Digital Battlefield

It's too bad other companies did not have the foresight and unique position of Apple to make their online music stores truly succeed. I say this not because I don't like iTunes, I've said before how it is pretty much my primary source if at all possible. However, some other companies are starting to do some good things and it is just a nearly insurmountable obstacle for them to overcome, which I think limits some progress that we should be seeing.

Okay - that was a long run-on way of getting to my real point. Amazon continues to improve and add to their excellent MP3 download service - yet I still basically forget about them entirely unless something pokes me to remind me. This is especially weird given that for almost all of my other online shopping, I prefer to use them first.

I received an email pointing out that Amazon has weekly album deals that are really good. We're talking $5 or $7 full album, non-DRM downloads of some really good artists. I assumed these would be pop radio schlock, but they actually have a good assortment of some good music.

Then, on top of that, I find out that Amazon has weekly free songs, just like iTunes, except again they are DRM-free of course. These songs change weekly (and possibly daily, some that I saw yesterday are no longer featured). Here is a link where you can find some, or signup for their weekly newsletter if you're like me and need a poke to look outside the iTunes garden and see the other music all around.

iTunes is still the simplest path around for me, without question. Nobody else can yet pull off having a single app where I can search their store, manage my music, and drop it on my device all in a well-designed interface. Amazon's downloader does a decent job, but I still consider it somewhat of a hack. However, low-priced DRM-free music is a good way to at least get me looking at them.

Adding on quick - here's another link to 30 free hip-hop/R&B songs courtesy of AllHipHop.com. A bit of a pain, you have to get your iTunes code via email - but some pretty good songs.

UI Consistency

Ryan had a post about "Inconsistent Time Sliders", specifically with regards to Apple software products. I had enough thoughts on it that it eventually just turned into a post of its own.

First, I think that Ryan notices UI components more than is healthy for the average human being.

This is actually a good thing though, and it usually Apple is the company who takes care of this. Is diversifying their product line taking its toll? Are they losing attention to small details such as this? Not sure.

I really don't think there needs to be more than perhaps 2 types of sliders. Shouldn't we be able to figure out pretty quickly if circles, triangles, or squares are the best marker? In reality, how does pushing a triangle or square down a round tube make sense? Stick with the round markers.

Given that we know the marker, I think the only thing that might change is dependent on whether transparency is allowed or not -- Ryan mentions this as well.

In general, these are the type of thing that get overlooked, and in the grand scheme of things
won't really hurt a product. Conversely though, paying some attention to these details can lead to a highly coherent and strongly-branded product (that which Apple has done the best at in recent years). Also, as Ryan mentions, usability can be greatly increased even with new products if a consistent UI is presented.

It takes a strong attention to detail, and some time commitment from a company to address these issues. However, overall it is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase marketability and sales of product.

In my opinion, the cover flow (and perhaps the new DVD player) slider is the best. I like a very unobtrusive slider that only shows when I need it, with the rounded slider. Buttons can be reduced to three, the play/pause, and a previous and next. Anything else is auxiliary and be hidden behind a click or menu, or perhaps available in a separate interface.

Ringtones

The introduction by Apple of ringtones to its arsenal has prompted some discussion, and made me actually think a bit about something I generally just find to be a nuisance.

The general consensus when the iPhone first came out was that the lack of custom ringtones was something Apple needed to remedy. This has been a staple of all of the other phones and providers for some time now. They did just that with their most recent announcement. However, I think many were expecting more/different since it was Apple doing it.

First, some things that I think they did right. Being able to pick which 30 seconds of the song to use is good. This is something I would have always considered a must, but it isn't available directly from any of the cell providers. Next, they don't force you to just buy an overpriced ringtone (anywhere from $2 to $5 from what I can tell most places); they allow you to make them from your own music that you already own. Yes, I know there is a catch, we'll get there in a minute. Finally, it can all be done from the safe haven of iTunes. Pick the song, pick the musical selection, and get it loaded on the device is all possible and very simple. The last one is the type of thing I have come to expect from Apple, and may be the single largest benefit. As usual, most people miss the benefit of simplicity.

Now, the things I think were not done the way I would have hoped or expected. I need to preface this by saying I don't think any of the current providers or ringtone offerings have done anything positive; they have been nothing short of horrendous. Overpriced, a pain in the ass to get or use, lack of choice, and a general annoyance is how I would summarize all previous offerings. I can't understand personally why people pay anything for a ringtone, let alone more than I am willing or need to pay to purchase a full song from the iTunes store.

Although the 99 cent price sounds about right, you can't actually purchase any ringtone for that amount. You have to already have bought the song or buy it at that time, which means there is an additional 99 cents to include. Thus, the minimum for a ringtone is actually $2. However, you do also get a full copy of the song for listening as well.
Not all songs are available for making ringtones though, even if you have purchased them from the store. This one seems confusing. You would think if you bought it from Apple, they would let you pay them another $1 to make it a ringtone no matter what.

Now, these few downsides seem to be far overwhelmed by the positives. However, I wondered immediately why Apple would put restrictions such as these on the songs. It doesn't fit with some of their past policies and my expectations of them. Coupled with the recent news that found many of these issues could be easily circumvented in iTunes 7.4 (although they have since been "patched") it made me start to wonder if Apple had nothing to do with these. Were they in fact mandated by some other entity?

I did a (very) little research on this, and came up with some additional conclusions and thoughts. Since this post is fairly long though, I'm going to make like Back to the Future 2 and leave you with this...


SEE THE EXCITING(POSSIBLY) CONCLUSION IN TOMORROW'S POST: "Idiocies of Licensing"

Software and the idiots who use it

I needed something to get me fired up (many of you will find that hard to believe). This will definitely do it.

As many know, Apple released a version of their Safari web browser for Windows yesterday at their WWDC developer conference. An unexpected move for many, including myself, and one that spawned a good amount of discussion and pondering.

Don't confuse pondering with pandering though, which is what many in the tech community love to do so much. The bits had barely hit the web before people were trashing the release. I'll admit, I tried it immediately, and was less than impressed with the usability and visual aspects of this particular build. Guess what? It's beta. Should this be a surprise? So, rather than bitch continuously, I simply closed it and will wait for a later version to do additional evaluation. After all, Apple actually still uses beta to mean pre-release, not perpetual unwillingness to claim completion like other companies.

The worst of these were some of the security exploits supposedly found, as covered by Slashdot. The first of these idiots is the guy who supposedly had found a bug in Apple's Airport, only to be smacked down later. He claims he found a bunch of holes, but he will not be disclosing them to Apple. Fantastic, great plan. Run around, spouting off about how great you are and poking holes in software, rather than attempting to improve something. Specifically, a beta, which is released entirely to attempt to find issues and get them fixed before release. These people need to have their Internet pass revoked.


Personally, I want to see Safari not only succeed, but excel. Mostly, because I want some competition to push my favorite browser, Firefox, a little harder. At this point, I really don't see myself ever moving to Safari. I like some of its features, but I have nearly all of them already courtesy of extensions. Extensions are still the silver bullet of Firefox for me. Also, I find Firefox to still run very snappy, and I have his memory in check on my machine. I look forward to some friendly competition between the two to keep improving them both.

The Unholy Trinity

One of these things is not like the other...

The unholy trinity I speak of in the title is a combination I stumbled upon tonight with much glee on my part. Apple iTunes COM SDK + JavaScript + Windows Scripting Host. I know, you're probably wondering what the hell kind of medicine I am on, playing with Windows scripting. I had never touched it before tonight either. JavaScript and I have a longterm love/hate relationship as well. I love to swear at it endlessly for its annoyances and lack of ease of debugging, while hating how often it ends up getting the job done for me.

That all said, this combination has just allowed me to do some kick-ass things with iTunes. I had the SDK downloaded for some time, and I wrote some sample C++ apps when I first got it. However, after seeing the Apple JavaScript examples I decided to experiment with them a bit. I'm thoroughly impressed now, similar to Unix shell scripts (although orders of magnitude less powerful), I find that I can just get a task done very quickly, as opposed to writing a full application. Quick and dirty is the key here.

I currently have some scripts to perform some actions I had been meaning to do. Remove any dead tracks from my library, and cleanup bogus comments on some of my tracks. If anyone is interested, I can give them the scripts.

Now, for the challenge. Come up with some task/feature that you would like to do with your iTunes library that you can't quite seem to make happen with playlists. I'll see what I can do about getting it done in a script.

The Underwhelming Sound of Zune

At this point Zune has been covered nearly ad-nauseum, and it wasn't even released until today. However, like others, I have some quick thoughts of my own.

I was in Wal-Mart today, and I walked near the digital audio players (DAP for all the cool kids out there) section. I immediately saw one of the new pink iPod nanos, as well as the incredibly cool piece of design that is the new shuffle. I stood there and drooled over the new shuffle, looked over the selection as a whole and then moved on.

Only then, did I realize I had walked right past the Zune display without taking any notice whatsoever. There weren't any big signs, just some small ones that said both Microsoft and Zune. I looked at it, and realized that if it weren't made by Microsoft I never would have even given it a glance. (Somebody please post in the comments the link to the Zune-poo comparison).

Microsoft better hope that their name and the silly music sharing feature are enough. I don't see much else here to make it compete with Creative or iRiver, let alone Apple.

Apple - You Fail It

I've been sitting on this post for a while, but I needed to get something back out there after taking a little break.

I've talked before (although I can't easily seem to search for where) about how much I want a nicely integrated system update service. All applications could tie into it to update themselves. Very similar to how I think backup should work. Let the system control it all, but each application can register with it, since who better than the app to decide what to backup or update.

Ryan has also said several times how ridiculous it is that due to the lack of this, every app feels the need to bundle their own updater. Apple it turns out is no exception. When iTunes 7 rolled around, Apple created something called Apple Software Update, and included it with iTunes. I groaned, but I thought, "Hey, Apple stuff is generally simple and just works." So, I installed it.

Then, after fixing a ton of bugs in iTunes 7, they released an update. I thought, "awesome, I'll have it automatically thanks to that update package, right?" Wrong. Not even when I tried to use it to check for an updated manually. Check the screen shot. The software updater doesn't have a clue, but iTunes itself prompted me to do the update.




Yep, that was the end of Apple Software Update. Promptly uninstalled.

I hope the next operating system that convinces me it is worthy of being installed finds a way to integrate these services that I want.

Change of Perspective

Without getting too deep, I have been pondering lately how drastically one's perspective on something can change over time. I'll keep it simple with one example.

I used to love building computers. Everything about it. I kept up-to-date on all of the components that were out there, knew their specs by heart, and pretty much knew the best price on anything at any time.

Those days are long past. I no longer give a rip. I want my computer to work, I don't want to touch it, and I pretty much have one that is just "good enough." Until iTunes 7 came out that is, and suddenly I found my machine lacking.

Those who watch this blog saw me love iTunes 7, but also rant about it. However, I never even blogged about my biggest disappointment. After seeing how sweet cover flow looked, I couldn't wait to use it at home. However, I was instead greeted by this message when I enabled cover flow at home: "iTunes is unable to display artwork on this computer." Huh? Why? Talk about a worthless error message.

I immediately hypothesized that my last than fantastic Rage XL graphics card simply wasn't up to the task. A bit of searching on some forums pretty much proved me right. Thus, I was in need of a graphics card. I really didn't care though, and didn't want to spend time researching it. Once again, I really just wanted to be able to click the "good enough" graphics card button on Amazon or something. In the end, I went to eBay, narrowed the list by a few features I actually knew that I wanted, and bought one. Radeon 9250 it turns out, don't really care about the specs, they are good enough, and met the most important criteria, my price point of $30.

Now, I have cover flow goodness. Sweet. Now, lest I forget:

Hawks 24, Worthless Illini 7. Go Hawks.
I'll see all the cool folks under the lights at Kinnick next week.

Mellow

Okay, my last post may have come across harsh on iTunes 7. That is far from how I actually feel. I was impressed with this the second I saw it, and now I am thoroughly amazed. They hit nearly every feature we were hoping to get added.

1. Burn with CD-Text - Yes
2. Kick-ass view artwork display, similar to delicious library - Yes
3. Album art for all music, free - Yes
4. Backup music library to CD, full or incremental - Yes
5. Automatic ipod updating within iTunes, not a seperate app - Yes
6. Automatic iTunes updating (is this a good thing? Oh well.) - Yes

I don't like that you still can't export a playlist to M3U format, but oh well. Very cool overall Apple.

Battle Hymn

iTunes 7 came out today. It rocks hard, very cool all around, couple this with a lower priced iTV, and things are looking good on the Apple front. I don't think I need any more explanation of all of this, as the geek sites should have it more than covered. However, there is one little caveat, Apple has now phased out anything prior to 6.x buying from the music store.

This eliminates my current workaround for being locked into DRM, using iTunes 5 with Jhymn. Sucko. The only saving grace is that iTunes 6 recently had a workaround created, and iTunes 6 is still allowed to purchase songs, even if you use that account with iTunes 7. So, I do believe I will use iTunes 7 on my main machine because it rocks, and keep a virtual PC image with iTunes 6 and purchase/un-DRM over there. Cumbersome, but necessary for the time being.

Here is a quoted block from the forums over on the Jhymn site explaining this:

Ok, here are my final results of testing iTunes version. I have three machines:

1) XP with iTunes 5.0.1.4
2) XP with iTunes 6.0.5.20
3) Macbook with iTunes 7.0

When I tried to "purchase" (free song of the week) a song with iTunes 5 and an account created with itunes 5 it told me I need to upgrade. Apple must have phased out 5.0 completely with the changes made today.

I was able to download the free song using iTunes 6 no problem.

I created a new account on my macbook with iTunes 7.0. I was then able to use that account in the windows version of iTunes 6 to download the free song.

Conclusion: Thankfully, using iTunes 7.0 does not stop you from using iTunes 6 on another computer. However, I wouldn't recommend upgrading to iTunes 7 unless you know what you're doing. It may be hard to go back to iTunes 6 on the same machine once you've upgraded."

Dump #2 - Boot Camp

The whole tech world yesterday (at least the parts I care to keep track of) where talking about "boot camp". No, not some military institution, the announcement by Apple of a boot loader that permits running either Windows or the Mac OS on Apple hardware.

This floored me. I never expected to see this announcement from them. I was barely shocked at all to hear that they were switching from PowerPC to Intel, and I fully expected that some people at that point would find a way to run Windows on the thing, but I never thought Apple themselves would endorse it.

At that point the questions really started.
1. How did they do it? Did they just steal the work done by the hackers going after the $13,000 bounty? Did they make Intel give them a reference BIOS? Did they create their own BIOS internally?

At this point, I would lean toward the latter. There is no way they would go use some hackers piecemeal code, and I'm not sure they would have even ran this by Intel. Bootloaders are not really that difficult, especially if you know the hardware and specification, and Apple would definitely have guys that fit both of those criteria. I'm sure the day the developers got an x86 board on their desk (about 5 years ago depending on what you read -- different topic) they threw together a BIOS and booted XP on the thing, just to prove it could be done. I would have.

2. Why? Apple has been notorious about protecting their overall system solution by keeping their hardware and software tightly coupled and under wraps. Are they now simply wanting to be a hardware company?

I think this answer may be the trickiest and the most interesting. It is possible they simply want to pick up hardware sales from the "switcher" market. Those people who are interested in Apple, but still have reasons to continue using Windows, and don't really want to have different machines for each. It turns out I fall squarely into this market. I really want an Apple machine at home, and I think I would wear out the iLife suite I would use it so much. However, I still need Windows for some tasks at this point, and I refuse to have multiple machines. This is truly sly, because over time I'm sure I would find replacement apps on the Apple, and grow tired of rebooting, slowing fazing Windows out entirely.

This is where the discussion gets really interesting. There has been much discussion that even if Windows XP were possible on the Apple, Vista will not be. Do a google search if you want to learn why or how, I'm not up to doing the research right now. However, if that is true, there is basically planned obsolescence for the Windows solution. If they get the people right now, when Vista comes out they won't be able to transition to it on the current hardware. However, the latest shiny new OS (leopard or greater) from Apple will absolutely run on it. Thus promoting users to simply abandon Windows at that point.

Overall, I really like how polished this solution looks from Apple. It's already very nice in beta, and will just get better when it is embedded into Leopard. Simple resizing of partitions should have been in Windows from day 1, but never was natively. Everything in typical Apple style just works and looks very polished.

I did see today an announcement of someone with some virtualization software to run Windows inside Mac OS. That is the only way to make this better. Let me quick jump over to run a Windows task without rebooting. I'll be watching this to see how it pans out.

Update: Check out Thaddeus's blog for another perspective on all of this.

I Tuned In

1 Billion songs have now been downloaded from iTunes. Think about that, that is a freaking ton of music purchased in an entirely new way than in the past. No physical media accompanying the purchase, just ones and zeros. Go back 8 years ago when I first started playing with MP3's and tell me that would happen in 8 years, let alone less than 3, and I would have been amazed.

The reason I knew the contest was over, is that when I logged into the iTMS tonight, I saw the counter getting dangerously close to the 1 billion mark. I had a few songs I needed to buy, so after refreshing a bit, and trying to guess the rate at which they were being bought, I grabbed my songs. I of course bought each one individually to try and maximize my winning opportunities. I was slightly disappointed when after I thought for sure the counter would have rolled, I watched it actually back up -- thus proving what I initially knew, that the counter was mostly just for show. Anyway, I gave it my best shot. Others around me would have no doubt liked me winning those 10 iPods, as I would have given almost all of them away. The 20" iMac was mine all mine though, and I can't even imagine having the $10,000 iTunes card.

Good show Apple. Now just quit breaking hymn.

Any color you want as long as it's black

Some guy who is obsessed with three stripes or something recently wrote about the new photocasting support in iPhoto. It all sounded grand when handed down from upon high by Jobs, only to turn into an exercise in proprietary methods and mis-implementation of pseudo-standards.

There are many gripes about this around the net. Dave Winer, the credited creator of RSS, providing as usual some of the most vehement. Today I found a page with the most truly informative postings about it that I have seen yet. These guys are an order of magnitude above me in their understanding of XML and RSS. Not surprising, as they were in it from the beginning, which makes things much easier, and the fact that I just don't have time to keep up with the whole of all technologies.

I was glad to find someone on that page had created a Greasemonkey script (screenshot) that I could add to Firefox to make those photocasting pages as least usable in their current, standard-smashing form.

As usual, big company provides something bad, open source hackers find a slick way around it. Good job guys.