Software
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Saturday, October 27th, 2007
While at the Leopard launch last night Mike picked up an 8Gb 3rd generation iPod Nano for his daughter. While over at their house this morning I was amused to see he was having trouble registering the Nano. Every time he tries to sign in with his Apple ID he gets the puzzling error “This person record requires harvesting.” (click the image above for a full sized view).
While I’m sure it has a valid technical meaning it’s a strange message to show to an end user. It almost makes me wonder - what kind of harvesting is Apple talking about here, a kidney or a crop?
Life’s little pleasures: Leopard, IMAP, and Puzzle Quest
Saturday, October 27th, 2007The past 24 hours has brought a number of great things into my life. Yesterday night I went to the Bell Square Apple Store for the Leopard launch with Mike and picked myself up a copy of the shiny new version of OS X.
The launch event itself was an interesting experience. Apple really does know how to work a crowd, and the energy and passion it’s employees (retail and engineering alike) bring to work with them makes for a really positive experience for Apple’s customers.
Leopard itself is a neat little upgrade. The upgrade itself actually works really well - I didn’t lose any of my documents, settings, or preferences. Aside from Quicksilver being stuck in my dock (not the menubar where it really belongs) everything works flawlessly on Lanshark - Photoshop even stayed fully activated. Leopard is nothing revolutionary, but it really does add a lot of polish to OS X and makes for a worthwhile upgrade.
For the first time ever I actually kind of like the Finder. Quicklook (the ability to preview just about any document without the overhead of opening it’s parent application) is handy and makes confirmation that you have the document you are looking for brain dead simple. Spotlight is vastly improved featuring much faster searches, operators, and network search abilities.
Aside from the Leopard launch I was also thrilled to find out my Gmail account finally got IMAP enabled. The IMAP implementation is well done, and it makes Gmail’s iPhone experience as slick as their browser experience. Being able to have Mail.app cache my gmail account is handy as well for having my webmail searchable via the OS just like the rest of my personal knowledge store.
The final great thing to enter my life yesterday was Puzzle Quest for the DS. Puzzle Quest is a fun little RPG/Puzzler game that a couple of friends had suggested and it’s quite fun. It offers quick-in, quick-out gameplay - a fun addition to my go bag.
Gmail getting IMAP
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007Gmail is getting IMAP support and I need it now! I already have switched my whole life over to Gmail and the thought of having IMAP access to Gmail for my iPhone gives me tech-wood. Turn it on for me Google, I love you long time!
QuickPack
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007Wow, simply wow - Quickpack, an elegant fusion of Quicksilver and Backpack. Quicksilver now not only rocks the OS X application management and work flow automation, but now it’s also my key information capture action. With a few keystrokes it’s easy to add a note or list item to any page in your backpack. I run my life out of lists using a semi-GTD approach and being able to add list entries quickly and without effort means I can keep my momentum going on tasks as new ones pop into my head.
YAY! My life is better having discovered QuickPack. Go technology!
Google Reader has replaced NetNewsWire in my life
Thursday, October 4th, 2007Since discovering NetNewsWire shortly after (re)discovering the Mac platform I’ve been a pretty vocal advocate of the application and its slick swiss-army knife approach to tackling mountains of information piling in via RSS. When NetNewsWire was purchased by Newsgator I started using the sync features which greatly simplified my multi-computer lifestyle.
Strangely enough I think NetNewsWire has just left my life as suddenly as it came to it. More and more I found myself using Newsgator as a reader rather than NetNewsWire. I really like the slick interface NetNewsWire offers, but the overhead of opening and syncing it with Newsgator combined with the fact that I don’t always have a Mac handy combined to limit it’s use to a single big post reading session in the evening to drive my unread count down to zero for the next day. I mainly read RSS in tiny chunks I squeeze in here and there throughout my day as I can spare the time, so entirely web based solutions make it easier to do from whatever computer I happen to be sitting at without having to worry about clients, syncing, or application state.
I just discovered my new reader of choice Google Reader (yeah - I know, I’m really behind the times) and I have to say I’m 100% impressed. Just like Google revolutionized the concept of web-mail using a fresh new Ajax approach Google Reader has done the same for RSS. Reader dynamically loads your stories in the background and provides a configurable view including my all time favorite - the never ending scroll of articles that I can slide through as I get the time.
Google Reader performs a great little trick by automatically marking posts as read when they scroll up the screen leaving me with fewer actions than with Newsgator where you see 50 articles at a shot (not configurable) and have to click a link to mark them as read and to pull up the next batch. Another nail in the coffin of Newsgator was that some of the Javascript they used had issues and would occasionally fail to respond to clicks and have to be reloaded.
To seal the deal Google Reader has amazing keyboard shortcuts. While in the application simply hit the ? key to bring up a semi-opaque cheat sheet. The keyboard shortcuts are intuitive and make navigation, triage, bookmarking, and reading very efficient. After less than 20 minutes of use Google Reader became an entirely keyboard based application for me, and one rivaling the functionality of most thick-client RSS readers.
At this point my only gripe with Google Reader is it’s iPhone experience. Newsgators was worse, but the iPhone version of Google Reader is very static and really fails to capitalize on the rich Javascript capabilities the iPhone bestows to offer a experience that matches the desktop browser experience in functionality while being tailored to the user interface limitations of the iPhone.
Sorry Brent - I still love NetNewsWire and have a special place for it in my heart, but the cloud is calling!
Skitch: reviewed recursively
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
Shortly after putting the finishing touches on my glowing review of Skitch for Gear Live I was fooling around and created this meta-skitch recursive image. Oh the idle joy’s of modern computing! Seriously though - check out the Skitch review, it’s one of those apps that you likely haven’t heard of yet won’t be able to live without once you try it. If you want a beta invite follow the instructions on the review for an opportunity to win one from me. You might also want to check out the Skitch website or my expose-screengrab experiment with Skitch.
“meta-skitch” by sparktography
iPhone: Context over consistency
Monday, October 1st, 200737signals, the makers of Basecamp, Highrise, and my favorite: Backpack just blogged about the iPhone’s user interface and Apple’s conscious design decisions which favor context over consistency. Personally I trend slightly more to consistency because I’m mildly OCD about organization and repeatability, but the article is an interesting read that rings true.
To-to-too mmuuuch caffeine
Monday, October 1st, 2007
I just got done blogging the rollout out their new Starbucks WiFi Music Store here in Seattle and I’m aquiver with coffee as a result. This morning I happened to stop into the Starbucks for a latte when I remembered that the new partnership for free iTunes access at Starbucks retail locations was lighting up in Seattle this morning so I whipped out my iPhone to check it out. The new Starbucks review is a good sister article to they soon to be posted in-depth review I did of the new iTunes WiFi Music Store.
Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera with me in the morning so I had to come back to review it over lunch about 90 minutes later. Between the quad shot earlier, and a triple over lunch I’m completely wired. *Bzzzt* *Bzzzt* *Bzzzt* *Bzzzzzzt*
Luckily I don’t have anything left on my to-do list for today so I’m pretty much free to lay on my couch watching movies with Skype. Finally getting a long weekend is really helping me feel a lot more relaxed from all the activity at work recently. Now for the rest of The Matrix Revolutions and then perhaps a little Lord of the Rings to continue on with the epic feel.
iTunes Smart Playlists
Sunday, September 30th, 2007
I’ve allowed my obsession with Smart Playlists in iTunes to get a little out of hand. After spending the last month combing through my media collection, tweaking ID3 tags, and rating as I go I’m learning how to create personalized radio experiences from my library that are easy to manage and sync/update automatically with my iPhone. By making a series of smart playlists with size limits limited by least recently played I can keep both my iPhone and my Apple TV stocked to the brim with a great music selection that gradually changes as I listen to it.
While the Smart Playlists feature is amazingly powerful I have unfortunately discovered a few pieces of highly useful metadata that are not exposed as options for the creation of iTunes Smart Playlists. These all seem like simple things to add, and would enable some really cool Smart Playlist scenarios. Here are the things I think iTunes is missing on this one:
- A purchased flag - a simple true/false bit to indicate if the track was purchased from the iTunes store or imported from media (CD or HDD).
- An iTunes Plus flag - again a true/false bit to indicate if the track is an iTunes Plus track or not. This flag could easily be combined with the purchased flag as a dropdown.
- A kind field - a field to select the kind of media from video; audio booklet, music, podcast, etc. Adding this field would make it much easier to keep iTunes TV shows and podcasts from leaking into music-only playlists.
- Ringtone flag - another true/false bit to indicate if the track is eligible for creating ringtones from.
If anyone at Apple is listening please, PLEASE get these added to the next version of iTunes! They all look reasonably simple to implement and would make me one happy iTunes geek!
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