freeform goodness

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Slashdot’s CmdrTaco, upon the introduction of the iPod, October 23, 2001

Apple’s iPod platform is a monster in the portable music space. Tens of millions have been sold, and the application that interfaces with the device,iTunes, runs on tens of millions of computers.

I have a love/hate relationship with the iTunes application. I use it to manage my digital collection, which it does handily, but I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that it has limitations and inconsistencies that I bump into every day.

Continued @ moodmat.

:: Dave Walker 01:52 (EST/EDT) [+]

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In a recent podcast, a guy complained (damn non-internally-permalinkable things — fix that!) that a big problem with the iTMS is that the files are locked to a given computer and that, if that computer takes a dump, you’re screwed. He complained that Apple makes it too hard to back your songs up.

For all the complaints one might have about Apple selling DRM’ed music (and I have some myself), the idea that the songs are “too hard” to backup isn’t a valid one, IMO, since all the tools necessary to do the backups are built into the application, and they’re not hidden, either.

Really, there are only 2 steps to backing up your music —

1. Creating a smart playlist

   

2. Burning it to a disc . You probably want to make sure iTunes is set to make a data CD/DVD, rather than an audio CD.

You now have an ISO-formatted CD or DVD that you can place in a media safe, a safe-deposit box, mailed to your nephew, or whatever. None of this is hard.

:: Dave Walker 15:30 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
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Steve Jobs apparently demonstrated support for downloading podcasts and syncing them to an iPod in the next version of iTunes. I imagine they’ll use a UI similar to the current one for radio streams. Now that I actually have a commute again I listen to a couple of podcasts a week (though I still prefer music, thank you very much), so I imagine I might find it useful.

I haven’t actually seen this confirmed, but there apparently have been talks at some level between Apple and Sony towards some level of integration between iTunes and the PSP and PS3, and the iPod and the PS3. What I would love to see is support for syncing photos and video to the PSP from iTunes and iPhoto, as the current manual process is a major PITA and Sony doesn’t have any Mac syncing software anyway.

:: Dave Walker 12:22 (EST/EDT) [+]

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Lazyweb, I invoke thee.

You would think this would be a simple request, but you would be wrong. I’ve been having a devil of a time finding an OS X backup utility that meets my needs. I’m not asking for much. My requirements:

1. Allows me to do a full system backup, spanned over multiple DVD-R’s
2. Allows me to do interim incremental/differential backups, spanned if necessary
3. Does the above, predictably, reliably, and without a lot of hand-holding

Yes, I know about .Mac backup, and it fails number 3 spectacularly. Retrospect still feels like a Classic app, frankly, and it’s rather expensive. Most of the existing backup apps I’ve looked at are oriented towards duping to another mounted volume, which, though useful, is not what I need. I’m not averse to picking up a reasonably priced tape drive if I have to, but DVD-R media costs are such that I’d really like to stay with optical discs over tape if possible.

:: Dave Walker 09:16 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
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After a couple of days of use, I’m really liking NewsFire. It’s only at version 0.21, so it has a few rough edges, but it does a whole lot of the little things right.

• Excellent autodiscovery support. You can subscribe to feeds either by:

  1. Entering the feed URL directly.
  2. Entering a web page URL. It will suck down the page, find any feeds that are properly advertised in the <HEAD>, and scrape the HTML looking for feeds in pages that don’t.
  3. Telling it to look at the current displayed page in Safari, and goes through the process in 2.

• Per-feed update intervals. There are still some minor nits, but it’s smart enough to use the information provided in the feed if it’s present.

• Per-feed persistence settings. You can tell it whether or not to store old entries on a per-feed basis. In practice, this works great: I usually want weblog entries to be stored persistently, while things like weather feeds, BBC news feeds, and the like to be transient.

• Humane interface. There’s very little clutter, just a two paned window with a list of feeds on the left and a space to display feed indexes and articles on the right. You can configure it to sort feeds either by newest content or most unread articles. In perhaps the coolest touch, it visually shuffles the feeds as new items comes in, with audible feedback.

• Of course it does the basic things expected of every OS X aggregator: it uses Webkit for display, imports and exports OPML, supports all the extant RSS variants plus Atom, etc.

• At least for now, it’s free.

:: Dave Walker 15:06 (EST/EDT) [+]

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It looks like the new SubEthaEdit networking protocol is based on BEEP (spec), and apparently “Ethereal is a nice way to watch BEEP traffic.” (link). So now you know.

:: Dave Walker 23:55 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
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There’s been a new release of SubEthaEdit. I’ve barely started using it, so I’m not entirely sure of what’s changed, but one change is that they’ve introduced a new URL scheme for document sharing. If you’re running SEE 2, you can connect to my test document here, at least for a little while.

:: Dave Walker 16:57 (EST/EDT) [+]

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Gust’s HumaneText.service has been updated to rev 3 and supports Markdown natively, so my hack is no longer necessary.

:: Dave Walker 12:33 (EST/EDT) [+]

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The very first thing I ever used the Internet for was email. I was a freshman at U of M, and MESSAGE, which ran on top of MTS on one of the big IBM mainframes on campus, was very popular among the student population. It was tied to a number of other campuses via Bitnet, so I was able to send email to friends at a few other universities as well. Most of my online time was spent on MTS and on local BBSes. The BBSes around at this point in time were mostly islands to themselves. I realize that things like FIDONet were around, but the boards I haunted didn’t use them. One BBS I used was hosted on someone’s Mac II running an early version of A/UX. What made this BBS special is that the owner was maintaining a Usenet feed. You could dial into this BBS and read and post articles on Usenet. That was the moment when the potential of the Internet really hit me. You had tens of thousands (at that point in history) of users taking part in hundreds of newsgroups, being replicated around the world in something not-at-all resembling real time (most of the Usenet nodes were using UUCP at that point, connecting via modems in the middle of the night and passing articles around. You could post an article on a Monday and it might take until Thursday or Friday to propagate around the Net. One of the coolest things about Panic’s page for Unison is that it takes a “when people were shorter and lived near the water” approach to describing what the application does, assuming (probably correctly) that the majority of people who happen across their product page will have no idea of what Usenet is.

Panic are really some of the all-star developers on the Mac platform. They’re not huge, like an Adobe or a Macromedia or a Microsoft, but their applications are always polished, tightly functional, and most importantly, a joy to use. I registered Audion ages ago and used it for years until the crushing power of the Smart Playlist secured the universe for iTunes.

Their latest application, Unison, is no exception. Everything about the app, from the whimsical icon to the introductory setup dialogs to to the progress indicators, screams polish. If you’re doing a long binary download in the background and switch out to another app, Unison even badges its dock icon with a jaunty green checkmark when it finishes. How cool is that? It really makes binary downloads completely painless, taking care of the alphabet soup of standards (uuencoding, base64, yyencoding, rar, etc.) and presenting the files in big, friendly format that even a tyke raised on P2P apps can understand. Don’t have a Usenet provider? Panic has partnered with a provider to bundle access if you need it.

Anyway, it’s a joy to use, and it’s nice to see a Mac newsreading app that does something different, as opposed to slapping a paint job on John Norstad’s ancient Newswatcher source.

:: Dave Walker 18:43 (EST/EDT) [+]

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iTunes 4.2 adds a “Grouping” field on the tag screen, which sounds interesting, but it’s currently undocumented. I did a Feedster dig and found this thread on Apple’s discussions board. Sounds interesting — some folks are using it as a subgenre field, others have different applications. Well, more metadata to key smart playlists on is always a nice thing. One wacky thing is that it seems to have picked up the Emusic classifications scheme (for tracks I downloaded from that service), which implies that whatever field ID3 Apple is calling “Grouping” is being used for other things by other people.

:: Dave Walker 20:05 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
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