I've been playing with Nero lately. Never mind for what. And I wonder, do the Nero people actually use their own software?

If you are making a DVD menu and using frames as the button, the user interface to do this is terrible.

It's better than before when the frame that was shown in no way corresponded to the actual frame that would be used for the button.

But there is a slider that makes adjustments that are far too big, and the arrow buttons can bump you a frame ahead at a time. But no play/pause buttons. Just those two options: way too big and way too small.

So to get to the correct frame that might just be a couple of seconds into the program, takes about 2 minutes. Grand scheme, not a lot of time. For a user interface, this is an eternity.

Is there a blog that Nero maintains for suggestions? Not that I can find. So I gripe on my own blog, read by a couple of friends and probably no one else.

Oh well.

So I bought a new toy, an iPod. I got the 30 MB video one, and it's very cool.

Only thing, the screen scratches incredibly easily. With all the knowledge of polymers that presumably is out there, why use a plastic that scratches so easily. Maybe there's a good reason for doing what they do, I really can't fathom it.

The thing is, I bought an accessory, the audio video kit. Instead of cloning of the controls on the iPod itself, they have a slightly different configuration for the remote.

And the menu button doesn't work. There is a menu button. I just doesn't do anything. The instructions say that it's for future products. Future products!

Why have a menu button on the remote that doesn't do what the menu button on the iPod itself does? Weird.

Surely the idea of making a product that works nicely has occured to the smart people at Apple. You would think.

Maybe there are remote codes that can be programed in my fancy Phillips universal remote that can overcome this bizarre shortcoming.