Year of the Occam

How to get to the simplest solution in whatever you are building

What was your first portable music player? The answer to this question will definitely age you. For me it was a personal cassette player, but not the cool one from Sony. After a brief time with clunky portable CD players, I quickly jumped onto MP3 players.

It was early days and design aesthetics did not seem so important. It was all about the features, and the one I had from iRiver was the Swiss Army knife of players. It played MP3 files, but it did so much more. It…