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  • I loved the custom engravings. I still have two red iPod shuffles with "STEAL THIS" engraved on them, one I occasionally use, one unopened it its box.

    Ironically, the reason I have two is because I accidentally ordered two, didn't realize until I received them…and they were non-returnable because of the engravings.

    I figured I'd just give one away as a gift, but this was right around the time everyone started getting smartphones so the opportunity to do so never presented itself.

    by jasomill
  • We all want to be able to afford to do what Apple did back in 2019. Have a full developers salary dedicated to adding sparkle. I wonder in todays day and age how do you add that level of personalization and differentiation?
    by hahla
  • The article mentions the 'yellow fade' or 'yellow flash' to highlight when elements change -- I miss that!
    by eclipticplane
  • > The engraving was created using imagemagick, which took the user’s text and returned an “engraved” image to be overlaid on the rear of the iPod.

    Couldn't this be handled client-side, just overlaying plain text in gray 'Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif' on top of the image? At this scale, the specific font doesn't matter.

    Although interestingly, Apple still renders the text server-side (and offers engraving only for iPads, apparently): https://www.apple.com/shop/preview/engrave/PH304LL/A?th=hell...

    by Kwpolska
  • > We obviously have much better ways of doing such things today, but in 2005, with limited browser technology, those solutions seemed a little bit magical

    Nah, this still seems like a pretty good way of doing things. Yes, we can probably run the image engraving on the client now, but to address a wide audience of older devices, we probably shouldn't change very much about this process.

    by swiftcoder
  • Since this is about old iPod technology, I thought this might be interesting here:

    I’ve been working on getting the real Apple iPod Classic 6G firmware running in QEMU. It currently emulates two clickwheel iPods, including the display ,click wheel input and music player.

    https://github.com/davidmonterocrespo24/qemu-ipod-classic

    Still a work in progress

    by dmcrespo
  • I really appreciate that someone's job (or at least part of it) was to "prototype concepts that would add some interactive sparkle to the site". Working on a larger team, we generally add this kind of interaction at the start of a project or during redesign. There are larger prototypes, of course. But very rarely is someone designated to independently go out and just find small ways of making the experience just a bit nicer for the users, and build that; and I really like that idea.
    by georgecalm
  • That’s my site. I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have about it.
    by dunstanorchard

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Apple iPod Engraver (2019) · Birbla