This is really nice! I think it has a great aesthetic and works really well. Just a couple of thoughts:
- the long press feels a little bit too long on mobile. At least I think it is? I thought nothing had happened because my thumb was covering the active state of the letter that I pressed down on. Potentially a combo of the two
- you can "cheat" by moving the board and tracking when your word disappears
There was a good video on YouTube that talked about the Walkman resurgence, and why they're so large these days. Almost all of these walkmans are using the same internal mechanism because there was only one place to source them. I don't know if that's still the case now.
Believe it or not the iPod community is alive and well! There are plenty of people buying them, replacing the battery and hard drive, performing some cosmetic mods, and daily driving them (me included)
It's popular enough that if you look on eBay, the price of an old iPod has become majorly inflated
isn't that just because it's an Apple device? I mean, there are people buying those old Macs that shipped with System 7 or 9... it's a fun hobby I guess.
But there again, fast forward to 2025, you download a 17GB OS update so it can tell you which apps you can and can't run on your computer (in a barely readable messages because transparent backgrounds are a thing now)
it has nothing to do with the brand and everything to do with the fact they are still a damn good mp3 player, especially when you swap in a brand new battery and a gigantic-capacity SD card (which also greatly reduces the weight of the device). The click wheel is still one of the most slick controls for a handheld electronic device I've ever seen. Plus there's even an open source replacement firmware for most iPods (among other mp3 players), adding plenty of neat features: https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/WhyRockbox
Also probably because the iPods are very sturdy devices, which many competitors were not; my 2nd gen iPod Nano has suffered extreme abuse yet was perfectly usable. I somewhat regret throwing it away in a recycling bin some years ago.
A good explanation for their maintained prices is the high level of support they still receive from Apple.
Apple gets excoriated here for its backward compatibility, when the company takes very good care of its devices' backward compatibility. In Fall 2025 was the first time that any iPod lost support when macOS lost its Firewire drivers. Any USB iPod still completely works with the current version of macOS.
"We never demonized Europe and our server in France moved to Switzerland, not North America. Most of our servers with OVH were in Beauharnois, Canada. Multiple of those Canadian OVH servers are now retired and the remaining 5 are going to be moved elsewhere too."
Hey, I'm actually in the process of building a desktop application that does this. Perhaps we could chat? I'm also leveraging IGDB. I have focused mainly on windows/Mac/Linux, with my main driver being steamdeck compatibility
reply