I've been waiting for Apple to add more good content to the iTunes Plus store. As far as I can tell, they haven't. Instead' they've been screwing people over by bricking their iPhones, locking their iPods down, and just generally being monopolistic assholes. Maybe it is a good thing they're not big like Microsoft. They could actually be worse.

Anyway, after all that waiting with nothing to show for it, Amazon finally saved the day. They opened Amazon MP3. It is awesome. All DRM-free music encoded at 256kbps VBR. It just sounds really good, costs less than the exact same content over on Apple's store, and integrates into iTunes and Windows Media Player easily.

I wish Amazon a lot of success and hope they land more deals with more labels. It is about time somebody came along and gave Apple some real competition. They've been kind of stagnating and marinating in their own success a little too long.

A new version of iTunes (7.4.2) is available. Would you like to download it now? No.

iTunes 7.4.2 addresses an issue with creating ringtones using iTunes Plus song purchases and includes bug fixes to improve stability and performance.

Dear Apple,

Stop it. You're really starting to get on my nerves. For a company that has Eric Schmidt on their board, you sure seem to be doing a lot of evil lately. I'm really starting to question doing business with you based on some of your tactics and community responses lately. In short, you're being a jerk.

A while back, you put the Apple TV on the market. Shortly after you did so, the community began to hack it and found all sorts of clever ways to make it better. There were ways to increase storage, add RSS support, and much more. When questioned about the hacking, you said it's your box, do with it what you please. To date, I'm not aware of you slapping people down for enhancing the product. Instead, you seem to be busy focussing on the iPhone.

Next came the iPhone and ringtones. In order to support the new iPods and the new ringtones for the iPhone, you released iTunes version 7.4 on September 6^th. I don't have an iPod Touch, iPod Classic, or an iPhone, but I was cool with this. One update that added features that didn't cater to me was acceptable.

Shortly after you launched iTunes 7.4 with ringtones, the community found a way to circumvent the requirement to pay 99¢ in order to convert music they already owned into a ringtone for their phone. In order to counter this workaround, you released iTunes 7.4.1 on September 7^th. This is one day after having just launched iTunes 7.4. In other words, you pushed another update out that had absolutely no relevance to me since I do not own an iPhone. Kind of annoying.

Today, I got a notification that iTunes 7.4.2 was available. While I don't know for sure what the update does at this point, the description implies that it is related to ringtones. That would make three iTunes updates within 11 days that have no relevance to me. Despite this, I'm still prompted to update my iTunes. Please note that I'm not even complaining about the 99¢ charge for making ringtones. While I find that to be totally absurd as well, it is less important to me at this point.

Please, stop this madness. If you really want to keep playing Whack-A-Mole with your valued customers, find a way to stop hitting me in the process. iTunes has become a monolithic program. Not only does it do syncing with iPods, it also manages Apple TV and iPhone. Maybe it is time to make iTunes more modular and only update modules as appropriate?

And while I'm here, let me just say that I find your continual iPod/iTunes changes to lockout third parties rather disheartening. While I understand your desire to control your user base and get them to use your products from end to end, I also wish you'd consider being less restrictive and try to accomplish this through quality, not force.. Stop changing DAAP/ROAP in iTunes to prevent third party streaming. Stop adding database checksums to the iPod to prevent software other than iTunes from managing them. Basically, just quit putting artificial roadblocks in place that the community will eventually break through anyway. You're just making yourself look bad and irritating part of your user base.

For a company that seems to value being able to use and interact with open source projects such as BSD, gcc, Postfix, and Apache, you seem to be going really far out of your way to screw over people who want just as much interoperability with you as you want with them. Stop it. You may end up convincing me to take my money elsewhere otherwise.

A few good Parallels commercials. Too bad for them, as I've been using VMware Fusion lately. I think it is better. I also think these may be better than the original Apple ones that they're "parodies" of.

( Four YouTube embeds... )

(Originally seen here.)

On May 30, 2007, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sat down with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher for Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital (D5). During the interview, they discussed many things including the history of Apple, Microsoft, Jobs and Gates working together, and the future of computing.

At one point, the topic of thin clients and applications moving to the Internet came up. Both Steve and Bill seemed to agree that while AJAX and Web 2.0 are great advances for moving applications into the cloud, the process is still very slow and there is still need for specialized clients to enhance user experience. For example, iTunes wouldn't work if it was a pure AJAX application. The power and great user experience comes from the thick client, not from the HTTP back end that the iTunes Music Store works through.

From the D5 transcript:
Steve: I’ll give you a concrete example. I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they’d done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, since we’re pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It’s way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they’d put on phones before.

And, you know, that client is the result of a lot of technology on the client, that client application. So when we show it to them, they’re just blown away by how good it is. And you can’t do that stuff in a browser.

So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get a persistent state of things when you’re disconnected from a browser, how do you actually run apps locally using, you know, apps written in those technologies so they can be pretty transparent, whether you’re connected or not.

But it’s happening fairly slowly and there’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment. At the same time, the hardware is progressing to where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower cost devices, on lower and lower power devices. And so there’s some pretty cool things you can do with clients.

Fast forward to today, where Steve Jobs announced at Apple's 2007 World Wide Developers Conference keynote that developers can create applications for the iPhone using the built-in Safari browser and Web 2.0 and AJAX technologies.

From MacWorld:
“We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it, and yet keep the iPhone reliable and secure. and we’ve come up with a very sweet solution,” said Jobs.

This capability is being exposed through the full version of Safari that will run on the iPhone, said Jobs, using “Web 2.0”-style technologies like AJAX that will enable developers to create content that “looks and behaves exactly like apps,” integrated with the iPhone and iPhone services.

“They can make a call, they can send an e-mail, they can look up a location on Google Maps,” Jobs added for emphasis. What’s more, distribution is simple because developers can put them up on their own servers, update the code themselves, and incorporate the built-in security that Web 2.0 applications provide.

I'm confused.

Just two weeks before you tell everyone that AJAX is the best way for them to make iPhone applications, you sit down in a public forum and tell us that AJAX just isn't there yet and rich clients are still necessary for a great user experience.

Come on, Apple. I thought you were all about the great user experience. This is just ridiculous. Making full applications in CSS and JavaScript for phones? How do established Mac software developers reasonably port their existing applications to the iPhone platform while retaining their popular and well known user interface and workflows? How do I get my awesome OmniFocus experience on my phone without being tethered to the Internet or the limitations of web applications? Where are you expecting us to store data? What about when the user is on a plane or has no signal? Do we have to use something like Google Gears?

I'd much rather see you provide an SDK and act as an application gatekeeper to ensure good user experience rather than this. This is just insane. I hope you somehow make this all seem a lot better in the coming days.

This just all seems so contradictory.

I had no idea you could do this!

You can drag objects from Finder into the Finder toolbar. For instance, I could put Parallels, Word, Entourage, and a Terminal session in my Finder toolbar so every Finder window would allow me to easily start and use them.

I'm not sure I'd ever want to do this since I use Quicksilver and can't really even tolerate the Dock, but it is still cool.

Last night, I was putting DVDs into the DVD-ROM on my PowerMac G5, running a certain program against the DVDs, and then ejecting them. While doing this, I noticed that the Eject key on my keyboard wasn't working very well. I found that I had to press down really hard on the key to make it work. I figured there was something in the keyboard or something, due to the open design of the Apple keyboard and tried to clean it. It was no help.

This morning, I woke up to this in the Apple section of my RSS reader:
Mac OS X 10.4.9: Media Eject key delay
(Yes, I subscribe to a feed of new KB articles.)

It turns out that Apple changed the way that the Eject key works in 10.4.9. You have to hold it down longer for the media to eject to prevent accidental ejection. When I was pressing down harder on the key, I was pressing longer too.

First off, way to change functionality 9 patch levels in, guys. How many years has that key been working the same, and you go and change it over night? Second, I've never accidentally ejected media on either my desktop or my laptop. Is Steve having a problem with this as he gets older or something? Seriously. This from the people who used to be all about user experience and interfaces.

Okay, so Nick posted a bunch of screenshots from the latest OS X Leopard build over at Thinksecret. While I usually put little faith in these rumor sites (and Nick, as he was slightly insane last I talked to him), these are looking pretty awesome.

Pictures.

Of notable mention in these screenshots, you can see that:

• There is a new screensaver
• You can finally specify file shares on File sharing
• They merged Bluetooth file management into the Sharing prefpane
• There is some kind of screen sharing and remote machine management
• They've started to integrate Photo Booth effects into other stuff like Address Book
• Disk Utility supports iSCSI targets!!
• Global spell checking has a new grammar checker

A lot of these are small things and some of them have already been known to be coming if you've been watching WWDC sessions. However, it all looks pretty cool.

Over the last few hours, I've been becoming more familiar with VoiceOver, the speech output features in Mac OS X Tiger. Back before Tiger was released, I was in the beta program for VoiceOver, where they provided a beta version for use within Panther. At the time, it was okay, but somewhat complicated to use. Sadly, even after ?Tiger is out and very mature, VoiceOver is still tricky to use and many applications don' twork with it.

Earlier I was trying to use iTunes to listen to some music, and I was greeted with VoiceOver being totally unable to recognize or navigate anything within iTunes. I was left without any music, as the VoiceOver cursor failed to iterate through the elements in the iTunes application window. How sad that one of Apple's best programs is so unusable to an audience that requires accessability.

Later, I tried to check in with work by opening Entourage and checking my mail. Again, I was surprised to find that VoiceOver failed to work with the interface. I ended up having to use Safari and Outlook Web Access in order to read my mail. My theory is that both iTunes and Entourage are Carbon applications, thus their lack of magical VoiceOver support provided by Cocoa. Still, pretty weak.

Finally, I was saddened to find that Adium also didn't work properly with VoiceOver. While some of the GUI elements were iteratable, they were nonsensical and useless. I ended up having to use iChat, which is somewhat usable but also very awkward to use.

I would hope that Apple isworking to make VoiceOver better in Leopard, as well as making more of their applicationsworkwithit. Until then, I will continue to rely on the very great zooming features in OS X,and also wait for my vision to return to normal.


Also, it is worth noting that I wrote this entire entry in XJournal, a program that works beautifully with VoiceOver. No vision necessary.

One of my least favorite features of Mac OS X is the Dock. Yes, the Dock. I don't use it. I don't want it. It just gets in the way. When I launch applications, I use Quicksilver. When I want to open documents, I use Quicksilver or the Finder. When I want to switch to a different application, I use Cmd-Tab. The Dock serves no purpose for me and just takes up screen real estate.

I used to have the Dock on the left side of the screen and set to auto-hide. That way, I wouldn't ever haev to see it. Unfortunately, the Dock would still pop up and get in my way when I was working near to the left edge of the screen. Even at the smallest size, it would get in the way and cover up what I was trying to work on. Normally, it would be a Terminal window. Finally, those days are over.

g4:~ smkelly$ defaults write com.apple.dock orientation top

Using the magical command above and Dock auto-hiding, the Dock now lives up inside the Apple menu bar at the top of the screen. If I want to see the Dock, I literally have to work at making it show up. There is about a one pixel wide line that I have to rest the mouse pointer on in order to make the Dock show up now. That, or I use Cmd-Option-D to toggle the auto-hide feature.

Finally, peace on my desktop. And as you may have guessed, you can also set orientation to bottom, left, and right.

So Apple came out with their Core 2 Duo-based MacBook Pros today. Sadly, my workplace has a 4 year replacement cycle on personal computers and laptops. I got my PowerBook last year. That means I won't be seeing any Intel-based Mac goodness on my desk any time soon. Meanwhile, other people around the office are getting Intel-based Macs. The funny thing is, I actually sort of need one so I can run XP in Parallels so I can run some Windows-only software, such as VMware Infrastructure client.

Is there anybody willing to make a highly targeted donation for around $2,748 to the university I work for? All you have to do is specify that the donation is to be used to buy me a 17" MacBook Pro.

You know you want to.

The other day, I got a new cellphone. My ancient Motorola T720 has been replaced with a much newer and cooler Motorola E815. Among the new features I gained was a megapixel camera, a Transflash/microSD slot, and of course bluetooth.

So far, I've gotten most of it to work with Mac OS X 10.4. I've got iSync working, and I've got OBEX going as well. I've transferred sound, video, and pictures from and to the phone. I've sync'd my address book with the phone. These work great. Sadly, there is one feature of Address Book that I can't get working.

In Address Book, you're supposed to be able to pair your phone and then right-click on phone numbers. This brings up a context menu that includes SMS Message and Dial With Cell Phone. Sadly, my phone refuses to work with Address Book. Whenever I click the pair button, it asks for a Passkey. This, despite already having paired it in System Preferences. No matter what I put in, it doesn't work and those two menu items remain grayed out.

Oddly, despite Address Book not working, there is payware for OS X that is able to interface with my phone and get call logs, SMS logs, and supports both incoming andoutgoing calls and SMS. I wish Apple would fix this, or somebody would tell me how to fix it. I want to be able to use my phone from Quicksilver. That'd be pretty sweet.

All that said, phones sure got cooler in the few years since I got my last one. I'm just happy I'm not another RAZR toting zombie like the majority of the Moto customers.