Apple Delivers

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:52:00 GMT

The new iPod touch is (almost) exactly what I wanted.

Steve Jobs live -- Apple's "The beat goes on" special event - Engadget#end

The only thing it lacks for me is 160G of storage, but I can live with that for now. Oddly, no mention of Bluetooth but I assume it's there so my MotoRockr headphones will work without the adapter. (UPDATE: no bluetooth, it's a BIG letdown! But I still have my adapter.)

Wifi, browser, fullscreen video, this is an awesome device. If it worked with Verizon I wouldn't need a phone, but I think I will be using Skype more and more now.

The capabilities of Wifi with this easily hackable device are going to be awesome. If only Microsoft would make a decent device like this that supports Silverlight and has a real SDK I might get one. For now, I am sold on iPod. The Zune doesn't even come close for me with its restrictive interface and DRM.

In fact, I bought 2.

What can the iPod teach us about Development

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 16:40:00 GMT

I now have a 20Gig 4th generation iPod. This is probably the most perfectly designed piece of hardware I've ever seen. Too bad no one can figure out a decent way to mount these in a car, the market is certainly big enough that something better than a cupholder mount, but not as costly as an Icelink would sell.

My reaction to the software however, is not so kind. What I like and dislike about the software are basically the same thing from different perspectives. It's really more than that, what I want doesn't exist yet.

I like the portability, but I dislike the need to dedicate a duplicate library that I manage on a PC. I can't store everything in iTunes, Winamp integration is basically a kludge (with an equally poor library). I already have an enormous library of media, I only want a small portion of that on the iPod at any one time. I tend to do the same thing with my TabletPC, I put some TV shows or Movies I want to watch on a plane or while traveling temporarily, then discard them later. Music on the other hand, I would like to rotate in and out of the library, retaining metadata like last played time, number of times played and ratings.

Portability is for things like listening to an audiobook, then removing it from the iPod, but retaining it in my "Digital Library". When editing content on the portable and sending the metadata changes back to the library, there is no need whatsover to transfer the whole file back to the library.

I have digital items like Voice Notes, TV Shows and Movies from a Tivo like device or DVDs, CDs (all converted to MP3/AAC), Audiobooks, Digital Photos, and several other "formats". Its really just a confusing jumble of stuff for most people. For me its much more, I tend to think of my collection of digital media in much the same way Victorian gentlemen thought of their Personal Libraries. I collect this stuff from all over the place, add Word Processing documents, Important emails, OneNote files, Diagrams and Drawings and you start to see that the way I deal with media is an almost full-time job.

In fact for me, it IS a full time job. As the CTO of a Document Imaging company, I have to think about how to deal with this stuff constantly. Couple that with my enthusiasm for a digital lifestyle at home and it’s a never ending battle of shuffling digital content around. I don't think WinFS is the complete answer to this dilemna, though it may help. It only solves one small part of the problem. For what it's worth, my personal media fileserver is a Linux box running Raid 5 and Samba. It has worked out far better for me than a Microsoft solution would have. If they allowed us to buy Storage Server 2003 for about $300 I'd certainly consider it as a viable solution, but as of today you can even buy it if you aren't an OEM without a bunch of useless (to me) hardware.

To my joy and dismay, there hasn't been an effective solution proposed to sort all this stuff out. To my joy because I can obssess about it and figure out the best way to do it, then propose it to the world. To my dismay because I really need a completed solution right now. It drives everyone around me crazy because I live in an Alpha grade software state that changes all the time when I have to adapt to something new. They can never figure out how to do things as simple as turning on a TV in my office because it changes almost daily and they never know what state it will be in.

As we march on in the digital era its only going to get worse because we will keep getting larger and larger amounts of storage to deal with. 10 Years ago a large hard drive was 4 Gigs, today its 400Gigs (and most of us have more than one), within the next 10 years it will be in the Petabytes (1024 Terabytes). I already have over a Terabyte of storage in my house, granted I am not the average PC User, but I am always being consulted by friends and relatives in their confusion over how all this stuff works.

We are shoved further and further in this nightmare of digital overload every day. Removeable media isn't an answer because its not searchable or refineable. Average consumers won't maintain a full time staff of DBAs and application developers to keep track of their digital lives.

I see a desperate need for us to have a centralized media library at home that all our devices can talk to. I want to be able to mark a bunch of files for use on my iPod and at the same time mark a completely different set of items for my wife. There is no client (or server for that matter) made to do this right now. Developing one has been one of the most challenging and fun things I have done in years.

Devices need to have some sort of interface built into them that acts like WSDL, declaring all the stuff it can consume and how it expects that data to be formatted, then a central library could simply interact with it.

Something you would think is easy becomes incredibly complex really fast when you start thinking about how to make all these devices interact with each other. If you are not a caveman, then you probably have stacks of CDs, DVDs, Camcorder Data and Photos in one form or another. Piling all these things into some ordered system is no easy task, for the average consumer it is virtually impossible. DRM adds an even more ridiculous layer on top of all this.

I own a DVD, I bought it, its mine. I want to watch it on my TabletPC, but I don't want to carry around the disc with me in case it may get damaged, or even just to save the hassle of space. With a digital library, I can just select a group of items I want to take on vacation with me (so I can show my grandmother pictures of her great grandkids). I can catch up on the last season of the Sopranos that I still haven't watched, in the free time I may have on vacation and we can watch a decent movie on the plane that isn't hacked to bits or unappealing in storyline.

Try that with the tools we have available today and you will just about go crazy just making it possible to run everything, let alone, make comments about the Photos (like grandma's voice comments recorded for posterity) and get them back into the library.

Metadata needs to be able to stay with the portable file, at least until it can be synchronized back to personal library, but it would really be nice when I select a few files, I could take all the associated data with it and put it on the portable device when I go visit my great uncle so he can hear what grandma had to say.

We definitely live in a new world, we need new ways to handle the data that goes along with it. We no longer live in the era that can store something in Filing Cabinets and make a copy of the document we need temporarily, we want to take a piece of media and all the metadata and related material that goes along with it.

As developers, we need to start thinking of ways to lets systems interact with each other in intelligent ways, letting the systems start to make decisions on their own how to transfer media from one device to another. Until we have Positronic Brains that can go into these devices we are just going to have to think of ways that they can interact in less time consuming ways. Average people don't have a clue how to use XSLT to translate one XML fragment into another or the difference between embedded metadata and attached metadata, nor should they have to. Devices should be able to talk to each other just by plugging them into each other, discovering each others capabilities then offering ways to move data between them.

I should be able to transfer my “personal media” (forget DRM for now) from one central library to another (directly or through a portable device as a transport medium) in a simple straightforward fashion. Merging the items that are different from one to the other and searching the metadata then become something more intriguing. I want a personal Google style interface that does it, not some convoluted form requiring training.

Stick around and see what develops, I am sure we are in for some interesting times.

Obsessing on an iPod

H. Steele Price, IV — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 12:01:00 GMT

For about the past month I have been obsessing on which iPod to get.

Fortunately the wait is almost over. Apple has announced the G4 iPod that has the clickwheel seen on the mini.

I bought my wife a mini just over a month ago and she really likes it, bear in mind -- my wife is a total technophobe and this is the only electronic device she will use besides her cell phone. I think the iPod has the best UI of any player by a HUGE margin.

I was debating a mini for myself, but I had a CD Player so I really didn't need an new player yet... well, bad luck struck and my player was stolen (along with my truck...) So I have been shopping.

I wanted a little more room than the 4gigs that the mini offers and now the new product looks awesome. I didn't like the 4 button interface and the mini just seemed so much better to me. This 4th Generation iPod looks like they have really nailed it.

With multiple (synched) playlist support, the airPort express and a car adapter that works with the docking port, it's finally time to buy an iPod for myself.

Now I can start obsessing on how to use the new API that comes with iTunes 4.6 to synch Home/iPod/Work with my giant music/spoken word library. The stange thing about iTunes has always been what to synch with your iPod for me. I have 250g+ in various audio files and it grows all the time. I don't want all that on an iPod, but I need a way to access everything without losing all the metadata when I transfer in and out of the portables.

I'd really like to be able to synch the metadata changes (like ratings) so when I decide I don't want to hear a song anymore I can reduce the rating and it will disappear from my auto-playlists.

Expect to see some interesting things on what I do with my iPod and my music library as I get it closer to something I think other people can actually use.

iPod/iTunes

Apple Delivers

What can the iPod teach us about Development

Obsessing on an iPod