Apple has helped usher in a feelgood wave of minimalism. The iPod Shuffle has one sliding, three-position switch (which is hard to use), one big button for the most important feature of the device—play. The four small buttons are for controlling volume (up and down) and track skip (forward and back).

OK.

Let’s play with the concept of minimalism.

I’ve recently spent some time lusting after PDAs. I wanted Bluetooth, first and foremost. However, that’s just play-factor; really, I want something that does two things:

1. Beeps at me, and
2. Syncs with my Mac.

That is all I want. Everything else is superfluous in a PDA. So, if that is all I want, I don’t need an interface on my device. It can be, in essence, a battery, some flash, and a small speaker.

Now, to be honest, that’s a bit bare. It does seem like a PDA should allow me to enter new appointments while I’m wandering around away from my Mac. However, I don’t want to care for another mini-computer—how simple can I make the interface?

I think you can build it into an iPod Shuffle.

First, I need a way to enter information. However, I don’t want lots of buttons and useless interface elements. So, I’ll take a small microphone. If I’m going to enter information by way of voice, though, I need to be able to hear what I’ve entered. Therefore, I need a small speaker.

(I’m not much with graphics manipulation; cut me some slack here.)

Now, operation. My iPod Shuffle PDA beeps at me. I slide the two position slider into PDA mode, and can now press Play to listen to the event that just fired. If I have headphones on, it plays through the headphones. Otherwise, it plays quietly through the speaker; I just hold the device up to my ear to listen.

Now, there’s two questions:

1. How do you enter new events?
2. How can I listen to events typed into the Mac?

Entering new events is easy; slip into PDA mode (slider), and hold Play (or something) to indicate you want to enter an event. I can imagine this going one of two ways: either you simply speak the event, and it gets recorded, or you speak the date, and then the event, and simple voice recognition is performed when you sync with the PC.

That is, if the first thing you speak is the date, then the corpus of words that must be recognized on the PC is very small. Therefore, you don’t need to “train” your PC on your voice. It should be able to handle “April Seventeenth, six PM” without training.

When I sync, the audio file is brought over, and attached to the correct date in iCal. I can listen to it if I want on the Mac, and possibly transcribe it. However, I’m not too fussed about this; as long as it gets the date, I can deal with the message myself.

Transferring events typed into iCal to the PDA is a piece of cake, fortunately. The Mac can easily render text into speech. Open up your Terminal, for example, and type:

Last login: Sat Apr  9 09:42:40 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Lyra:~ mcj4$ say Hi there, everyone!

The ‘say’ command will speak things for you (there you go, Dad, now you know). The Apple can easily render entries in iCal into the spoken word, and sync those to the iPod Shuffle PDA. So, when my ‘Comped book meeting’ alert fires fifteen minutes before my meeting, it beeps at me (perhaps re-beeping every 5 minutes until I acknowledge it), and when I listen, Victoria kindly has her say—speaking whatever I typed into iCal.

Playing back the recordings is easy, because we already have MP3 playback hardware. Now, all we need to do is fit a small speaker and microphone. And, really, you could do away with the speaker, and simply require that we use our headphones to listen to the sound. Now, all the shuffle really needs is a microphone.

What else is the win? Look at this PDA:

That’s the BraileNote PK. I don’t know how much it costs, but it cannot be cheap. Why? Because I don’t know of any cheap assistive devices for the blind. That, and that thing just looks expensive.

However, an iPod Shuffle PDA would be cheap, and is perfect for a blind user, as it has a minimum of interface elements, and lets them record events (while roaming) using their voice, and already have support technology on the computer. OS X 10.4 also has some excellent technologies for the blind built-in, which I think is a good step for Apple to take.

There you go. Steve, drop me a note if you like it. My first name at last name dot com will reach me. I’ll be done with my degree in a few months, and would love to see this come to be.