Slightly Disappointed
Wednesday, July 02, 2008 - 08:13 AM
Well, I finally got my new (refurbished) iPod Classic. Yeah! My old one (a 2nd generation iPod Mini) was on its last legs. Don’t get me wrong, the Mini was a hell of a device. If it hadn’t been dropped countless times, and hadn’t had beer spilled on it (and subsequently taken apart to clean), it would probably still be in great working condition. But, it was time to replace it. (I have ordered a new battery, click wheel, and compact flash card (to replace the HD) to try to rebuild it. I might even give it a custom paint job.)
One thing I’ve really been looking forward to (for a long time) is having gapless playback. The Mini was introduced before iPods featured gapless playback. Since I listen to a lot (you have no idea) of live music, not having it has been a major annoyance. I do have some concerts as single, large chapterized AAC files, but that has its drawbacks. Now, it’s not a problem. (I may have to go back to those shows that I’ve “joined” to a single track and reconvert them from their original .flac or .shn into regular AAC or AppleLossless.)
Oh, also there was the issue of deciding which portion of my huge library to load onto the rather smallish 8GB iPod. That’s no longer an issue.
So, why am I disappointed? Well, I have an older iMac that only has FireWire and USB 1.1 ports on it (no USB 2.0). It turns out Apple dropped FireWire connectivity on the iPod a couple generations ago. D’oh! Do you have any idea how long it takes to sync a huge library over USB 1.1? You really don’t want to know. I started syncing sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 PM last night and just let it run. When I got up around 3:30 this morning (for the, ahem, usual nighttime business) I checked on it. It was only up to the L’s (Led Zeppelin) - about 15.9 GB had been transferred. Ouch.
I decided to shut things down and give it a rest. I guess I’ll just have to connect it each night and let it run for a few hours until the whole thing is synced! (Future syncs shouldn’t be too bad, once I get the initial library over.)
Finally Fixed the RSS Feed
Thursday, June 19, 2008 - 09:34 AM
For those of you subscribed via the RSS feed, you’ll be happy to note (as I’m sure you might have already noticed) that I’ve fixed the formatting issue.
This has been bugging me for some time, particularly because the ATOM feed has always been fine. Since I’m not much of a coder, I really didn’t know how to tinker with the site templates to fix it. Well, today I went to the ExpressionEngine community forums expecting to post a dumb question and being ignored (or worse) for being a “newb”. Instead, I found a post from someone with the exact problem and a fix already suggested for the issue. (Although, it did take almost a month for someone to answer the original post.)
Now, if only I could figure out how to get Windows Live Writer to automatically use “smart quotes” so I don’t have to go into the HTML each and every time to fix them. This is particularly annoying on the longer posts, since Live Writer doesn’t have a search and replace feature.
Public Transit on Google Maps
Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - 11:34 AM
I don’t know when they started doing this, but I just noticed it today: Google Maps now includes an option to get directions for taking public transit. It even shows alternate routes that you can take. This is awesome. I hate trying to find public transportation information from CTA/RTA/Metra.
I don’t know what other cities this has been rolled out in, but it’ll definitely make getting around Chicago easier!
Stupid iPhone Complaints
Tuesday, June 10, 2008 - 09:03 AM
So, not everyone is as excited about the new iPhone as some of us. It’s to be expected - it’s Apple, and some people are going to complain no matter what. Cnet’s Crave has a list of features that they think should be in the new iPhone. Some of them are pretty dubious. Let’s look at these requests, shall we?
- MMS (Multimedia Messaging) - Is this really necessary? Are twelve year olds the target audience for the iPhone? The answer to both is, “No”. Why do you want/need MMS when you have the best email client on any phone? MMS is completely pointless. Email is for grown ups. Text messages are for children.
- Copy and Paste - This I sort of agree with. But, I don’t see how Apple can implement it with the current interface. Maybe Apple’s engineers don’t either. Who knows? But given all of the things you can do without it, I don’t think it’s really that big of a deal. I’m also fairly certain that it will come eventually.
- Video recording - Quote from the article: “Yes the quality wouldn’t be that great, but it should be an option anyway.” You really don’t understand Apple, do you? Apple is about quality. They are not about to put a feature that sucks on the iPhone. Have you ever seen any phone with decent video quality? Why would Apple put in a feature that they know is going to suck? If you want video, go buy a camcorder.
- Voice command - Again, this goes back to a matter of quality. I’ve never used the voice command feature on any phone that worked well. Voice command on phones, as it is now, is a poor feature. Could Apple do it better? Probably. But the technology isn’t really there yet to make it a killer, “must have” feature. Apple isn’t going to include a feature that is going to be sub-standard. Voice command is sub-standard.
- Bluetooth flexibility - This is the one point that I agree with 100%. I don’t know why they haven’t done this yet. Given that OSX is the only operating system that allows you to flawlessly integrate Bluetooth phones for syncing and file transfer*, you would think that they would do it with their own damn phone. On top of that, being able to stream music via Bluetooth, as the author states, would be a great feature. (I don’t really see the need to use it as a modem via Bluetooth, as you’ve got web browsing and email on the phone itself. But, I’ll concede that some people may find this useful.)
People are going to cry that the iPhone doesn’t have this feature or that. Most of the time it’s just BS. Yes, Copy/Paste would be great, and Bluetooth connectivity would be awesome. But the iPhone kills the need for MMS. Video recording and voice command are non-features to begin with. I think Apple knows what they are doing with the iPhone.
* Have you ever tried to set up a Bluetooth phone in Windows for these things? I have, and I’ve never gotten it to actually work! Every time I’ve tried, either Windows refuses to connect to the phone, or it connects, and everything looks like it should work, but none of the features actually work. It’s horrid. It takes about 30 seconds to connect to a Bluetooth phone on a Mac.
WWDC News
Tuesday, June 10, 2008 - 07:54 AM
Okay, so I’ve got nothing to report that you haven’t already read elsewhere, or didn’t already know before the keynote for that matter.
- New iPhone with 3G and GPS? Check.
- Great new iPhone apps? Check.
- Subsidized iPhone pricing? Check.
- MobileMe replacing .Mac? Check.
- Snow Leopard announced? Check.
I do have a couple of things to say, however. First off, my purchase of an iPhone is inevitable now. All of the new features combined with MobileMe make it pretty much a no-brainer now. And even though there were no real surprises with anything announced yesterday, Apple (and Steve) still managed to make everyone say “Wow!” Think about that. Everyone already knew everything that was announced, but they still managed to exceed our expectations. We knew what was coming, yet it still was beyond what we had hoped for. That’s pretty impressive.
On MobileMe. One thing that I think kind of flew under the radar was just how impressive the web app portion of MobileMe is. Put MobileMe next to Gmail or Yahoo! Mail and they look silly and amateurish in comparison. MobileMe is a web app that feels like an application. Gmail (all of the Google Apps, really) and Yahoo! Mail are web pages that have application-like functionality. They feel like web pages. They act like web pages. MobileMe acts like an application. Not only that, it acts like an Apple application.
People thought the iPod was going to have a “halo effect” of bringing Windows users to the Mac. And that was just an MP3 player. This will blow Windows users away. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like for an iPhone owning Windows user, one who has never used a Mac, using their MobileMe account. Eventually it’ll click with them: “Why can’t my entire computer-using experience be like this?” Eventually, they’ll buy a Mac.
MobileMe was the real Trojan Horse in yesterday’s announcements. The iPhone will bring them in, but MobileMe will make them stay.