Apple's Latest Product Announcements

I must admit, this week's announcement of new Apple products really got me thinking. There was a lot there that I couldn't really conceive of until I finally saw it implemented: online TV distribution, The Digital Hub, and the Video iPod at last. This was almost more of a conceptual and marketing breakthrough than a technological one for Apple, and it's really interesting for me to see how they're starting, gradually, to implement these concepts. I just want to talk fairly briefly about my thoughts on some of the main ideas brought to light last week.

The first thing that struck me is that Apple is the best thing to ever happen to U2. That band is so lucky ol' Steve apparently has a hard-on for them. I mean, does an iPod announcement take place that doesn't prominently feature these has-beens? Has U2 written anything interesting in the last decade? I think the band is getting a lot more out of this deal than Apple at this point. But this is just a snarky aside.

Next, I think Apple has really nailed, or is very close to nailing, the online content delivery thing. They proved themselves with music, and now other media want in. Big time. And Apple is not only happy to provide, but I think they do a hell of a job. In some ways, Apple has become the intermediary in the ever-hostile relationship between producers and consumers. They make all that ugliness pretty, and not just on an aesthetic level. The pricing scheme vs. quality of the downloadable TV shows is about as perfect as I can imagine. I find myself wanting to download shows I've already watched and have on tape, just because I can, and because they're cheap. Seems like a great deal. And if I ever miss an episode of Lost, I'll be checking iTunes long before I ever suffer through the Hell that is BitTorrent. Again, because I can, and because it's cheap. The great thing about a service like this -- the thing that Apple realizes -- is that the point of your two bucks is to bypass the hassle of the free alternative. It's the same reason I buy DVDs instead of stealing them: It's easier and the price is reasonable. Why do people still steal music? I'd argue it's at least partly because it's easier to do so, and the price of music is unreasonable. I mean compare: $1 for a 4 minute song vs. $2 for an hour long show. Someone is getting screwed in the music model. Three guesses who. That's why people steal music so much more readily than video. The downside to all this is the DRM, which I'm pretty sure works just like the DRM for music. I understand the reason for it, but I still think it's a pain in the ass. And, as I've just pointed out, the greater the pain-in-the-ass factor, the greater, in some ways, the motivation to steal. As long as the DRM is less aggravating than the stealing process, there's value added and folks will pay. But someone needs to come up with a better DRM model if they really want people to pay money for stuff they get on TV for free. Other than that, I don't have much to say about it.

The new iMac seems to be the first real, tangible iteration of the "Digital Hub" idea. If I could replace my aging stereo, TV, VCR and DVD players with this one device, I'd plunk down my fourteen hundred clams right now. Alas, the big caveat: no ability to record. You can't record anything from the TV. Again, I understand the reasoning here, but it's a deal killer for me. It's too bad, too, because it looks like they've done a brilliant job with the remote and the Front Row interface. But without the ability to record content, it's just a big, fancy, pretty DVD player. I think this is coming though. I think what we're seeing here is, like I said, the first iteration. Apple likes to seed an idea or a part of an idea before they go for broke. That's what I think they're doing with the iMac and Front Row. Just like they did with the iPod Photo, they're whetting our appetites for more, and giving us a gentle cushion, of sorts, on the future. Letting you envision the logical next step and get ready for it, psychologically.

Finally, the iPod. Not the video iPod; just the iPod (that now does video). Actually, it's important (to me anyway) to note that the iPod only plays video. And apparently, from the lack of firewire capability, that's all it will ever do. I can't say I'm surprised by this, though I'll always long for my own personal vision of what the Video iPod could (should) be (have been). Nevertheless, it is not to be. Still, the new iPod looks cool. It's another well-implemented idea, with much more potential than I would have imagined. Combined with downloadable content at reasonable prices, the iPod becomes a whole new entertainment device: Want to watch a movie with some friends? Download it, put it on your iPod, and head over to their house. Hell, put ten movies, a couple TV shows, and a party mix on your iPod, and you're set for a whole weekend of media fun. As a video teacher, I can see the potential for putting all the videos I use as demos on an iPod, and never again worrying about whether I have this DVD or that for class today. In short, I think video adds a social dimension to the iPod, where before it was quite the opposite. I'd imagine most people will not look at video on the device itself as they travel to and from work. Rather, I imagine they'll plug it in to the TVs of friends and watch movies and shows with other people, but in a much more convenient and portable way then they ever did before. It's a neat idea, and I'm very tempted to get one. That said, the lack of firewire bothers me. I'm a firewire guy. I do a lot of video work, and I need firewire. If I were to get one of these puppies, firewire would be sorely missed. Also, the type of video you can watch on the iPod is very limited. And unfortunately, said video looks like pure ass on a full-sized computer monitor. I don't know how bad it looks on a TV, but, apparently -- and I find this somewhat disappointing -- downloadable video content is only made to be viewed on an iPod. I, again, have a feeling this will change over time, and that we will see quality options for our downloadable video content sometime in the near future. But for now they are seriously limited.

Ah well. The Apple giveth and the Apple taketh away.

I don't own an iPod, and I never have. Almost everyone I know does, but not me. I'm a huge fan of Apple, but more for their computers. Yet, for the first time, I find myself tempted by the latest iPod. (Add video to something and that will tend to happen to me.) This is saying a lot. I think this latest batch of products shows, more than serious technological leaps, real conceptual breakthroughs in terms of the marketing and management of purchasable, viewable, online media, and the relationship between the producers, the consumers and the device. I, for one, am glad Apple is at the helm of this... Is it too soon to say, "revolution?" Yeah, probably.

Other Articles of Interest:
Daring Fireball Article
Subtraction Article

iChat AV UI Annoyances

iChat AV is fantastic in a lot of ways. But there are a few basic but important things that really annoy me about its interface. The first thing I hate about iChat is that it can't remember window positions across restarts for any windows other than the buddy lists (and you know how I am about my window positions). This, combined with the fact that iChat AV employs numerous windows (Video Preview, Connection Doctor, and Text Chat are all windows I routinely have open in any given session), and the fact that the default placement of said numerous windows is entirely unusable (i.e. every window opens opens smack dab in the middle of the screen, except Text Chat, which opens in the upper right-hand corner, I believe), means that every time I open iChat, the first few minutes are spent positioning windows in some sort of functional arrangement. It's a freakin' pain.

The other major interface screw up is how iChat deals with active windows. If you use video, for instance, you'll sometimes be presented with what looks like two active windows. In the picture below, note that the close/minimize buttons are active for both the Video Preview window and the Connection Doctor window. This is very, very, very bad and happens in iChat AV with a variety of important windows open. And why is this so bad? Pretend the Video Connection window is the Video Chat window, and you're chatting with a friend. If you want to close the Connection Doctor window in this case, you might just be fooled into thinking it's the active window. You'd hit command-w to close it. But guess what: It's the VIdeo Chat window that's active, and is the one you just closed. Ooops!

iChat AV: Can you tell which window is active? Neither can I.
(click for larger view)

Which brings me to my third major gripe about iChat AV: Closing the Video Chat window ends the session. Immediately. No discussion. No popup. No confirmation dialog. There are so many other places in Mac OS where confirmation dialogs exist. Sometimes to the point of absurdity. But when it comes to something as important as interpersonal communication, Apple has decided it's not such a big deal to make sure we want to disconnect with a simple, "Are you sure you want to disconnect?..." confirmation dialog.

So, let's look at what we've got here:
1) An application that forces you to touch most of your windows at every launch.
2) Active window confusion in which two windows appear to be active.
3) The ability to completely end a session by closing one of said apparently active windows.

This is a usability mess. Yes, Apple has done a great job simplifying the often confusing process of video conferencing. But these are few really serious UI flaws -- the types of flaws that you rarely see in Apple application -- and they should be addressed. Like, now, please... Hello?...

Shit... I think I just got disconnected...

Speech Recognition in Tiger

Let's get one thing straight: Tiger is buggy. If you have any doubts about this you might just try playing around with Speech Recognition.

Speech Recognition is by no means new. It's been around since the Classic days, and it hasn't changed much since. I first played with it in grad school, in Mac OS 9. Though it may not be new, and it may not be perfect, it is pretty nifty in concept. Basically, you can control just about anything you want using a microphone and your voice. There are a whole bunch of ready-to-use "Speech Commands" that come built right into the OS. All you do is turn it on (in the "Speech" System Preferences), a little microphone do-hicky pops up, and you can begin commanding your computer to do whatever your heart desires. (Well, almost.*)

Speech Recognition is always a bit frustrating: The computer is slow to recognize commands; it misinterprets all the time; and you have to speak way to slow for it to understand you. Heaven help you if you're eating a burrito while you want to use Speech Control. Star Trek it just ain't. (And, yes, I firmly believe Captain Picard was a big burrito freak.)

Using Speech Recognition in Tiger, though, was plagued with problems far beyond the usual Speech Recognition frustrations. Problems that seemed to be in the OS. Turning Speech Recognition on in the Speech System Preferences pane seemed to work fine. The microphone commander widget popped up, I got a sound level, but upon opening the "Speech Commands" window, I discovered I had no speech commands. Thinking I'd missed something in my OS install, I hunted around for awhile, looking for the speech command files. I eventually determined that I had them, and they were right where they should be, but Speech Recognition just wasn't seeing them. Finally, I went to the Speech pref pane, and looked under the "Commands" tab. Here there is a listing of default speech commands, groups of which which you can check or uncheck per category. Mine were all checked. On a lark, I decided to quit Speech Recognition, uncheck and then recheck all these items. Voila! that did the trick. After restarting Speech Recognition, I finally had speech commands.

Using Speech Recognition for awhile, I was amazed at how much you could do. One cool addition since I first played around with it, is that Speech Recognition can now be used to navigate menus in any application, which means you can control, really, just about anything. Menu control is amazing, but could use some refinement. For instance, there is no obvious way to navigate back through a menu -- to back up through a menu hierarchy. It turns out, the way to do this is to issue the command for the top-level menu item (like "File" or "Edit"). If you're in a nested menu structure, that's how you back out. Not terribly intuitive. But not awful, either, once you figure it out.

At some point, however, Speech Recognition just stopped taking commands. It didn't freeze. It still showed mic input. It just wouldn't listen. I expect this from a five-year-old, but coming from my PowerMac G5, it just pisses me off. The solution was to turn off Speech Recognition, and then turn it back on. But guess what I found after doing this: Yup, no speech commands. I had to go back and repeat the entire process of enabling speech commands, just to get the app working properly again. These are OS bugs if you ask me. I don't think Speech Recognition's changed one bit since Panther, nor have a lot of apps that have had problems, yet Tiger still seems, somehow, to make a mess of them. Add Speech Recognition to the list.

*One last thing: My initial reason for wanting to use Speech Recognition was to control my iSight camera. It should be noted that one thing you can't do with Speech Recognition is control the device that's being used to input commands, i.e., the microphone, or in my case, the iSight. I know... Duh...

Anyway, you might want to give Speech Recognition a try sometime. It's pretty cool, and if nothing else, a fun time-waster. Just be aware, like so many things, it's buggy in Tiger.

My Hand to God: Adobe Space Monkey

I was attempting a drag-and-drop install of Adobe Photoshop CS2 to a machine that had not been licensed yet, here in the lab, just to see if one tiny part of my life could be made that much easier. It could not. The attempt, however, did afford me the opportunity to get a load of this Easter Egg:

Adobe Space Monkey Splash Screen
(click for larger view)

Which was promptly followed by this error message:

Adobe Space Monkey Error Message
(click for larger view)

Seems the Photoshop programmers have left us something to smile about when we discover that we'll be installing Photoshop on each individual Mac in our lab. Thanks, guys! You couldn't come up with a volume license scheme that allows me to install a single copy of PS across multiple machines, or a package installer that would let me do same over the network, but you managed to find the time and resources for Adobe Space Monkey. Awesome! I finally get why Photoshop costs hundreds of dollars: You're a bunch of assholes.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Yowsa! Browsers!

Yes, I know, that is the worst post title ever. Sorry.

Let's move on.

I've been playing with the beta version of Firefox. I must say, it's pretty cool. Lots of nice stuff. A few bad things as well. I've compiled a list of the systemsboy-specific pros and cons. In doing so, I've gone over what it is that makes me like certain browsers over others, and started looking at some additional options. Here is a loose, and very subjective, collection of ramblings and lists about browsers.

General
Browsers are a mixed bag. None seems to do everything you want it to do exactly how you like it. So I tend to use multiple browsers. For general surfing. I use Safari. It's the most comfortable for me to use, and the easiest on the peepers. Firefox, however, is the most full-featured. It will load just about anything properly. I use it for editing the blog, as well as whenever a site doesn't appear properly in Safari, but it's kind of slow and clunky looking. At this moment, I am using Camino, which I'm surprised to discover, actually supports Blogger's "Compose" mode. It's pretty, and I like the key commands. And, hoo-boy, it's fast. Camino, however, is one of those eternally-beta-level (okay, technically it's "alpha," but whatever) browsers, and I'm pretty sure it won't be able to totally replace Safari or Firefox for me. Even writing this post, I had a minor glitch. But I'd love to see Camino development continue to the point where the browser is as rock-solid and feature rich as Firefox, and as pretty as Safari. That would be great.

When trying out browsers, I tend to consider a few basic parameters that determine how much I like or dislike the browser in question. These parameters vary among users and are extremely subjective. The ones that affect me the most are:

• Functionality -- the ability to load pages, web apps, forms, etc.
• Appearance -- how the UI looks, as well as how pages render
• Usability -- how well key-commands and UI elements, like preference panes, function and make the browser comfortable and easy to use

Now I'd like to take a quick look at the browsers themselves, and list some of my likes and dislikes for each.

Safari
Despite everything, this is my favorite all around browser. I use it for everyday surfing and most web-related tasks. Still, there are things I've grown to hate about Safari.
The Good:

• Safari is pretty -- the UI is nice, and pages, when they load properly, look great
• Safari is fairly fast, at least fast enough for me
• Safari's key commands, for whatever completely subjective reasons, make the most sense to me
• Safari is bundled with the OS, so I can use it on any Mac I may be on (lab, client, etc.)

The Bad:

• A recent Safari bug is the window placement problem I've blogged about that drives me nuts, where Safari resets my window placement after quitting and relaunching the app
• Another recent Safari problem has cropped up wherein pages don't load the first time, particularly when lodaing a group of tabs
• Safari still lacks the ability to bookmark a group of tabs, a feature I've been waiting forever and a day for
• This frickin' scroll-wheel jump is frickin' annoying
• Blogger's "Compose" mode is not available in Safari

Firefox 1.0.6
Firefox is the most full-featured and configurable of the Mac browsers. I like it a lot, and I use it to post to this site as it works with Blogger's "Compose" mode. It features a "Multiple Home Pages" function that I could see coming in real handy someday. It's very stable, and works almost identically on Mac, Windows and Linux.
The Good:

• Works across platforms
• Can load just about anything
• Stable and secure
• Just about anything you can dream of is configurable (except, unfortunately, key commands)
• Firefox is skinnable, which is great if you can find a theme you like, which is hard (I'm using "Brushed" right now, which I like, but not as much as "Pinstripe," which appears to no longer work with Firefox)
• Firefox's key-commands aren't bad once you get used to them, which doesn't take long
• Firefox can use Amazon's A9 online bookmark manager, which helps mitigate the ongoing problem of inconsistent bookmarks across multiple computers

The Bad:

• Firefox is kind of ugly -- not butt ugly, but clunky and silly looking, comparatively speaking
• Firefox is slow, both at launch and loading pages
• Clicking in the URL field selects the entire link, instead of placing the cursor at the click-point
• Firefox has no key-command to stop page loading (that I can find, anyway)
• Opening a URL in a new tab requires a command- or control-click and can't be done from the middle mouse button
• The enormous list of preferences is badly displayed and hard to manage from the clunky sheet interface provided
• The key-command for said preferences window usually doesn't work, requiring a trip to the application menu

Firefox 1.5 Beta
The new beta version of Firefox shows real promise, and addresses a lot of my issues with the previous version. It's the impetus for this post, actually. The reason I've started looking at browsers again.
The Good:

• Clicking the URL bar no longer highlights the entire field, but rather, puts the cursor right where you just clicked
• Clicking a link with the middle mouse button now opens the link in a new tab
• Tabs can be rearranged, which is just so cool
• The new, tab-based, floating preferences palatte is nicely done and easy to navigate
• The key-command for the preferences window now works consistently
• There is now a key-command to stop loading a page (and it's the standard "command-period")
• In fact, most key-commands now match those found in Safari

The Bad:

• The tab selection key-command (which used to be "control-tab") has reverted to the one used for Mozilla (which is "control-page up/down", which sucks for people, like me, who switch between a PowerBook and a Desktop, as the PowerBook version of the command requires the use of the "fn" key, and, thus is a differnt key-command than it is on a desktop machine), which was the reason I stopped using Mozilla in the first place -- this is a deal breaker for me
• This new version placed aliases of Firefox in my sidebar and on my Desktop without even asking -- like on Windows!

Camino 1.01a Alpha
Camino has gotten steadily better in recent months and years. It looks good, it feels good, and it's snappy as Hell. If it ever becomes stable enough to get out of alpha, I think it could be a contender. Right now, it is not what I'd call dependable. In fact it crashed in the middle of this post.
The Good:

• Camino is fast -- it feels the fastest of the browsers I've tested, though this is not a scientific assesment by any means
• Camino is pretty -- this latest version uses the "Unified" theme, which I personally think looks swell, and is aqua throughout
• Very configurable -- more than Safari, though not as much as Firefox
• Camino has good, easy-to-learn key-commands

The Bad:

• Can you say, "Crashes a lot?" That's my major beef with Camino
• Also, as it's perpetually in "alpha", there are probably lots of pages that don't load properly in Camino, but I haven'tused it as thoroughly as the others, so this is really only a cursory examination

So that's my take on the state of browsers for the Mac. I use a range of them for various tasks, which kinda sucks for the obvious reason that my bookmarks are in a state of total disarray, a problem only partially mitigated by the availability of services like Amazon's A9, or del.icio.us. Still, between Safari and Firefox I can get my work done without too much trouble. And I'm learning to let the bookmark thing go. Too many computers, too little time, and with the greatness that is Google, bookmarks are less crucial than they once were. I have to say, though, I'd love it if Google made an online bookmark manager. Or, Hell, a cross-platform browser with integrated, online bookmark manager. C'mon. You've got to admit, that would be sweet!

UPDATE 1:
Looks like there is a stable release of Camino after all. My bad. I've just been testing it. It has weird, centered, aqua tabs, and it's not nearly as fast as the alpha version. The alpha version is so fast, I get vaguely nauseous surfing with it. Dude. It's fast. But I found one other beef with Camino, and all the browsers I looked at: none of them renders text as nicely as Safari. Don't know why. All the non-Safari browsers render text slightly bolder. It makes everything look, I don't know, chunky and a little cheap, particularly on pages like MacFixit. I think this has a lot to do with my reasoning for using Safari for day-to-day surfing. It looks very nice. But if you need the speed, check out Camino 1.0a.