The Lowly Button Gets an Upgrade | Hacker News Reader

The Lowly Button Gets an Upgrade

gizmodo.com.au

33 pointsmhb17 comments

This is an interesting idea. Some problems:

1. I have a dozen sets of earphones and I don't think there are even two of them with identical cables. How would these buttons deal with different gauges of wire covered in different thicknesses of insulation? Cables too big obviously won't fit at all and cables that are too thin will slide, causing slack to be taken up by gravity until you turn your head and painfully jerk the buds out of your ears.

2. What problem is this solving again? I'm actually pretty okay with not clipping my headphone cable to my shirt. In fact, I never do. I have workout buds with an ultra-short cable that's just long enough to reach a clip-on mp3 player that goes on the neck of my shirt. I have canal-phones with their own cable management features to eliminate microphonics. I have a nice pair of woodies with a cable far too fat to fit inside any button-clamp ever made!

Allright, I admit it. I'm being obtuse. These are probably designed for Apple buds. Those things are ubiquitous so you can design specifically for their cables and still have a decent market. Their ergonomics are poor enough that they might actually benefit from being attached to your shirt too. Still, it seems rather impractical to upgrade your whole wardrobe to accommodate $5 crap-buds. At $3-4 a button, even just upgrading the buttons (nevermind the time spent sewing!) isn't worth it. Just buy half-way decent headphones suited to your needs!

Uh ... do I have to have one of these buttons on each of my shirts?

Seems like it would be better to have the headphone attachment mechanism on the headphones, like a clip on the headphone wire, so I can clip it to my shirt. Oh wait, I already have that.

Just put the wire inside your shirt!

Blog spam.

http://www.shapeways.com/model/699026/button-2-0.html

I see comments like this a lot on HN and I find it very frustrating. The curation and coverage is not "blog spam," it's an extremely useful service. I'm fine with someone linking to gizmodo, they deserve credit for curating the information, and this article provides more context and a touch of humor. It also provides three links, two in the body and one in the footer, to go to the shapeways page.

I think people have different definitions of blog spam and it's a matter of taste. Personally I began to grind my teeth after the first cliche-ridden paragraph ("cliche-ridden" again being subjective, but the "there should be a Nobel Prize for..." format has been done enough now that it just seems lazy to me) and by the time I got to "the Button 2.0 is approximately a thousand times more useful" (emphasis mine, to highlight particularly clunky hyperbole) I was hovering over the tab with my finger over middle-click.

Here's the thing: this kind of overwritten article is so easy to put together and IMO so inferior to the clean, straight-up no-nonsense page on the Shapeways site that I don't feel "blog spam" is so inaccurate. I don't feel strongly enough to call it out as such as "benologist" did, especially as I know that to others on here (such as yourself?) it's not, but I hope this explanation helps you see it from both sides. To "benologist" this sincerely is blog spam and the fact that they linked to the cleaner article gets them an upvote from me.

I don't know why it's so hard for people to skim read. I looked at the photo, immediately got what the text was going to say and am perfectly capable of reading hyperbole without it making me grind my teeth or have any other kind of overly dramatic response.

Fair enough about the "overly dramatic response" and probably equally fair downvote(s) on my comment. From the guidelines, then:

  > Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports 
  > on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

Most definitely not blog spam. Are you serious? What led you to this conclusion?

During long days away from my desk when I use my headphones a lot I often found that they would fall out and get tangled. I started carrying safety pins with me - I would pin it on the inside of my shirt and run the headphone cable through it.

When you finish a call you take your earphones out and they slide down on the inside of your shirt. When you need the headphones again they are right there.

I place the pin far up on the inside left-hand side, as close to the top button as possible. Works just as well on the outside, I just prefer having them inside my shirt.

I know people are pointing out the existing easy solutions, but I'm really quite taken by the idea just for the 'Oh gosh, yeah! so simple' moment I had when I saw it.

If I could buy a bag of these I'd happily sew one on to all my shirts in preference to a clippy thing on the cable of which I've used several and kept none.

Although buttons do have very rounded corners.....

This one is good!

Sometimes there are articles about improvements to something that is claimed to "change the world", while it's just building an electronic gadget into something, or making something controllable with an iphone.

But this here is really a clever idea!

Clever but impractical.

I'll wait until the kickstarter video comes out showing me how hard my life is without this button.

Props for making the tiniest iPhone accessory yet!

> I'll wait until the kickstarter video comes out

Hopefully they have a working prototype and not just a rendering!

Why not just tie an overhand knot on a bight of the cord, and then slip the resulting loop over a button on any shirt you happen to be wearing?

Now this is smart!

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