Alas, they did not.. But Shipley isn’t terribly upset about it.

As a creator, part of what I seek is recognition, immortality. I don’t work for Apple, or Google (I’ve been offered jobs & buyouts) because I want the fame myself. It’s my shot at immortality. My designs are my children. So it stinks when I feel like Steve might get the fame for my innovation. I lose my children, as it were.

But your children aren’t really yours. They have lives of their own. So when your designs do change the world, you have to accept it. You have to say, ‘Ok, this was such a good idea, other people took it and ran with it. I win.’”

Now that’s an attitude worthy of admiration.

But what I do miss, in some ways, is how I used to enjoy my music. I used to like browsing used music stores, and if I happened to stumble upon something I’d been looking for, I’d buy it, take it home, put it in the CD player, and enjoy it while admiring the cover of the album, and reading the liner notes.

When just casually wanting to put on some music, I used to open up my CD cabinet, and scan my collection until something caught my eye. If I filled my 5 disc CD player, I’d get around 5 or 6 hours of music, without any repeated songs.

On one hand, I don’t miss driving around town trying to find obscure albums, and love the fact that now I can go from thinking about how I want to hear a song to owning that song in less than 30 seconds, without ever leaving my chair.

On the other hand, I sorely miss the once-clear definition between an album and a mix tape. Listening to albums used to the norm for me, while listening to a mix tape was more of an unusual occurrence. When I thought about listening to music, I didn’t think “I want to hear this song“, I thought “I want to hear this album“. iTunes Party Shuffle completely reversed my thinking, and I guess I just sat back and let it.

And I’m a little bitter about it.

Party Shuffle is easy. It seems like a great idea to just select my top rated songs smart playlist, and shuffle away. There are problems with this, though. First, shuffle is surprisingly poor at really shuffling songs, and as a result is very good at making you sick to death of a few songs, or artists. Tragically, I had to unrate the Who because of this. As much as I love them, I need to take a long break before I can really enjoy them again.

This burn-out shuffle problem can be alieviated somewhat by creating a smart playlist with the much needed “has not been played in the last week”, I found out, but really, this shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

I really wanted to start listening to Albums again, but when browsing through a Library of 706 artists, and “1129 Albums”, it was hard to scan through my choices, as I used to with my CD collection. Maybe it’s just me, but if I don’t see the cover of Tonight’s The Night, I sometimes forget it exists and will go months without ever considering it as a listening choice.

What would be great is if iTunes would actually comphrend the fact that music is not just a library of singles, but rather a library of complete and incomplete albums, with some singles thrown in. Albums should be considered their own entity, if specified, meaning Albums could have ratings, play counts, and all the rest of the data songs have.

On that same path of thought, ratings need to be much much smarter. I want the ability to find all the albums that contain at least 4 songs I’ve rated higher than 3 stars, that I haven’t listened to in the last 2 months. I want to be able to find the songs whose ratings have increased in the last week, which would be extremely useful for figuring out what my current favorites are. Give me something I can work with, Apple. I’ve been wanting to write a better ratings plugin for a long time now, but the hurdle of figuring out how to do that is a little daunting. It’s on the list, though.

I made a small step in returning to my previous listening style last week, when I spent some time going through my library and adding “[Album]” to the “Grouping” field of all songs that were part of a full album. I then made a smart playlist showing only those songs, and also made sure that every album in that list had Album art (which is much easier than making sure my entire library, with lots of singles and incomplete albums has album art). Now, using CoverFlow, or List view, I can browse my albums with an ease I never experienced before in iTunes.

It’s a long way from ideal, but it’s a start.

The short demos Steve gave at WWDC and at MacWorld were impressive, but what really won me over was the guided tour of the phone I watched yesterday. Since when has a cell phone been really intuitive to use?

Horrible cell phone user interfaces have become so common it’s always a surprise to discover a phone that’s “not as horrible”, and downright shocking when I see one that really is easy to use. I’ve berated Motorola’s awful interfaces to Motorola employees (well, my brother), and I still marvel at some companies’ blatant disregard for anyone who actually wants to use their products. Can you honestly imagine a similar “guided tour” of Motorola’s RAZR?

“It’s thin.”

Do you think they’d point out the fact that some menu options on the home screen are in all caps, and some aren’t? Or that the font-size is too large, so that “ADDRESS BOOK” is truncated? How about the seemingly random shortening of menu options, like “SpkrPhone”, when screen space is clearly available? And that’s just aesthetics.

As I recall from a harrowing experience of trying to set up my wife’s old Motorola phone, the process of adding contacts seemed to be designed using some sort of reverse polish logic, because I had to lower my intelligence level to that of an advanced cave-man in order to successfully complete this simple task. It made me wonder if anyone actually tried using the phone before launching it out into the world? Or perhaps, did they know full well that the UI was horrible, but also knew that the general public’s expectations of cell phones were so low, that they would still wait in line for it, simply because it was thin?

Well, for once someone is changing the game. With the iPhone, Apple’s engineers appear to have actually thought about how people will use the phone, and designed their interface around that. And now other companies are going to have to follow suit.

Some companies have been better than others — Sony Ericsson, and LG, for instance — but I don’t think they’ve done it well enough and aren’t main stream enough for consumers to really take notice. Apple has, and Apple is, though.

For instance, I’ve been wishing for a way to separate my phone book into the people I call often and the people I don’t ever since I got a cell phone. I have numbers of people who I haven’t talked to in years, and although I don’t want to delete them, I also don’t want to scroll by them to get to the number I really want to call. “Favorite contacts” on the iPhone allows you to do just that. And it’s about time.

This Friday’s launch of the iPhone will usher in a new era of cell phone standards. I hope that it straightens out what type of experience phone manufacturers put into their products, and more importantly, what consumers demand of their phones. Because honestly, how many clicks should it take to add your friend to your address book? Don’t you have better ways to waste your time?