Lots of announcements today from Apple. New iMacs, Video iPods, blah blah blah. It's the only thing that anybody is talking about. I'm going to tell you about something else that is cool today.

We were brainstorming sometime before the release of iTunes 5, and I came to think about sliders. They are useful but pretty hard to use. If you want to change the value of the slider continuously, you have to grab the tiny knob and drag it around. For something like a volume slider, a real world knob is much easier to operate and more precise than anything in a computer. Well, a lot of people have mice with scroll-wheels nowadays so why not use it with the slider! Just move the mouse over a slider and scroll to adjust the value. Pretty nice idea I thought and proceeded to check a few apps to see if it was already done that way by default in OS X. Nope.

When iTunes 5 came out, I unconsciously flicked my scroll-wheel over its volume slider. It moved! I felt like a young padawan using the force for the first time. It was very strange, but in a good way. I didn't think that anybody would be that detail oriented, or put another way: anal. Some programmer at Apple must have been thinking the same thing as me about around the same time because that feature sure wasn't there in iTunes 4. Creepy. I might have a twin separated at birth working at Apple...

So yeah, you can use your mouse wheel to adjust volume in iTunes 5... uhm... 6. I think it's a nice touch.

I haven't put that in into Podcast Maker yet, but I will eventually.