iPod Tempo Patent and Software Development

Or why clicking harder doesn't make it work any better

Apple have a patent on technology which links tempo to music selection — I want the same thing for development.

When the bugs are biting I want suitable music, and when things miraculously work I want something to celebrate with — perhaps “Oh Mickey You’re So Fine!” would work quite nicely. Apart from anything else it would be audible cue to let others know whether to approach or back off.

So how would it work? One possibility would be to link iTunes to the count of the number of warning and errors when building a project, but this wold only trigger a track change when the project was actually built — there could be a long period of potential frustration before even getting to that stage. Another possibility would to do something really clever with the iSight and monitor the mood — I think monitoring eye-brow angle would be a good approach, although listening for muttered (or screamed) obscenities may work for other developers.

However, I think a potentially more accurate method is at hand. Literally. Simply add detectors into the keyboard and mouse to detect the more forceful impact of frustrated fingers, or to detect the increase in mouse grip, or to detect the forceful click of a mouse button. Watch someone who is getting frustrated by an application not working as they think it should and you have to resist pointing out that clicking harder with the mouse or hitting the keys harder isn’t going to make the application suddenly change what it is doing. With Sudden Moodswing Sensor — as I am naming this new technology — applications could take advantage of this information, and deduce that that really forceful click on the ‘OK’ button, accompanied with a severe frown, may not really mean ‘okay’ after all…