotify they thought that simply using the controls that are being used in on the iPhone would also work on the desktop. Well, guess again.