Category: Apple

iPod Touch

I picked up an iPod Touch at CostCo today. Primarily, I’m just looking at it as a replacement for my Nano, which I’ll probably be selling to a friend for a few bucks. I like it a lot, though there are a few little annoyances. Here’s a couple of bullet lists of good and bad stuff:

Good

  • The interface, in general, looks nice and works well. The multi-touch stuff works well.
  • Safari works well on most sites, and there are a lot of sites that are formatted either for the iPhone/iPod Touch specifically, or more generally for mobile devices, that work really well. The browser on the PSP, by comparison, doesn’t work nearly as well.
  • The screen looks pretty good. I synced a few episodes of Heroes down to the device, and they look nice.
  • QuickTime and PDF support in Safari. (I was actually pleasantly surprised about the PDF support. I wasn’t expecting it.)

Bad

  • Since there aren’t any physical controls, I’m not going to be able to use it without looking at it. That’s something that I take for granted on the Nano. I don’t think it’ll be too much of an annoyanyce, but we’ll see how that works out.
  • There’s one stuck pixel on the screen. It’s not really obvious, except on a solid black background, though.
  • The keyboard is a bit of a pain. It works, and I’ll probably get used to it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be using it to write blog posts or long e-mails. (It’s definitely better than typing on my Moto SLVR though.)
  • No Flash support. That kills some web sites that rely on it.
  • You can’t use a stylus on the screen, the way you would on a Palm. That kills some potential applications that won’t work with only finger controls, like maybe a drawing app or handwriting recognition.

We won’t see (approved) third-party apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch until next year. I’m hoping for a few key apps. First, a note-taking app. If I can get that, then I can probably (finally) dump my Palm i705. I use the Palm primarily for contacts, calendar, and notes. The Touch already has contacts & calendar; if they can just add notes, then they’ve got everything I need in a PDA. I’d like to see a good offline e-book reader, too. I don’t know if I’d use it a lot, but I’d like to have it. And maybe a couple of games that make innovative use of the multi-touch interface. Heck, even a simple solitaire game would be nice.

weekend weirdness

My iBook stopped working on Saturday. I brought it to the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store, and they managed to get it back up and running again. For a little while there, though, I thought I was going to have to trash it and buy a new MacBook. I’m planning on doing that at some point next year; I’m glad I didn’t wind up having to do it today. Right now, I’m doing a full backup with Retrospect, just in case.

I found out that Citibank canceled my credit card today and issued me a new one. I discovered this by trying to log on to my account on the web, and getting a big red error message about how my account was locked due to a security problem of some kind. I called them to ask what was going on, and they told me that they’d canceled the card due to the TJ Maxx security breach that happened a while back. Now, I can’t access my account online until I get a new card in the mail (hopefully, early next week). And I’m going to have to change my card number with every merchant that has it on file — Amazon, eBay, and so on. Fun.

iTunes Plus

Apple rolled out “iTunes Plus” today, their DRM-free, higher-quality audio format. Any songs you already own that are now available in the new format can be “upgraded” for 30 cents a pop. I think this varies if you’re upgrading an entire album — my collection came to $11.70 for 44 songs, including two full albums and a handful of miscellaneous tracks. I decided to give it a shot, but I couldn’t get the purchase to go through. I guess a lot of other people are trying, too. Maybe I’ll try again in a day or two. Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide if I want to preorder the new Paul McCartney and Ryan Adams albums.

There’s a good article on iTunes Plus over at Ars Technica.

AppleScript

Related to my little iTunes buying spree from yesterday, I’ve been trying to find a good way to keep my purchased iTunes stuff in sync between my PC and my Mac. I’ve been thinking about just using rsync or something, but I haven’t gotten around to playing with that yet.

Instead, I started looking into doing this with AppleScript. That seems like it should be easily doable, but I haven’t been able to get this set up exactly the way I’d like. I started with a “copy files” script found at Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes page. The script just copies any selected songs in iTunes to a single location. I’ve just been selecting my most-recently purchased stuff in the “Purchased” list, then running this script to copy the files from my Mac to my PC. Then, on the PC, I just drag the files over iTunes, and they get moved into the right directories automatically.

I’ve got two little problems with this script: First, it tends to come back with an error when it’s copying a big video file. Second, it doesn’t provide any feedback while it’s copying (no progress bar or anything like that). I decided to see what I could do about that, and came across this article at MacTech. I managed to use the example from that article to put together a nice app with a progress bar that should do just what the original script did. It compiles OK, but, unfortunately, doesn’t work when I call it from the iTunes script menu. Clearly, I need to do some more reading on AppleScript and figure out how this stuff works. Also, the script uses the same method to do the file copies as the original script, so I’m assuming video file copies will probably error out the same as they did in the old script.

more iTunes silliness

I preordered the new Wilco album from iTunes a couple weeks ago. It was released this week, so I went into iTunes to download it, but I kept getting an error 5002. I contacted support, and found out that there’s a really weird bug in the iTunes store: if you’ve got song credits (as opposed to dollar credit) in your account, you can’t download a pre-ordered album! How weird is that? The support guy told me that if I used up all my credits, then downloaded the album, he’d then replace the credits for me. So, basically, I’m getting 21 free songs out of this bug.

I’d been meaning to download the Essental Gram Parsons collection, so I went ahead and did that. Unfortunately, that used up dollar credit instead of song credits for some reason. It’s not an album, just a collection of songs, so I don’t see why the “buy all songs” button wouldn’t use song credit before dollar credit, but that’s what it did. So, I then decided to download the Essential Ryan Adams and Essential Sol Volt collections too (just the “basics” part, not the whole thing), but I did it song by song, so I’d use up the song credit.

So now I’ve got quite a pile of alt-country (and related) stuff — Wilco, Son Volt, Ryan Adams, and Gram Parsons! A lot of stuff to listen to. I haven’t heard from the support guy about putting those credits back in my account, but I’m assuming that’ll happen by Monday.

iTunes economics

Lately, I’ve been adding money to my iTunes account from various sources, rather than just putting stuff on my credit card. I’ve been cashing in pennnies, nickels, and dimes at CoinStar, and getting iTunes credit in return. And, a while ago, I bought a $50 iTunes card at CostCo for $45, and put that into my account.

Today, I was buying a gift certificate for someone from AmEx, using my rewards points, and I decided to spend some points on an iTunes certificate for myself while I was at it. I didn’t look at the fine print too closely, though. The certificate you get through AmEx is a 50 song certificate, rather than, say, a $50 certificate. The difference seems to be that you can only use it towards individual song purchases, as explained in this tech note on Apple’s site. So, that’s a bit of a pain, since I’m usually only buying albums. Also, song credits expire after six months or so; regular dollar-value credit doesn’t. I guess I’ll have to spend it on individual songs, and maybe buy some albums song-by-song rather than all at once.

iBook problems and Jethro Tull

I noticed that Apple added a bunch of Jethro Tull stuff to the iTunes store this week. Tull was my very favorite band back in my teen years. They’re still a sentimental favorite, though I don’t listen to them much anymore. Browsing through the stuff in iTunes made me think a bit about which Tull albums I had on CD, vs. the ones I only ever had on cassette or vinyl. While I have about a dozen Tull CDs, I’m missing a few key albums that I never got around to re-purchasing. I also realized that I’d never ripped any Tull into my iTunes library. I decided to correct that by ripping the 20 Years of Jethro Tull box set.

I didn’t get very far, since my iBook wouldn’t pull the first CD into the drive. Nor would it pull any other CD into the drive. After some research, I eventually figured out that you can fix this problem by inserting a CD into the drive right as the iBook starts. OK, that’s kind of weird. The drive sounds kind of funny now, but it’s loading, reading, and ejecting CDs fine.

Getting back to Tull, I found a few casettes that I didn’t have on CD, so I figured I’d look into buying them from iTunes, or maybe just getting the CDs from Amazon. As usual, the iTunes version is more expensive than buying the physical CD from Amazon in most cases — usually $10 from iTunes and $8 from Amazon. The one notable exception is “A”, which comes with a bonus DVD if you get it from Amazon, so it costs a bit more than just buying the album from iTunes.

iPhone FAQ

David Pogue has an iPhone FAQ up on his blog.
A few disappointing items, assuming he’s correct:

Can it run Mac OS X programs? –No.
Can I add new programs to it? –No. Apple wants to control the look and feel and behavior of every aspect of the phone.
Does it have games? –No.
Does it have GPS? –No.

I was pretty sure it *did* have GPS, so that’s a bit of a bummer. And the idea that it’s not open to third-party development is pretty disappointing too, assuming it’s correct. Oh well, maybe I should start thinking smartphone!

iPhone

I have to admit I’m pretty interested in the iPhone. When it first started looking like the rumors were true, and this was really going to be coming out, I got pretty hopeful that it would be a decent PDA in addition to being a phone, and it looks like it is. I haven’t really been 100% satisfied with any PDA I’ve owned since the Newton. The iPhone seems to have most of the stuff I’d want in a PDA: a touch-screen, a decent contact manager (and, presumably, calendar), and a robust OS that can (probably) do a decent job of running games and miscellaneous third-party software. I don’t really *need* it to be a decent music and video player, but if it is, then that’s OK. And if I can do a decent job of browsing the web with it, then that’s great too.

I’m a little concerned about the fact that it’s only going to be available through Cingular. I’m currently with Verizon, and I don’t have any problems with them, so I’m not enthusiastic about switching carriers. Looking at Cingular’s web site, it looks like they charge a minimum of $40/month for voice and $20/month for data, under their current plans. Assuming the iPhone plans with be similar, that’d be $60/month for service, minimum. Right now, I’m only paying about $20/month, though of course I’m getting very limited access to the internet on my current phone, and I have a very limited voice plan. Jobs didn’t talk at all about monthly pricing during his keynote. I’m hoping that maybe there will be a special monthly plan for the iPhone that gets you voice and data together for a reasonable sum, maybe $40 or $50 per month total.

There’s a somewhat interesting article on the iPhone over at Time.com, by the way, with a bit of history on the development of the device and some of the reasoning that went into the design.

Delicious Library

I’ve been entering my audio CDs into Delicious Library. I’ve entered about 200 so far; probably another 200 to go. I just found one good reason why it’s worth my time to do this. I bought a (used) copy of “Are You OK?” by Was (Not Was) from Amazon a couple of weeks ago. I was quite sure that I only had that album on vinyl and not CD. Well, now I have two copies on CD, since I just found my original CD while I was entering stuff into Delicious. As a side note, the main reason I bought the new copy was due to a strange desire to listen to “I Feel Better Than James Brown”. Now, I’m feeling a little conflicted about that.