Results tagged “Apple” from ScottandMargo.net

"Gizmodo iPhone Hands On Part Deux: Why Isn't it White and Other Questions" via TUAW

Gizmodo's reporting that, among other things, that the iPhone isn't really running OSX and that they're not going to allow third-party developer support. I guess that answers a couple of questions that I had about it.

That's kind of disappointing. I understand Apple's need to keep the platform pristine and seamless and that they tend to do that by strictly controlling what goes on it (like the way the iPod is controlled). I'm guessing that any applications that come out for the iPhone will be handled through the iTunes store like the iPod games are.

That's a little disappointing to me. Restricting third-party development support like this makes the iPhone a prettier but less flexible Windows mobile phone. The Cingular 8525 isn't as slick, but it's a lot more flexible and ultimately usable because I can go out and find (or potentially write) the software I need to do what I want with it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Gadgets, iPod, iTunes, Marketing, Technology

I've said before that all I want is a phone that's a phone.

Maybe it makes me a hypocrite but I want an iPhone. I can't help it. It's small, slick and smart. I think that the voicemail inbox idea is almost worth the price by itself. It would give me an iPod that has a better interface than my iPod. A phone that's better than my phone. It'd sync with iCal enough for me to be able to actually use it effectively. I'm still not really into the camera or photo functionality but I could see how some people might.

I do have some concerns though:

• Sometimes Apple screws up 1.0 devices. The first Nano, the first Intel systems, the cube for example.
• How hardy is the touchscreen? Better than the face of the first Nano's I hope.
• Movies, TV shows, music videos and music, your contacts and calendar in 8GB?
• A phone that's 5 years ahead of the rest has EDGE but not 3G?
• A phone that's 5 years ahead of the rest has 802.11g but not 802.11n?
• It's running OSX but there's no indication of how much of OSX and what the hardware's capable of. What kind of games can I play? What other software can I run? NewsFire? Ecto? Lotus Notes?? Depending on the capabilities of the hardware and how much of OSX is on it, this could be huge to me
• I don't understand the pricing when you consider it with the fact that they're putting it out with Cingular and it's going to be sold at Apple stores and at Cingular. Does that mean the price is $499 or $599 with or without a contract with Cingular, or are they going to be signing you to a contract with Cingular in the Apple stores (which seems odd to me)?

I'm looking forward to the June release of this device. I want to see what happens when this thing gets out into the world. Barring any horrible problems, I would expect to try to pick one of these up as a Christmas present to myself. I just hope my Ebay'd t610 lasts.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Gadgets, iPod, iTunes, Marketing, Technology

Maybe I missed something but, did Apple just release a new Airport Extreme base station that does 802.11n but not release an Airport Extreme Card to match it at 802.11n?

I read somewhere that the newer Macbooks are shipping with an 802.11n capable network card, but those of us with older Macs are stuck, it seems.

I get a lot of interference with my 802.11g network from nearby cordless phones so I'd bump up to 802.11n just to fix that issue. On top of that, the new N access points seem to have some more features than what was more available with the G routers....like built-in print servers and USB file servers.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Gadgets, Apple

Apple's .Mac Mail webmail updated overnight to the new interface.

Looks a lot like the Mail.app interface.
There's some small differences like the "Checking" spinner being moved from the Inbox in Mail.app to the top of the interface (below Apple.com's header). There isn't much there that's going to take any time getting used to though.

It feels faster...speed was my main complaint about the old version of .Mac webmail. The preview pane seems to work well. It's been a slow mail day so I don't know yet if it's "web 2.0" enough to automatically show new mail instead of making me click "Get Mail" like I had to in the old .Mac Webmail. Time will tell on that one.

Nice improvement at least, if less than innovative.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Technology

Looks like Apple is updating .Mac afterall.

In August, I posted something about .Mac mail getting old. Now, there's a new page at Apple announcing the upcoming changes to .Mac (via TUAW).

Figures.

It looks good at least. For the Windows users out there, it looks like they're replicating the Mail.app interface for this version. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet. Maybe it'll be OK, but sometimes replicating an application's UI in a browser doesn't work out as good as the idea sounds on paper. As long as it's faster than the current .Mac webmail, it'll be an improvement. Thanks, Apple.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Technology

A look behind the iPod/iTunes report - Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus

This analysis pops up every year, it seems. Someone does the math on how many songs iTunes has sold and divides by the number of iPods are out there, and the number they end up with is pretty small.

I'm one of those people. Here's a screenshot of my Purchased folder in iTunes (7):

I've had an iPod for almost 2 years now (since the first Shuffles came out in Jan 2005) and I have five songs Purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Three of those are from the 5-track sampler that I got free when I registered my Shuffles. I deleted two of those songs since because they suck. I like TKO so that'll always be around. The other two haven't been listened to recently enough for me to decide whether to delete them...though the Blow It Out track has a 1-star rating, which I use as a "this sucks" marker. I'm a bit of a NIN fanboy, so when The Hand That Feeds came out, iTunes was the faster way to get it (I have the CD single too, and the vinyl picturedisc). I needed Cars for something relatively quickly so I didn't have time to track down a copy of The Pleasure Principle to use it from there.

I will probably always prefer buying CDs over digital downloads of songs. Gary Numan's Replicas album is $9.99 on iTunes, and it's $11.98 at Amazon. For that extra $2, I get a non-compressed version of the album, all of the artwork and a physical CD and an MP3 version for my iPod (after importing it to iTunes, of course). I consider that to be a better value than the iTunes version where all I get is a DRM'd AAC file.

There's always a risk when buying recent albums that you get a couple good songs and a bunch of filler crap, which kinda kills the value argument. Some times I do better at avoiding that issue than other times. I used to buy a lot of singles. Lately, I just avoid bands that do that altogether. Going indie helps (I love CDBaby) since unsigned bands have less of a reason to add filler crap to an album. I think that's another topic for another post though.

Technorati Tags: Gadgets, Marketing, Music

I've been keeping an eye out on the buzz about Microsoft's iPod-killer...the Zune. I wasn't expecting a lot. A portable audio/video player is an portable audio/video player these days so there's not much to compete on for features anymore. What's left to do with one, anymore? On Thursday, Microsoft dumped out a lot more details on the Zune so I'm

With the Zune preview pictures that have been coming out, I was impressed by the screen size. I'm using a Nano now (not the new one), so the music I carry with me is pretty manageable, but I think that if I had a big iPod and was carrying my whole library around, it'd get a little tough to navigate in that little iPod screen. I have no interest in watching movies on the current iPod screen. I've written before on what I'm wishing for from Apple (besides the long rumored iPhone): The full touchscreen video iPod. I could see myself watching a movie on one of those while on the treadmill or something as long as I can use my own DVDs. The Zune's screen, while not ideal, comes closer to being video-friendly than the iPod does.

What other innovation can there be with a device like this? In spite of both company's reputations, Microsoft beat Apple to the next level for mobile audio/video devices.

Sharing.

The Zune has Wi-Fi and you can wirelessly beam songs from one Zune to another. Isn't sharing of music like that kinda illegal? Probably. Microsoft has an innovative solution to that issue too. Any music that you receive stops working in 3 days and you can't share it with anyone else...and if you like the song, you can flag it to buy it from the Zune Marketplace (through URGE?).

That's a smart solution to a difficult question of how to legally share your music with friends. I'm impressed, Microsoft. Great idea.

Is it enough for me to buy one? Not yet. The featureset is impressive and the UI is beautiful but I'm not in the market for a $300 device that holds all of my music...the nano is just fine for now, thanks. Since the Zune is a Microsoft product, I'd expect that it's Windows-only which is a showstopper for me since the only computer in the house here is a Powerbook. It's definitely something interesting to keep an eye on, and I'm especially interested to see what Apple does in response.

Microsoft's Zune Delivers Connected Music and Entertainment Experience
Microsoft Unveils Zune MP3 Player

Technorati Tags: Gadgets, iPod, Microsoft, Technology

Can anyone tell me why it makes sense for the keypress to close a window is so close to the keypress to quit the application??

I have no idea how many times I've had a bunch of Safari windows open and closed them all out instead of closing the one that I meant to close. Then I have to go fishing around in my history to find what was open. This can be a lot of windows if it's been a busy day in the blogging world and I've just spent a lot of time in Newsfire clearing things out.

This sucks. I'm frustrated.

Technorati Tags: Mac, Apple, Technology

Jon at Administer IT makes a a point that I've been meaning to make about .Mac mail for quite a while now. The .Mac webmail interface is very old school, clunky and pretty slow. For a while, I tried avoiding the issue by forwarding all of my mail to a GMail account, but that just made mail management more difficult. So when I'm away from my laptop, I suffer through it, wondering why I'm paying $99 a year for the service.

To be fair, I use iDisk quite a bit. I also like the flexibility of having web and POP3 access to my email (which is something that most free web mail providers don't give). Having my email address independent of my ISP made my move from Cox to Verizon almost seamless.

I do get a lot of value from having my .Mac account. I just get the impression that Apple is neglecting the applications that make .Mac worth it. Maybe they'll get around to it after Leopard is done. Or maybe they'll improve it after they make it free like the rumors are saying.

Via Digg

Dear Steve Jobs: .Mac Mail is Getting Old

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Technology

Apple pushed out an iPod update yesterday along with the 6.0.5 update to iTunes. I downloaded the update and it pushed to my Nano. The iPod update page says the following about what's in the update:

What's new in iPod Updater 2006-06-28:

* Nike + iPod support for iPod nano
* Volume limit for iPod shuffle
* Bug fixes

I think I noticed another change. The stars used for a song's rating are smaller. I didn't notice any change in the text part of the display, but I don't have another non-updated iPod to do a side-by-side against. I don't know why I noticed it and I don't know why Apple did it and didn't mention it...but it is what it is. Makes me wonder what else gets changed on these updates.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, UpdateStars

Vowe posts a link to a study by Paul Lamere on the statistics that were gathered by his iTunes Registry.

The whole article is worth reading. I found a couple interesting points in the analysis:

“It turns out that 80% of all plays are concentrated into just 23% of the tracks. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that 64% of the over 20,000,000 tracks had never ever been played (not even once). This means that the average ipod user (with 3542 songs), actively listens to about 800 songs in their collection, and has never listened to about 2200 songs.”

I think that's just nuts! I can't imagine what it's like to have listening habits like that. Are people just listening to the same songs over and over because they like to, or because the random shuffle feature doesn't take play frequency into account? I'm hoping it's the latter but I'm afraid it's the former...those numbers sound like they'd line up with how radio stations work.

Personally, I'd hate a rotation like that. I hate commercial radio because of it. I'm becoming increasingly dissatisfied with XM Satellite Radio for the same reason. I've spent a lot of time since I got an iPod trying to work out how to get a good thorough mix across my music library when I'm listening to music. My most recent thinking is based on what I found in a post I did in March about some Smart Playlist resources I found. Below is a breakdown of my iTunes library:

Collection Size: 4022
Plays: 5694
Number of songs purchased from iTunes: 2
Active songs (80% of Plays): 50%
Sings never played: 872
Manually rated songs: 1215

It looks like my persistence is paying off. I'm getting a pretty good mix of music across my library. Definitely higher than average. How much higher was kind of surprising to me to be honest. Looking at the numbers, I think I'm going to need to raise the representation of unplayed songs in my main mix playlist, and I need to get back into the habit of rating my songs.

Technorati Tags: iPod, iTunes, Music, Technology

I bet that title gets used a lot in blogging. Oh well.

I'm kinda offline for a little while. My Powerbook's hard drive started to fail over the weekend. Late Sunday and last night I was trying to see if there was anything I could do to stop the problem progression. I gave up last night. Today on the way home, I'm going to make a pit stop and get a new hard drive, and an external drive enclosure and maybe an extra external drive too.

Once the hardware comes home, I need to swap the drives install my OS back and do a backup restore. Then I need to see what I can salvage from the old disk from its external enclosure (I didn't have my music on backup), reinstall some software, etc. It might be a couple days before I'm completely back online again.

With the other external disk, I'm going to set it up as another backup disk...and I'll be archiving complete disk images to it. This crash could have been worse if I had no backups at all but it's going to be really inconvenient and time consuming. It wouldn't have been if I'd spent the time and money up front to protect myself.

Fun.

When I first heard about the 3-23-2006 update for iPods that adds a volume limiter setting, my first thought was that the lawyers won again. Personal media devices in general and iPods in particular have been in the news on and off over the last few months with studies about their contribution to hearing loss.

Then I actually started playing with it and it's actually kinda useful for how I use my iPod. I mostly listen to it in the car through the headphone jack into a tape adapter (yeah, I know). I found a balance between the volume setting on the iPod and the volume from the car's stereo that minimizes distortion and when I go back and forth between listening in the car and listening with the headphones that I have to hunt for that "best" volume level in the car.

With the volume limiter, I set the upper limit to the level that I listen to the car....so now I can just max it instead of hunting and pecking for the sweet spot.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, Technology

Since the iPod Nano needs Autofill post a while back I'm still thinking of how to manage my music on the iPod and in iTunes in general. On Thursday, I came across a blog posting called iTunes Smart Playlists at Andy Budd's blog.

I don't know why but for some reason, I never noticed that one of the rules you can set for a smart playlist is to have it use another playlist or set of playlists as a source. That helps a lot of the issues I have had in the past with keeping an interesting and fresh mix of my music available. I used the playlists in Andy Budd's post as a base and took some tips from SmartPlaylists.com and I've built a decent playlist. It'll get better as I get more music listened to and rated, but it's definitely a good start.

The playlist that I'm feeding the iPod with is limited by total size which I still have to adjust up and down as the size of my podcast list. The Autofill problem still isn't solved, but at least the mix is better.

Technorati Tags: iPod, iTunes, Playlist

Yesterday there was a package by the front door. Inside was two of the new items that Apple launched at the MacWorld Expo last week:

iWork
iPod shuffle

I spent most of the night working with Pages, the new word processor. My resume needs some work so this was a good test for me to get started. It looks like a good word processor to me. The interface isn't overly busy and complex. I don't like Word and I'm glad I can work out decent docs without having to buy Office now.

I didn't spend much time looking at Keynote 2. I don't do presentations. Maybe if I did, I'd think about using Keynote, but I have no use for it now. I think Pages was worth the $79 by itself.

I actually got two if the 512MB iPod shuffles. One for me and one for Margo. I haven't played with them yet....haven't even opened the boxes yet. Will show Margo tomorrow, then will see what I think.

Today I'll be picking up iLife 05 from the UPS dropoff point. I came to the realization that iPhoto 04 wasn't going to be enough for me in editing my photos a while back and was going to get Photoshop Elements until I heard that Apple was updating iLife. The updates to iPhoto will probably be good enough. Will see. It's what I'm waiting for before I start populating the photo section.

Technorati Tags: Gadgets, Technology