Software
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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!
iPhone 1.1.1 is out - my frustrations with the WiFi Music store
Thursday, September 27th, 2007This morning Apple released updates for the iPhone bringing forth a bevy of new features including the slick new WiFi music store, better iPod controls, your choice of incoming SMS alerts, and other minor tweaks and refinements throughout the iPhone. The iPhone gained a few features already introduced in the iPod Touch like bringing up media controls when the home button is double tapped and a cool trick where double tapping the space bar inserts a period and a space to help cut down on finger taps.
The WiFi music store lets users purchase songs on-the-go using any WiFi hotspot which essentially puts the entire multi-million track library of iTunes in your pocket - perfect for a quick impulse buy from time to time. It would be perfect for the impulse-heavy consumer like me - if it worked on my iPhone!
I’m having store authorization problems so I can’t actually buy anything right now. It’s rejecting my credentials to the point of locking my account, when I know I’m entering them correctly. I even verified my credentials on a desktop just to make sure I wasn’t having a senior moment.
I wrote up up a more detailed report of my WiFi Music Store experience for Gear Live if you want to know more. For now I’ll have to sulk about with my existing library while on-the-go and be content with the other features released today.
Skitch: 5 minutes in
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
The geniuses over at Plasq have created another application, and while it hasn’t won any awards yet (it’s still in beta) but it’s certain to do so shortly. Skitch allows you to show the world something on your Mac effortlessly rather than try tell them about it in writing or sending massive and unmanageable screenshots. I’m 5 minutes into my experimentation with it and I already can tell this is one of the coolest applications I’ve played with in a while. It makes image capture and annotation a breeze, and does it all with a highly polished elegance.
Skitch allows you to capture screenshots, windows, webcam images, and all sorts of other media into its editing window. Once you have a base image it’s easy to annotate and edit the image with text, handwriting, or other shapes then one click saves it up to the Skitch site on the web for easy sharing. If you don’t want to go the upload route it’s easy to drag your creation into any other application on your mac, or just save the finished file to disk.
I’ll be writing a much more in-depth review on Gear Live over the next couple of days so stay tuned and check my Gear Live posts for more info on this delicious little software treat.
UPDATE:As amazing as the Skitch application is that’s not everything Plasq is throwing on the table with Skitch. Now that I’ve spent a few more minutes with it the service side of Skitch is starting to shine. The ability to save and upload one of your creations (skitches?) to the Skitch service with a single click is wonderfully simple and well implemented. Once the upload is complete you are taken to a webpage for that creation where you can share it with friends as simply as pasting a link into an IM, e-mail, or forum and you can instantly share what you just created. Check out the Skitch page for the photo above.
Of advertising and social commentary
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007Advertising is an interesting world - companies invading the psyche of the consumer, introducing products and messages with a singular goal in mind: profit. Many companies (AtlasDMT, Google, Yahoo, etc) have been quite successful on the web in finding ways to make contextual advertising automatic, targeted, and easy for both publishers to implement and consumers to use.
That being said I decided to experiment a little bit with advertising on Futurist Now. I’m not really doing this with a financial goal in mind (although having my hosting bills paid for every month would be nice) but more to see how the various contextual algorithms handle my content and what kind of companies they select to place advertisements on.
Obviously they have a vested interest in pushing companies they think my visitors are likely to click on (as their revenue is entirely click based) so seeing the products and services selected provides an insight into the web-browsing consumer, although in a statistically averaged way.
Provided the random nature of my content, and my wide range of topics this experiment has already led to some very interesting results. For instance the Amazon.com contextual advertisement script decided that linking the name Jack Thompson to a product in their catalog which contained a director of the same name as shown by the image below:
Now on the surface this not only makes sense from a technological perspective, but also from that of delightful social commentary. In the post in question I was referring to the now infamous Jack Thompson, legal attack-dog on a crusade against violence in video games. Jack Thompson the ex-attourny (the State of Florida BAR association pulled his license to practice law last year) has spent the last few years trying to ban violent video games as he perceives them to be the cause of almost every ill that threatens society.
Amazon was kind enough to link his name to the movie Feed, which starred an entirely different Jack Thompson, and yet somehow seems fitting. Feed is one of the best trashy C rate movies I am proud to own. The movie revolves around a murder detective who crosses continents in search of a serial killer who lovingly fattens feeds his victims to death. Upon their deaths he liquifies their fat to feed to his next victimlover, thus closing the loop on the food chain and completely disgusting the movies audience.
There is justice in advertising!
Gradual content creation
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007I’ve been experimenting around with Twitter Tools and the del.icio.us auto-post blogging tool. They make for an easy way to gradually add content to Futurist Now without having to actually sit down and write a full post. The web links from the day that interest me can go through a workflow into my del.icio.us account, and inane babble about my day fits quite nicely into Twitter. I’ve placed both of these into the new infobits category to make it neat and tidy.
Not that I’ll stop writing real content by any means - just an easy way to share things that interest me day to day.
Update 1 week later: It was a great idea while it lasted, but I’ve pulled the twitter and del.icio.us posts as I’ve gotten a surprising amount of negative feedback from my users. Lesson learned.
iPhone ringtones now available through the iTunes store
Monday, September 10th, 2007Just as I was heading to bed I connected my iPhone to sync and charge for the night when iTunes informed me that the ringtones feature of the iTunes store has gone live. Not many of my tracks supported ringtone creation, but one of my old favorites (Bytecry by Weevil’s Drunk on Light album - the OS X 10.4 intro music) was eligible so I decided to take the plunge and convert it.
After clicking through an obnoxiously long EULA I was able to click “Create Ringtone” to begin the process.Once clicked the main ringtone authoring pops up. The ringtone authoring interface allows you to select how long you want your ringtone to be (up to a maximum of 30 seconds), and position where you want the start and stop of the ringtone to be within the track. There are also fade-in and fade-out options to help the ringtone sound smoother as it comes to life on your precious, shiny iPhone.
After previewing my ringtone to my hearts content I clicked the “Buy” button and was charged the ass-raping $0.99 for a track I “already owned”. It’s a pity that Apple decided to cash in on the multi-billion dollar a year ringtone market - offering them for free on any track you own would have been a great differentiating feature for the iPhone.
It’s as easy as Steve made it sound in his keynote address - making my ringtone took less than 4 minutes including a fair amount of fussing around with the preview to get it just the way I wanted it. A quick sync later and now my phone erupts into a glorious chorus that’s far more unique and “me” than any of the included by default iPhone ringtone. Hazaa!
Just a little housekeeping
Monday, September 10th, 2007I did some general housekeeping tonight on Futurist Now. I upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress, and to a newer version of VeryPlainText. I applied some of the hacks from the old version of the VeryPlainText theme, but made a few other minor typographic tweaks. I’ve added a few new categories and back-added a few posts into them, but that’s mostly a move to help for some future planned expansion.
Overall not much has changed but just in case let me know if you see anything broken on the site and I’ll be glad to take a look at it - you can just leave some information about what you saw and what browser you are using as a comment.
Let the design play begin
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
Through a happy little coincidence I have been able to acquire a copy of Adobe CS3 Production Premium! I had a license for a previous version of Photoshop, but running under Rosetta the older version was getting to be a bit of a drag. Now I will not only get to enjoy the Intel version on my Core 2 Duo iMac, but I’m getting the rest of the CS suite to boot! Now I not only have still capabilities through Photoshop, but full blown video production, audio editing, and rich content authoring. This weekend I’ve already chalked off two days of the three day weekend to just start exploring the other apps and see what kind of cool things erupt forth from the depths of my creativity!