We spent the day prepping the HearPlanet bus for its debut tomorrow:







Having a double decker bus at our disposal is pretty friggin awesome. If you are anywhere near San Francisco, I'd love for you to hop on for a ride any day or night this week. If you are reading this, consider yourself invited - whether you are a Macworld attendee or not.

During the day from noon until 5pm the HearPlanet bus will be circling the Moscone Convention Center picking up conference attendees, giving HearPlanet demos, and conducting complimentary bus tours of nearby San Francisco landmarks.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night the bus will switch into party mode around 5pm, with live DJ's spinning on the upper deck. The DJ lineup is shaping up to be very cool:

Tuesday - 6pm: Oshan 7:30pm: Jocelyn
Wednesday - 4pm - 9pm: Cosmic Selector & Sirraum Nash
Thursday - 4pm: Andy "Aquaman" Davis 6pm: Fuzzy Philippe 7:30pm: George Feil

To get realtime updates on where the HearPlanet bus will be next stopping to pick up / drop off, you can follow "HearPlanet" on Twitter.

serolynne and I have also created an audio "tour guide" to many Macworld events. This guide is accessible by searching for "Macworld" within the HearPlanet application.

HearPlanet debuted for $3.99 in the App Store, and we managed to climb into the top ten of paid travel apps within the first week.

For extra exposure at Macworld, we have dropped the price to free for this week only. And we are now already in the top eleven of free travel apps. To download HearPlanet for free (this week), click here.

It has been an exhausting few weeks leading up to this launch, and the week ahead is going to be more exhausting still. In just a few hours I'll be hopping on BART to go flyering the Macworld keynote line crowd. I know I won't be getting much sleep at all this week.

This is fun stuff though. And we are totally excelling at building buzz for this application.

If you are around this week, come out and play!

serolynne has been drinking the Apple koolaid from a fire hose lately.

First, her new MacBook Pro arrived on Thursday...



It looks like she is in love... I don't think I've ever seen her hug her old Dell....


And today, we lined up before opening at the St. Louis Galleria Apple store to get her an iPhone 3G...


Even though the iPhone 3G has been on sale for over a week, masses of people were still lined up at the St. Louis Apple Store when it opened this morning.

We got there at 9:20 AM, and there were close to 70 people in front of us in line. Despite Apple's web site indicating that only black 16GB iPhone's would be in stock, the store actually only had 8GB models. After waiting over two hours, we got our ticket guaranteeing us one. Those just a few further back in line were told to try again another day.

I first came to California in 1996 to be a part of the launch of a new type of computer magazine.

'boot Magazine' was focused on the hardcore PC enthusiast who is concerned with maximum performance, having the latest technology, and pushing the limits of what their machine can do via overclocking the hardware and tweaking the OS.

In addition to being the magazine's technical editor and 3D graphics expert, I was the in house "alternative OS" advocate. But while Linux and even BeOS was deemed worthy of respect by the editors - you would never hear much nice said about any Macintosh in the pages of 'boot'.

We often used to even actively poke fun at our sister magazine Mac Addict (now known as Mac Life) and their unworthy hardware and limited operating system.

The boot audience was just about as anti-Mac as you could possibly get.

boot was renamed after I left, and lives on and continues to thrive on newsstands everywhere as Maximum PC. I've kept tabs on it over the years, and the anti-Mac attitude has hardly ever wavered.

But I think hell may be freezing over.

On the cover of this month's Maximum PC is a photo of a MacBook Air and the following feature story: "Can Any PC Notebook Beat the MacBook?"

The featured article pits the MacBook Air, MacBook, and MacBook Pro against representative best-of-class PC laptops in the ultraportable, mainstream, and professional laptop niches.

And in the professional category - according to the editors of Maximum PC, the ultimate laptop in the world right now is the MacBook Pro!

"Don't rub your eyes, the MacBook is the winner (!) ... While that’s likely to piss off many PC diehards, perhaps it’s time those folks finally admit the MacBook Pro to the power-PC family."

I must say - they are a little behind the curve. I ditched the PC world and switched to Mac OS and a MacBook Pro over two years ago!

I just found this video from Macworld comparing the MacBook Pro with the MacBook Air...

Damn that thing is small!

My MacBook Pro seems huge by comparison. I can only imagine what an Air would look like next to Cherie's old monster-sized laptop!

The video also includes a demo of the new multi-touch trackpad. That looks extremely cool, and I expect that feature will soon become standard on all Apple laptops.

I'm now guessing that the MacBook Pro will get a big refresh in May when the next major Intel chipsets get released. I'll be saving up for an upgrade then... *grin*

Since it now looks like Apple will not be giving me any worthwhile reasons to upgrade to a new laptop anytime soon - I decided to spend last night doing some serious upgrading of my own.

My MacBook Pro is now sporting a 320GB (!!!) Western Digital Scorpio HD, doubling my storage capacity and increasing my HD speed significantly. Having that capacity in a container so small boggles my mind.

Using TimeMachine to restore from my backup drive made this the most painless system upgrade I have ever attempted. Kudos to Apple for making something so complex so brain-dead easy. Time Machine really is a killer feature.

I've also been doing some software upgrading and acquisition to help fill up all that extra space. I encourage any of you with Macs to check out the MacHeist II promotion where you can get a bundle of 11 great Macintosh applications (sold for $368 separately) for just $49. (BTW - If you click on the link and end up buying, I get a 12th bonus app free...)

I wrote about the first iteration of the MacHeist last year - and I continue to think that it is sheer marketing genius. If you are interested in viral marketing done right - this is one of the best examples I have ever seen.

The promotor of the Heist has put together a great bundle, he's donating 25% of every purchase to a charity you get to choose, and developers I never would have heard of are getting some great exposure. The total raised for charity is already over $175k with a week in the promotion remaining - impressive!

I was already planning to buy the uber-cool secure digital wallet and password manager 1password (the iPhone sync pushed me over the top), and the PhotoShop-like Pixelmator looks amazing and seems well worth the price of the bundle. The rest of the apps I have not had a chance to check out too deeply yet, but I suspect that there are a few other gems to be found. All of them have gotten rave reviews.

The Heist has a week left, so check it out and treat yourself to some new Mac apps.

Enjoy!

Steve didn't have any big shocking surprises for us this year, and overall I am rather disappointed.

The iPhone updates were leaked weeks ago, movie rentals were known to be coming, and the MacBook Air was expected. It is pretty sad when the biggest surprise of Steve's keynote is a new wireless router with an embedded hard drive for backing up to. *yawn*

The new MacBook Air is an incredibly sexy little laptop, but other than the amazing package it comes in, there is nothing revolutionary about it. I was hoping Apple would do something a bit more radical - like ditching the spinning hard drive for flash as a standard feature (and not as a $1000 extra), or perhaps integrating in WAN networking technology like EVDO or even WiMax.

Instead we get a super slim laptop with a slower CPU, a small and slow HD, just a single USB port, no firewire, a mono speaker, a non-removable battery, and no expansion options. A great choice for some, but it would actually be a pretty significant downgrade for many.

Movie rentals in iTunes is the much more significant news, and has the potential to finally make the Apple TV compelling. I am curious though if Apple will now support purchasing HD content (or is HD just for rental?), and whether Apple will allow HD viewing on laptops and not just on the Apple TV?

Things I had hoped to see, but which did not make an appearance:

• A MacBook Pro refresh. When will Apple embrace Intel's new mobile CPU's???


• BlueRay DVD Support. Apple could have been first to make this a standard feature!


• A sneak preview of what will be possible with the iPhone SDK...

Ah well. Maybe next time...

It wasn't very long ago that the mainstream technology press looked upon the Macintosh with disdain, or at best mild amusement. As Mac OS X matured over the years that amusement has morphed into begrudging respect, but still the leading PC-centric publications would barely even mention Macintosh developments, and certainly would never suggest that Mac OS was a credible alternative to Windows.

That was before the debacle that Windows Vista has proven to be.

And while Microsoft is still struggling earn back some respect with the first Vista Service Pack (due in 2008), Apple's new Leopard has swept in to rave reviews. I am amazed to see quotes like this coming from PC Magazine:

After spending days with Apple's new OS X 10.5, we're convinced it's the best operating system on the market. ... despite minor problems, it's by far the best operating system ever written for the vast majority of consumers, with dozens of new features that have real practical value ... for the average user, Leopard is the most polished and easiest to use OS I've tested.

Leopard again raises the question of whether to switch from Windows to a Mac. I've found Vista to be a major disappointment that tends to look worse the more I use it. I still use Windows XP for getting serious work done in long, complicated documents. But OS X is easier to manage and maintain and I vastly prefer OS X to Windows for Web-browsing, mail, and especially for any task that involves graphics, music, or video. Leopard performs all such tasks even better than previous versions did—and Leopard is the only OS on the planet that works effortlessly and intuitively in today's world of networked computers and peripherals. Leopard is far from perfect, but it's better than any alternative, and it's getting harder and harder to find good reasons to use anything else.

That's the official word from PC Magazine?!?!

Also amusing is PC World's current article looking back at the "Most Notable Notebooks of 2007", which has this to say:

Fastest: Apple MacBook Pro
The fastest Windows Vista notebook we've tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we've tested this year--or for that matter, ever--is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware.

Egads.

It is amazing to see the big "PC" magazines gushing so enthusiastically about Apple, while it is hard to find anyone with much positive to say about Microsoft anymore.

I should be getting my copy of Leopard in the next few days, and I am very excited to start playing with it.

Over the next few weeks I'll have my hands full with geeking. In addition to Leopard, Cherie's laptop is regularly crashing and needs an XP rebraining, and my parent's are itching for a new computer entirely.

(And I am not sure I'll be able to talk them into a Mac.... *groan*)

Is anyone out there currently using a Vista system that they are actually impressed with? Any recommendations on where I should start on the quest for a new machine for my folks?

Last night as we were setting up camp at Beales Point State Park (near Folsom Lake, CA) - serolynne asked me "what is that beeping?"

The beeping turned out to be our Xantrex XM1000 Inverter - flashing an "E05 - OL" code, indicating an overload condition and depriving us of AC power. *ugh*

I spent the evening tearing apart the electrical system to try and isolate the problem, only to conclude that the inverter was internally broken. It was still giving us an "overload" with no load at all...

Perfect timing, just two days before Burning Man. If only that were the only glitch I was dealing with...

Here is a rundown of all the broken, busted, or sprained things I've got to worry about - and how I am dealing with them:

Xantrex XM1000 Inverter: Perpetually overloaded, but still under warranty. Xantrex gave me an RMA without much fuss, so hopefully I'll have it mailed off tomorrow and repaired within a few weeks. In the meantime - I spent today rewiring the electric system to use the old 400W inverter. It is up and working after a day of hard work - BUT - there is not enough power to drive the blender.
(No SolarSmoothies on the playa!!!)

MacBook Pro: Kent called back today, and after consulting with engineering he has decided to authorize "a special one-time-only out of warranty repair." He set up an appointment for me to drop off my Mac at the Apple store in Reno on Sunday - with luck it should be fully functional by the time I return from BRC.

Treo 650: My Treo has been flaky ever since I dunked it in Monster Kaos a year ago. But over the past few weeks it has gotten significantly worse, and now in addition to the fiddly keyboard - my phone is now only holding a charge for at most a few minutes. And just this afternoon I reached into my pocket to grab it - and the antenna popped off! *ugh*

It is time for a new phone - but what? The iPhone looks like lots of fun, now that it has been hacked wide open... But the costs and the downsides are pretty extreme too... Also worth considering is a Treo 755P (Palm OS), a HTC 6800 (Pocket PC), or perhaps even a BlackBerry. Whatever I get, I need to decide soon...

HP PSC 2510 Printer: I've always hauled a printer around with me in Tab, and last year at Burning Man I set up the "Solar Studio" and did photo portraits and 8x10 printouts right on the playa. This afternoon Cherie and I set up the printer to test out our ink supply, and print out a new stack of business cards. But... All the printer does now is click. It never even fully wakes up when you turn it on. Dead. *ugh*

Casio Exilim EX750: The other core component of the Solar Studio is my uber-sweet Casio digital camera. But... Ever since Oklahoma (May), there has been a faint black dot in the upper left corner of every picture I have taken. No amount of lens cleaning seems to make a difference either. It is probably time for a new camera, but not until after Burning Man. *ugh*

Email: The email server I share with the Geeks has imploded again, and though our email backup is working to forward all my incoming mail to Gmail, all my filters and spam prevention tools are now broken. *ugh* I think it is time to move my mail hosting to DreamHost...

Bike: The chain on my bike is jammed. I can probably fix it myself, but I had hoped to have time to do so (or have a professional do it) before Burning Man. But with so much else to do, it will just have to wait until I get there. Hopefully I can find one of the bike repair camps for help if I end up needing it...

Jeep: The dimmed AC light is now back to full brightness, and Jeep seems to be running great. But... I worry whenever an electrical problem (like a dim light) miraculously heals. It will be a while before I fully trust the work done by Great Valley Jeep...

Girl: And even my girlfriend is broken. Well, not broken - just sprained. Cherie took a bad step out of Tab last weekend at SolFest, and ever since she has been hobbled. Though fortunately - she has been healing rapidly. I am hoping that she is back to full speed by the time we arrive in Black Rock City on Sunday.


Egads, that is a long list...


But - surprisingly, I am feeling great. Last night was full of growling, snarling, and frustration... But today I've just been plugging away getting stuff fixed and handled. And - there is nothing here that I can't handle. It actually feels good to face down challenges, and not be stopped by them.

But, enough for this week - ok?

Ok - this is getting ridiculous.

As I posted about on July 23rd, the SuperDrive in my MacBook Pro has gone totally dead after downloading and installing Apple's SuperDrive Firmware Update 2.1.

Being just two months out of warranty, I was not a happy camper.

Checking the net, I discovered that I was not alone. The "Superdrive Update 2.1 killed drive" thread on Apple's own support forums now has 122 posts and over 9,500 views - so many that Apple has even locked the thread - without posting any sort of acknowledgment or official fix.

(A new thread has been started, btw...)

Clearly Apple knows there is a problem. They have even long-ago pulled the download link from the Apple website and removed the Firmware Update 2.1 from the Macintosh Software Update.

Some users (including those out of warranty) have reported getting their drives, or even their entire computers, replaced. Many others have gotten a "we are still waiting for an official fix" story. Others have been told that they are just SOL and that they need to buy a new $500 drive.

Apple has had no consistent response on this issue at all.

I waited a few weeks for an official fix to become available, but all Apple did was lock the first thread on the forum. So last week I took my MacBook Pro in to see a Genius at the San Francisco Apple Store.

After talking with him for a while - his Genius conclusion was "It is clear Apple messed this one up. I'm sure we'll make it right. But until there is an official article in the knowledgebase, we can't help you unless you are under warranty..."

Gee - great.

After seeing some posts on the new thread reporting success with calling AppleCare - I decided to give that route a try today.

I just spent nearly an hour (56 minutes, to be exact) on the phone with AppleCare, most of it on hold.
The first tech spent 20 minutes "researching the problem", including reading through the Apple Forum threads. He eventually concluded that I needed to pay him a $49 "phone support fee" for talking with him about an out of warranty issue since he couldn't find "anything official" about the issue in Apple's support system.

When I balked at paying anything, he elevated me to a "Senior Product Specialist" named Kent.

Kent had me power down my Macintosh, remove the battery and power cable, hold down the power button for 10 seconds, and then restart. The drive was of course still dead - but we did confirm that at least it shows up in the ATA device tree. He was particularly concerned with getting the revision number: "Model: MATSHITADVD-R UJ-857 Revision: 0009"

Kent then said that the next step was for him to escalate the problem and "send it to engineering" because it was still under internal investigation by Apple and they "might want to analyze your computer" and have me send it in. He told me that it "typically takes five business days" to hear back from engineering, but it may be sooner. He gave me his direct extension, and told me to call him next week. He also took down my number and email address in case he hears back sooner. When I asked him for his email address, he said that he "didn't have one that he could use externally" (WTF?!?) and that if he needed to email me he would need to create a special personal account. (Huh?!!??)

And that's that. It has been nearly a month, and I still do not have a functional SuperDrive - or any idea when Apple will "make things right"...


I am amazed that a company as well known for great customer support as Apple has been unable to gracefully handle this issue. Having no official response that your in-store Geniuses and phone support people can refer to is just downright sloppy. And having your "Senior Product Specialists" unable to send and receive email seems like the stone age. And FIVE days to hear back from engineering on an issue that has been well known and widely reported for over a month?!? Egads!


Apple - you screwed this one up. You released a bad firmware update. It happens. Now FIX IT!

Egads - the tech gods are not smiling on me.

As I ranted about on Friday, my Jeep has been held hostage SINCE LAST WEDNESDAY waiting for a part to fix a check engine light issue. (It had been driving great, btw...)

I called Great Valley Chrysler Jeep this morning, and confirmed the part had arrived. My phone-averse service tech Chris told me that they were installing it now, and he would call me the moment it was ready to be picked up - probably around 3:30pm.

I called at 4:50pm having not heard from him.

"Woops - he has already left for the day. But your Jeep is ready, wait, no - maybe not. Uhm, here's his cell phone, give him a call..." Eh??

I call Chris, and he starts apologizing for forgetting to call me. Somehow he forgot. Yes, the part came in - and it is installed. But it is the Jeep's PCM computer, and they are having trouble programming it. They have three "DRB computers" at the dealership that can interface to the Jeep, and two of them are not working with my Jeep for some reason. The third one is, but they "need to enter the VIN number into the DRB and then it connects to Chrysler and programs my Jeep over the Internet..." And for some reason, that wasn't working. When he left the tech was on the phone with Chrysler trying to figure it out. Chris promised me it will be ready first thing in the morning, and he will call me as soon as he gets in tomorrow with an update.

Uhm. WTF?!?! My Jeep is having trouble connecting to Chrysler over the Internet to download a software update?!?!!? Egads.

Technology sucks.

And to make sure I get that message - the technology gods just delivered another boot to my head.

A few days ago, my MacBook Pro automatically downloaded and installed "SuperDrive Firmware Update 2.1" - a seemingly trivial update that is supposed to make my Mac compatible with a wider variety of optical discs.

Today - I went to pop in a DVD, and.... nothing.

The disc won't even insert. The drive is dead to the world. Totally unresponsive. WTF?!!?

Turning to Google, I soon discover that this update has been bricking drives all over the place...

MacOS X Hints Thread: SuperDrive Firmware Update 2.1 killed our SuperDrives!
Apple's Support Forums: Superdrive Update 2.1 killed drive
And more on Apple's Forums: SuperDrive Firmware Update 2.1

Apple has not yet officially responded in any fashion to the rash of complaints, but they have removed the update from their website and the automatic Software Update service.

Clearly Apple knows there is a problem.

But - are they going to fix it?!!?

There is no software fix known. Some people who have had this problem have sent their Mac's off and have gotten new drives installed under warranty. But my warranty expired two months ago - and I am not about to spend $500 for a new optical drive when it was Apple's botched software update that killed it.

*gargh*

I think I need to go live in a cave. I'm done with craptastic technology....

Responding to customer demand (they don't mention it, but I think my rant pushed them over the edge) - Dell has announced that it is bringing back Windows XP as an option for consumers.

This is a pretty major slap in Microsoft's face. I've never before seen a major PC maker bring back an old operating system once Microsoft has phased it out. Kudos to Dell.

Microsoft has less than a year to get Vista into better shape. Based on Microsoft's current licensing rules, computer makers will have no choice and will be required to install Vista on all computers sold after January 2008. I sure hope Vista is ready by then...

Not that XP is really all the much better. As serolynne chronicled, we were up until 3AM Thursday night fighting with Windows XP driver issues and a system completely fubared by a botched Roxio install. Ugh.

It blows me away that it is actually easier to install and configure Windows onto a Mac than onto a Dell. But then again, I suppose that is what I should expect from Apple...

For example: drivers that Dell tech support on the phone considers ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL and MUST BE INSTALLED FIRST are labeled as "optional" on the Dell tech support website. And with Cherie's Dell D820, there are 63 (!!!) different driver options to sort through, figure out, and install in the precisely correct (but apparently secret) order. But using Apple's Bootcamp to run Windows XP on my MacBook Pro, there is just ONE simple unified file of Windows drivers to download, and they easily install all at once. Nice.

serolynne has upgraded to a new laptop - a Dell D820 that is indeed a beautiful piece of hardware. It has an incredible 1920x1200 resolution screen, amazing battery life, it runs silent, is built solid, and it is nearly as small and light (if not as silver-sexy) as my MacBook Pro.

I've had some serious hardware envy the past few days as we've been playing around with getting it set up.

Hardware envy - but software nightmares. Windows Vista is bad news.

Problem #1: Microsoft's own developer tools (Visual Studio) have yet to be updated to properly support Vista. Installing Visual Studio 2005 generated all sorts of warnings about needing service packs and Vista compatibility patches that were totally cryptic to understand and act on. Once we did figure out what needed to be installed, the 500MB's of service packs and patches took literally hours of watching an unmoving pulsing green "progress" bar to get installed. Ugh.

Problem #2: The Microsoft Office 2007 install required an OS reboot - annoying (why should installing a word processor ever mandate a reboot?!!?), but not unexpected. But then upon first starting any Office application a long 10 minute "configuring your machine" process is initiated. Followed by a request for another reboot (!!!). Reboot, try again, trigger the same 10 minute long configuring process. Repeat again, until frustration sets in and you throw Office out and download Open Office instead - which "just works" with no fuss at all.

Problem #3: Vista would not connect to Cherie's company VPN - and it wouldn't even give any sort of error message explaining why not. Only after hours of research was I able to discover that Vista has dropped support for the MS-CHAP v1 protocol (in favor of v2) for VPN authentication. Older Cisco firewalls do not support v2 - leaving no clear way short of a $3000 firewall upgrade for Vista to connect to the remote servers that Cherie needs to manage. It seems that Microsoft is refusing to enable v1 support in Vista to force people to move to v2, and Cisco is refusing to offer a v2 software upgrade for older firewalls to force people to buy newer hardware. Ugh.
(BTW - I was amused to confirm that on Mac OS X connecting to the VPN "just worked" without needing to do any configuration at all...)

Problems #4-50: Exploring Vista, there have been plenty of other strange behaviors and compatibility glitches that just shouldn't be there on a stable mainstream operating system like Vista is marketed to be.


Solution: We are now in the process of "downgrading" Cherie's D820 to Windows XP. And XP is currently busy downloading the 80+ (!!!!) critical security patches necessary to bring itself up to date. I wonder - hasn't anyone at Microsoft ever heard of a cumulative update? Geesh!

In some ways it feels wrong to invest a lot of effort configuring a new machine with an officially obsolete operating system like XP - but Vista is not yet ready for prime time, leaving us seemingly no choice. If even Microsoft's own other products are not yet ready to work with Vista glitch free, it is no wonder that so many third party applications also seem to be having trouble. At this pace, Vista may not be ready to fully replace XP for years...


To recap - Microsoft's own newest developer tools and office suite both have major issues working properly with Microsoft's new flagship operating system, despite Vista having been in beta testing for well over a year and under development almost forever. If Vista points towards the future of Microsoft operating systems, I dread what that future may look like. What a mess.

Scanning the net and talking to other geeks, I am amazed at the flood of Vista horror stories that I am hearing. I don't think I've ever seen such a negative reaction to a new Microsoft OS before - not even towards the unloved Windows ME.

In so many ways Vista is very clearly an improvement over XP for "everyday users" that I was hoping I could start recommending it to friends and family - but there seems to be too much that feels broken in the overall Vista experience right now to make this recommendation seem wise.

I am sad to say that my official geek recommendation regarding Vista right now is this:
AVOID

As alchmst mentioned recently (he just bough my old PowerBook) - "once you go Mac, you never go back". And I have to say - I've come to discover that I couldn't agree more.

Yesterday Apple posted an essay from Steve Jobs on the state of DRM. And despite having a near monopoly on online music sales with the iTunes Store and iPod locked together via Apple's FairPaly DRM technology - Steve is calling for a DRM-free future.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Wow.

It is great to hear Apple and Steve taking such a strong stance for openness. Steve Jobs is once again demonstrating his mastery of PR, flipping the debate about Apple having locked the iPod and iTunes together so that now the music industry gets to be the bad guy.

This snippet from the Business Week article sums things up well:

Regardless of what direction the industry takes now, Apple can now claim the moral high ground. "He may be counting (on the idea) that the labels will still not give up on DRM," says Kohn, who's now CEO of RoyaltyShare, which processes royalties on digital tracks. That lets him "play the hero to consumers." Or if the labels do drop DRM, then Apple can claim credit, rather than be blamed, says Kohn. "It's a PR ploy, and he'll come out ahead either way."

But - actions speak louder than words. Apple could start to embrace DRM-free content today, without waiting for the big-four music labels to come around. Even major bands like Barenaked Ladies are willing to give it a go, not to mention the TONS of independent music from lesser known artists out there already available without DRM.

BoingBoing has a nice rundown of some of the other online responses, including links to some artists who have been trying to get Apple to sell their music DRM-free for years.

And what about movies, Steve? You have a lot of sway over Pixar, and even Disney. How about releasing the Pixar movie catalog online without DRM restrictions?

Now that would be an impressive move indeed.

You clearly are willing to throw down the gauntlet, but how willing are you to pick it up?

Are you game?

In defending his decision to make the iPhone a closed device, Steve Jobs said this to Newsweek:

But it’s not like the walled garden has gone away. “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

Steve - you are being absolutely ridiculous and beyond foolish now. Are we supposed to believe that the cell phone networks of the world teeter on the brink of collapse every time a Treo crashes? How far disconnected from reality are you?

No - there are plenty of fully open smartphones out there. In fact, that is often a key part of the definition of just what a "smartphone" is.

Michael Mace has posted his analysis, postulating that this is an attempt by Apple to control iPhone users by locking them in so thoroughly that no future competitive device will be able to lure them away.

But before you lock users in, you have to get them on board first - and I think Apple may be shooting themselves in the foot here. If they had heralded the iPhone as "the next great platform for developers", very nearly every mobile developer and tech enthusiast on earth would be lining up to buy one to experiment with. Within six months of the iPhone's launch there would be hundreds of innovative applications available, and behind all of those applications would be developers evangelizing the iPhone to potential customers.

Not even the mighty Apple marketing machine would be able to equal the sort of grass roots push that would emerge.

Instead - mobile enthusiasts and developers are starting to become vocal critics of the iPhone, instead of fans.

I love this comment I read today on SlashDot in reference to the way Steve Jobs is locking down the iPhone:
"The word "irony" is way overused, but these words, coming from a guy who started his company with money earned by selling blue boxes to defraud the phone company, belong in irony's fucking dictionary entry."

Indeed.

In the Newsweek article, Steve goes on to say:
“[The iPhone] is five years ahead of what everybody else has got,” he gushes. “If we didn’t do one more thing, we’d be set for five years!”

In some ways he may be right. The iPhone certainly is a big step forward in a lot of ways, and it is incredibly refreshing to see some actual UI innovation in phones at long last.

But - open and extensible smartphones have been around for about five years now.... And in that regard, I'd say that the iPhone may just be five years BEHIND. *gargh*

My biggest unanswered question concerning the iPhone seems to have been answered:

Mr. Jobs is moving in that direction, too, but it appears that he wants to control his device much more closely than his competitors.

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

[NY Times]

Egads - what is Apple thinking?!?! At the very least it seems like it would be a no-brainer to allow for an open user-installable widget architecture. You could do that without ANY risk to the stability of the phone.

Apple made a big deal during the iPhone launch about how the iPhone is running OS X - but they now tell us that they have all that power locked away out of reach. This is such a cruel tease... Apple now has the best mobile hardware and software platform out there - and if they were to let developers on it amazingly innovative things would emerge from big and small developers alike. But by making it a completely walled garden, they are throwing all that potential out the window.

Macintosh fanatics are NOT happy, and an anti-iPhone backlash is starting to emerge now that the launch euphoria is fading.

Having the iPhone be a locked down device is probably the one thing that will keep me from standing in line to buy one the day it comes out.

I am NOT happy about this. *grrrrr*

The iPhone announcement today ended up being even cooler than I had hoped it would be.



Michael Mace and I were chatting online as we watched the coverage of the keynote - and this afternoon he turned our chat log into a blog post in his most-excellent Mobile Opportunity blog covering the mobile industry.

Reading the chat transcript is interesting - you can see just how excited two jaded mobile industry geeks who have seen it all can get when fully under the influence of Steve Job's reality distortion field.

(If you care about understanding the mobile space at all, you should be reading Michael's blog btw...)

I also spent a lot of time "sparring" this afternoon with roadriverrail in response to this post of his calling the iPhone "crappy". We both share a lot of good thoughts and commentary - this is a good thread to read.

Though I am pretty sure that I want the iPhone to be my next phone, there are a few problems with it:

1) It is not 3G - only EDGE.
2) It is locked to Cingular - potentially for "multiple years".
3) It is not going to be out until JUNE! *argh!*

And then there are the unanswered questions:
1) Will it work as a modem for getting my laptop online?
2) Is the software development platform open? How open? Full API's? Just Widgets?
3) Is Google Maps location aware or not? Is the potential there for real-time driving directions?

I really wish I was in San Francisco right now so that I could dig for details at MacWorld. Waiting until June to get a closer look is going to suck...

Apple is at this very instant unveiling the iPhone.

I am "watching" the live blog at Mac Rumors Live.

WOW.

Total geekly lust is presently being ignited to the extreme.

Must... have... NOW!

I am working on a big DVD project chronicling the Conexus Cathedral project I worked on at Burning Man this year.

I have approximately 900 photos that I intend to include on the DVD both as a video slideshow and as hires originals, and I have been painstakingly working on them in iPhoto correcting and cropping and tweaking away....

And now comes the pain:

1) iDVD has a very nice feature that can automatically include hires originals of photos imported into a movie (or slideshow) project in the DVD ROM portion of the disc. Perfect - exactly what I need. BUT -- It uses the original (meaningless) filename for the photos when doing so - not the photo titles I have assigned in iPhoto. Which filename is more user friendly on a DVD: "First Sunrise :: BM 2006 - Build Week (Tuesday)" or "CIMG3702.JPG". *gargh*

2) I can "export" the entire photo set out of iPhoto and into a directory on my computer, and when exporting I can set the filename to be the iPhoto title and not the original name from the camera. Annoying, but workable. At least the names are right on the disc now. But when I import the photoset into iDVD directly from iPhoto, iDVD takes the iPhoto "title" and allows me to superimpose it on the photos when the slideshow movie plays. That is nice. But if I import photos from a directory, the "title" on all 900 photos is now blank and must be filled in manually. (No way in hell!) The order also seems to be getting scrambled in the process to. (See my rant about modification dates below...)

3) To get around this, I suppose I could first RE-IMPORT the entire photoset back into iPhoto, and then export that set back to iDVD - a massive waste of disk space and a major hassle. But by doing that both the "title" and filename will match, and will presumably survive an export to iDVD. Or, I could create the DVD-ROM portion of the disc with the hires photos manually - avoiding the whole reimportation hassle but making it harder to work on both the DVD-ROM and DVD movie sides of the project simultaneously since changes or renamings in one set will not be carried over to the other...

No matter how you look at it, annoying. This should NOT be this hard... *grumble*

WORSE: Setting aside the issue with filenames - the photos in the directory no matter whether I manually export them from iPhoto or let iDVD manage it all have a date based upon either when they were imported from my camera, or when I last made a modification to them. In other words - the very important and meaningful chronology of the photographs is lost! The building of the Cathedral when viewed in Finder or on a PC is now an out-of-order jumbled mess, rather than a compelling narrative story.

To fix this - I could prepend my meaningful names with ugly numbers that encode order and can be sorted "alphabetically" - such as "06.09.29-10:29:32", a royal pain when 900 photos need to be manually renamed, and ugly on screen particularly as a subtitle...

Or I could try and figure out a way make the file creation or modification date reflect the actual date that the photo was taken - which is what iPhoto displays and what users actually care about.

After way too many hours researching this, I only found two tools that seem capable of this task:

First I found A Better Finder Attributes - a seemingly powerful program that can (among many other things) batch change a photos creation date to match the actual date taken as recorded in the JPEG EXIF data. You can then make another pass to change the files "modification date" to match the "creation date", since the modification date is the field more typically displayed and sorted on. (Why should this need to be two steps I wonder???)

But - the unregistered version of "A Better Finder Attributes" can only work on 5 photos at a time - not enough to work through my 900 photo set or to even experiment much with on a large scale.

Next I tried CocoViewX, a freeware image browser that just happens to have tacked on to it some EXIF utilities, including the nice ability to reset the file modification/creation date for batches of photos with one simple click.

BUT: CocoViewX has not been updated in over a year, and it is not a "Universal" binary compiled for Intel so it runs VERY slowly on my MacBookPro. And it has a bug that causes it to crash after processing through 121 files, forcing me to break my project up into smaller batches. (Still better than 5 at a time though for experimenting with getting a workable workflow!)

One final annoyance - the way that CocoViewX modifies the files does NOT show up in Finder until Finder quits and restarts - making it at first look as if the program did nothing. I found another freeware utility called Nudge that can kick Finder into refreshing its view of a directory - but it seems silly to need a tool to do that.

I do intend to go back and take a closer look A Better Finder Attributes and its sister program for powerful renaming: A Better Finder Rename. I think some combination of those two tools should make future photo projects a bit easer.

But - WHY IS THIS SO HARD IN THE FIRST PLACE?!!?

This whole mess is just yet another example of the sorry state of metadata use and management in the computing world. But that is a rant for a different day...

PS: Any best practices suggestions or tips from other photographers is very much appreciated, btw...

I'v spent the past fews days learning how to use RapidWeaver.

Though it has more than a few quirks and weird UI over-complexities, overall it seems to be a really cool and powerful website development program and I am pretty happy with what I have been able to make it do. It sits nicely in between the powerful pain of hand-coding, and the confining simplicity of applications like iWeb.

I last worked on www.radven.net back in June, when I first tried experimenting with iWeb - creating the old site in just an afternoon.

But iWeb made adding simple things like Flickr Badges, JavaScript snippets, iFrames and such nearly impossible.

With RapidWeaver, I have already been able to figure out:

+ How to embed a Flickr badge into a sidebar.
+ How to incorporate my LJ post headlines onto the front page. (Using the awesome Feed2JS tool!)
+ How to incorporate my Amazon Store directly within my site.

There is a lot more cool stuff on the drawing board too that I haven't finished yet.

Anyway, please check things out. Thoughts, comments, and feedback appreciated!

www.radven.net (NEW)
www.radven.old (OLD)

Macintosh Users - go here: www.macheist.com
{Hurry - only three hours left!}

On the surface this is just a simple one-week sale to get $350 worth of some pretty impressive Macintosh software for a special bundled price of just $49.

But lurking below the scenes is one of the most interesting bits of viral marketing genius that I have seen in a long time. Anyone interested in Internet marketing should check out how the MacHeist came together. In the span of a week, the 18-year-old creator of the Heist has accomplished raising $150k+ for charity, probably $500k+ for himself, and he is giving the 10 participating developers an amazing amount of exposure that I think will pay off extremely well for all of them in the end.

I can't tell whether the controversy was planned or not, but the Mac blog-world is in a tizzy with discussion over whether or not the heist is a "scam to fleece developers" or marketing genius and a win for all involved. I believe strongly in the later - but the firestorm of "scam" posts and stories is what made me stop and check out the website and ultimately plunk down my own $50. I was planning to buy RapidWeaver and Delicious Library anyway - and now I get them both for way less, and I get 8 other very cool looking apps to try that I probably never would have even heard of. Nice!

It is a rare treat to see something new done in marketing that feels like a true win-win for everyone involved. Congrats to the MacHeist team for pulling off something that seems to be both truly new, and legitimately cool.