However, for many apps, there is a counterpart ‘pro’ version of that app, which is intended for someone who has more specific expertise and wants more tools at their disposal. You might graduate up from iPhoto to Aperture, from iMovie to Final Cut Pro, and so forth.

Well, I would like a ‘Pro’ version of iTunes. Here’s my beef:

Apple has changed their mind. A lot.

I have been using iTunes since it came out. There have been ten major versions since it was released. Apple has changed the preferred file format, DRM has come and gone (for music anyway), and there have been some stupid default behaviors built into the software, which have changed over time.

My music library is huge.

Couple all of these changes with a VERY LARGE music library. Let’s presume it’s larger than 80 GB.

I don’t want my whole music library on my computer.

You don’t want to store all of that music on your laptop because it takes up so much space. Fortunately, iTunes lets you specify the location of your music library. So, you put it on an external drive. (In my case, a Gig-E NAS with RAID 5 protection.)

Hey, I didn’t ask you to slink back there

This introduces problem number one: If you don’t have that drive mounted, then iTunes will revert back to your /Users / yourusername / Music / iTunes/ folder. It doesn’t say, “Hey! I couldn’t find your library, want to pick one?” It just does what it thinks is right. Bad. You don’t realize the external volume wasn’t connected, you rip a few CDs, or buy some in the iTunes store, and now they’re in two places.

Fortunately, there’s a ‘Consolidate my music library’ command. Okay. So you do that. But there’s another issue.

What does (!) this mean – c’mon, you’re not even trying

While your external drive was disconnected, let’s say you tried to play a song that lives on it. You get a (!) indicator, letting you know that iTunes can’t find the song. You might also get a dialog box saying, “iTunes was unable to locate your music. Want to help us find it?”

That sounds helpful and all, until you look down the list of exclamation points. Pages and pages of them. And (to my knowlege), helping iTunes find that one song does not help it find any of the other songs, not even the ones in the same folder (from the same album.) Exactly how hard is it looking? Wouldn’t this be a semi-intelligent behavior for it to exhibit? (We hear stuff about low-level lookahead caching and predictive file reading. This is not a new idea; please try harder.)

So now you’re looking at a bunch of these exclamation points, wondering how you can get rid of them. You think, “I should sort out just the ones that it can’t find.” But you can’t click on the column header to ‘sort by Found Status’. So that’s out.

Automatically Add to iTunes

One way I have had some success with is by just re-adding the music to my iTunes library, by tricking the program into re-finding and re-sorting the music files.

There’s a newish feature called ‘Automatically add to iTunes.’ It’s a folder inside of your music library. You drop stuff into it, and it magically gets sorted into the right Artist / Album hierarchy. You might think, ‘if it can’t find the files, I’ll just drag them out of their proper place, and into this folder, and let it re-add them.’

(One word of advice: move the folders to another folder first, then drag them into the ‘Automatically Add to iTunes’ folder a few at a time. It prevents ugly loops from happening.) This works, to a degree, but takes a long time. Except there’s a bug with some files, and iTunes ends up chugging, and by the time you cancel, there are hundreds of occurrences of some or all of the tracks from a specific album (in my case, Aphex Twin) showing up. So keep an eye out.

Bad file naming conventions, and: too many choices is a bad thing

Ever rip a two disc set in the past? You may see some files labeled “01-19 Songname.mp3″ and other labeled “04 Trackname.mp3″, so they don’t sort right in the browser, even if they show up in the same album together. Maybe a different popular music program out there (like the one you used before iTunes existed?) does the disc-track thing when it names its files.

Yes, we get that it is Track 02. Give it a rest.

I think this next issue happened because there used to be a preference that let you say whether or not it would put the track number before the filename. Whatever the historical precedent, users will end up with this problem: a few files named, “02 02 02 02 02 02 02 02 02 trackname 01.mp3″ That’s enough to go postal over. Are these not simple sanity checks?

What DO you do with a duplicate like Maria 01.mp3?

At some point, you’re doing to run into duplicate files. Whoever’s fault this is, yours or iTunes’ (probably both to some degree), it will get annoying. You know how Confucious supposedly said, “Man with two watches never knows what time it really is?” Well, let’s say you’re looking at your iTunes music library. You come across the Humpty Dance (and you’re wondering where you can get a hat like that) when you notice that it’s listed twice. You have two versions of it. Crap.

In fact, you’ve got a bunch of these duplicate tracks. Hey, neat: iTunes has a command in the File menu, ‘Display Duplicates’! Cool, what does it do? Well, it filters the list of songs to only show the tracks it thinks are, uh, duplicates of one another. But if you have two copies of a file, it shows you both of them. Wait a minute. Then what? To get rid of duplicates, you’d have to command-click every other file (or whatever) before hitting delete. Sounds like a huge PITA? Yes, it is.

I mean, let’s say you had three identical copies of a file, and when you picked, ‘Display Duplicates’, iTunes only showed you the second and third ones, and told you so. (e.g. “Original file not displayed. Fire at will!”) Then you could just pick any of the files you saw in that list and delete them, if you felt comfortable doing that. (And doesn’t this make more intuitive sense? What do you expect when you select ‘Display Duplicates’? You didn’t say, ‘Display Duplicates and the Originals They Duplicate’, did you?)

Back to your two Humpty Dance issue. You could right-click on the first one and say, “Show in Finder” (or Windows Explorer, whatever.) And you’re taken to your “Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Digital Underground/Sex Packets” folder, and sure enough, you see two files: 01 Humpty Dance.mp3, and 01 Humpty Dance 01.mp3. Now, wait a minute. Which one should you delete? Are they both exactly the same? Maybe one is newer. Maybe one has more correct information in it. Wouldn’t want to get rid of the wrong one, you know?

But, one might be better quality

This is a valid concern for some people. What if you’ve got multiple copies because you’ve re-ripped your CDs at a higher bit rate recently? Hmm, you could manually compare these attributes by going back into iTunes and hitting Cmd-J (or Ctrl-J) to see the View Options. Check off Bit Rate, Sample Rate, and (File) Size, to see if one file is of higher quality than the other.

But, one might have correct-er information

What if you’ve painstakingly gone through and tagged some of your files with proper metadata (artist, album, year, genre, etc)? You don’t want to delete all that hard work. Well, you could ‘Get Info’ about the first song, and click the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons to look at both of them and compare their metadata. Got it? Great!

Now, repeat these processes for 12,000 of your songs. Call me when you’re done.

Let’s look at some other ways you might solve this.

Just start over?

Some people just get so fed up with these issues that they will rip out their existing music library file (or, just move it to the backups folder) and let iTunes start afresh, using the ‘Automatically Add to iTunes’ trick I mentioned above. Sadly, this makes you lose a lot of your own metadata: song play counts, last played, your star ratings, your playlists, etc. Not advised, if you can help it.

Besides, this will not solve all of the problems – when you re-import files, you might see duplicates if you have more than one copy of a file. Especially if it’s got different metadata.

Music Fingerprinting Technology?

Even worse: let’s say you scroll down to the very bottom (the ‘dregs’) of your iTunes music library, where it lumps all of the files together. You have a bunch of 01 Untitled.mp3, 01 Untitled 01.mp3, etc files. How the heck do you do anything with those?

Well, have you heard of MusicBrainz? This is a software + (free) service, based on music ‘fingerprinting’ technology, where the program will ‘listen’ to (sample) your poorly-tagged, un- or mis-identified music files (that’s the Gourds covering Gin and Juice, not Dave Matthews, chief.) This process creates a unique hash, which is compared to a large database of such hashes; many hashes will map to the same song, perhaps due to different track lengths, bit rates, sampling, etc.

The server spits back metadata that it thinks is your song, plus a percentage of how certain it is of the match. You can set a threshold (say, above 85%) at which the program will automatically update the ID3 tags on your song. Once this is done, your music should have fully filled-out artist, album, year, genre, etc.

CD Hashing Technology

Well, guess what? Apple doesn’t use technology this cool. Why should they? (Smugly:) “If you were a good little consumer, you’d have bought it from us in the first place… and it would all be properly tagged already.”

Instead, Apple uses the GraceNote CDDB technology, which creates a hash from data found in Track 0 when ripping a CD, and uses that to look up the information about the album, and embed it into each of the tracks. Which is great, if you originally used iTunes to rip that CD, and if the info was in GraceNote in the first place. Not always the case.

Sadly, Mac music fingerprinting programs like iEatBrainz have fallen by the wayside (read the comments – “I’m not dead yet! Can we go for a walk?” “Shut up, you’re not fooling anyone”), and were slow and hard to use – note developer Jay Tuley’s comment, “This processing typically takes several seconds per song,”

The AppleScript Language, and API, suck

Worse, Apple does not give you direct access to manipulate the data in your own music Library. (Yes, there’s an XML file, but it’s one-way. It doesn’t get parsed, it just gets generated.) They make you use AppleScript, which is a sloppy, slow language that frustrates the crap out of a lot of people. And that’s how programs like iEatBrainz are forced to work. Apple will periodically change the API, or change the way the program reacts to certain commands, which also breaks programs like iEatBrainz.

“But,” you might say, “at least there’s something I can do to manipulate my music data! AppleScript!”

AppleScript Resources

At this point you may head over to a helpful site like Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. It is a great resource. I have grabbed many useful scripts from the site. But the average user is not going to want to go through this process, and these are third-party – use at your own risk. They do not (nor can they) solve all of the problems that come from using iTunes to manage your media, and as stated above, at your own risk – using these scripts may have unexpected consequences.

What about off-the-shelf programs?

I have purchased the ‘Gold’ version of TuneUp (for $29), a program that is supposed to clean up your music library. It’s also available in a subscription model of $19 per year, but I figured I’d run into the problem more than once so I went for it. Big mistake.

What I can tell you about the TuneUp experience: It did okay at identifying a number of tracks. But it didn’t eliminate any duplicate files, and tried to do way too much other stuff. It wasn’t just happy with trying to clean up my library; it always wanted to launch its companion app at the same time as iTunes, steal precious screen real estate from the iTunes window, tell me all this biographical info about the band I’m listening to (“Tuniverse”), and if they’re playing a concert soon, link YouTube videos, yadda. It chugged my machine, slowed iTunes way down, launched itself when I didn’t ask it to, and was generally obnoxious, so I disabled it.

Another program I’d check out is TidySongs, an Adobe AIR app (eww) which costs $39. This does have the ability to get rid of duplicate files. I haven’t used it yet, but plan on doing so soon.

So everyone has been up in arms for the last month or three about what Apple will announce today (Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2010.) The big rumor is that it’s a tablet. At this point enough people are saying it that I feel reasonable about having hope that’s what it’ll be.

What do I want to do with a tablet?

OmniGraffle comes to mind, except with more natural gestures and ways to draw things, mindmap, etc. I’d love to be able to use it as not only a way to annotate, paint, freeform doodle etc. but also as a way to quickly make some polished looking Graffle-type drawings. Pertinent to what I do is the ability to make signal flow diagrams between A/V components. That would be awesome.

Besides the usual — web surfing, book reading, movie watching, etc.

What technology or features do I hope it’ll have?

As much as I’m getting used to the software keyboard on the iPhone, I could live with a soft keyboard when I didn’t have any other options, but would greatly prefer using a USB or bluetooth keyboard. So I hope that’s possible.

If I had to wish for ‘innovative new ways of interacting’ with the thing, I would look at the proximity sensors Apple just got a patent for. If you could flick your hand through the air above the ‘page’ of an eBook, or to scroll down a pdf file, I think that’d be pretty cool. I can imagine a whole bunch of other gestures that could be used to navigate documents, and with more resolution and real estate, it probably makes it easier to do more technical stuff like rotate things, etc.

I was a fan of the handwriting recognition in the Newton. I’d love to see that come back but be even better. Maybe even learn my chicken scratch penmanship. Voice recognition would be nice but Apple’s got nothing on Dragon and they know it. They’d have to do a lot of improving before I would be interested in voice commands.

I’d like it to have two cameras, as some have mentioned. One to look at me and one to look at other things. But if I had to choose one, it’d be the one to look at me so I could videoconference. Worst case, I could always flip it over if I wanted to snap a photo of something. It couldn’t be any harder than trying to take a self-portrait with the default Camera.app on the iPhone…

I’d like it to have an accessible Disk Mode, though I’m not holding my breath.

Multitasking would be nice, the ability to switch between app windows, minimize and maximize them, etc.

I’d like to see the main menu page’s real estate used wisely, and perhaps give users some sort of ‘nested folders’ metaphor…

Flash would be lovely but I 100% doubt that’d happen. Until the web evolves to embrace other more open standards, face it, that’s what we’ve got right now.

Is it worth it?

I am a big fan of innovative technologies. I have had Apple stuff since I was six years old, starting with an Apple ][e with Robot Odyssey and later a Mac LC with Color MacCheese. So I’ll be the first to admit I’m biased. It’s what I like and what I know.

My prediction is, as long as the device is $1000 or less, I’ll feel that it’d be worth getting one.

However, owning another device that would require its own data subscription strikes me as ugh. My work phone supports tethering and I can hook my laptop up to it and surf the web. Case closed. I still cannot tether my laptop to my iPhone. I’d want to be able do this same thing with a tablet. I’ve got my phone on me most of the time anyway. So I’m torn as to whether I’d want to get yet another monthly subscription to support another device with a cell modem built in.

My Concerns

Apple has been growing steadily across the board: Music, movies, apps. All DRM’d, licensed content bottlenecked through the iTunes store. Now the rumors are that they’d be adding books, magazines, newspapers, etc. So, even more stuff that’d be locked down, non-portable, DRM’d. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

If this is just a device that is a ‘bigger iPhone’ rather than a ‘smaller MacBook’ then you are starting from a different set of expectations. I guess I’m wondering how easy it will be to collaborate – not just with others, but between your own devices. My thinking is that Apple will say, ‘you have iDisk! Look to the cloud!’ etc. and push that as the way to move stuff around.

Recently, I had an even more fortunate thing happen.

Maybe a month before my applecare (three year) warranty was up, I grabbed my MBP and took it over to the couch. I’m sitting there surfing and all of a sudden, zewwwwwp. No warning, it just died. Thankfully I wasn’t in the middle of anything huge, just surfing. I go plug it in and turn it back on and I get this ‘service battery’ warning.

So I call Apple and I ask what’s going on. The Level 1 guy asks his “are you actually an idiot” questions, decides I’m not and escalates my call.

The Level 2 guy asks me to submit a System Profiler report to Apple which gathers data for diagnostics.

During the course of the call, the ‘service battery’ thing goes away before the report is submitted. (Like a frog that will only sing, “Hello, my baby…” when nobody is watching.)

So, the Level 2 tech cannot see that the ‘service battery’ warning was active. (However, they can read my system logs and see that the #$$% thing crashed.) He has me reset the SMC, which is a power manager chip on the motherboard. He also has me power-condition the battery, e.g. charge the battery fully, run the machine on battery until fully drained, and then recharge it again. I figure, these are good things to try, and we’ll see if it happens again.

A few DAYS before Applecare is going to expire I see the stupid message again. I don’t mess around; I resubmit the error report right away before it decides to leave again. But I’m busy and can’t call Apple right then. Or it’s too late at night, or something.

With about two days to spare, I decide I have to get this done before my coverage runs out. I submit another System Profiler report. I call, and get escalated again. This time the Level 2 guy sees the new report, with the error message, and compares it to the one from a month ago. He says, “Wow, it shouldn’t be draining the max capacity of your battery this quickly. So we’ll take these steps:

1. We’ll send you a new battery. Send your old one back to us in the same box, return label underneath, etc.
2. We’ll send you an empty box. Send your laptop to this place nearby for diagnostics (Austin to Houston, overnight shipping) and we’ll see if something is wrong. Doesn’t matter if it goes beyond the warranty period.
3. If you keep having problems that are related to this issue, you can keep calling about it and we’ll support it.”

I backed up the machine (to Time Machine and with SuperDuper), and sent the machine in on a Wednesday. They got it Thursday, turned it around the same day and it came back on Friday morning. Oops; I had gone out of town for the weekend. I had no idea it’d be that fast. So I got it the following Monday.

Even more amazing is what I saw when I opened the box:

• They replaced the motherboard (apparently it was a component soldered on which was malfunctioning and causing it to drain the battery, so they just swap the whole thing)…
• They also replaced the whole bottom case and listed “cosmetic damages” as the reason — when I was biking to work on snow/ice in Chicago maybe a year and a half ago or more, I had flipped over. My MBP was in its protective “MacTruck” secret-agent briefcase, so the corner got dinged instead of killing the laptop. It worked just fine, but DVI cables didn’t go in more than 95% of the way. Whatever. Fixed…
• Even more exciting: they replaced the keyboard! I’ve typed so much on this keyboard, particularly with the keys you use to navigate through PINE (text based email via Terminal) that I had worn through many of the keys’ letters and parts of the palmrests. All replaced.

Therefore: Apple == phenomenal customer support. I am so happy about this.

This is what we know:

• Problem exists beyond our demarc (TNI), meaning it’s not the wiring in our house. You can plug a phone into their box on the outside wall of our house and hear the static or fast-busy or whatever it’s doing at the moment, provided it’s raining.
• Lots of aerial lines in our neighborhood (as opposed to buried).
• Technician who was already out here estimates four or five splice points between our house and the nearest cross box. In other words, those are the places where it’s likely to be having the problem.
• To fix the problem, a technician would probably have to cut in a new pair. However, they’d also want to do this while it’s raining, to make sure they don’t pick a different, equally bad pair instead.
• What this all means is, the problem has probably persisted because who wants to go climb four or five different poles in the rain to hunt down this issue? I know I sure wouldn’t want to.

Trying to use the AT&T automated trouble-reporting service is also very frustrating. Here are some reasons why:

• You’ve already told the main system that answered the phone what line you’re calling with trouble on. But once you’re connected to the actual ‘home phone line repair center’ you have to do it again, because these are two different systems that aren’t smart enough to talk to one another.
• Once you get to the part where you’re asked, “Does this affect the data portion of your line, or the voice portion?” you don’t have an option 3 for, “Both.” Even though earlier, you’re given the choice to tell them that multiple systems are affected by the problem you’re having.
• There is an eleven hour window in which the technician might show up, and of course not until Monday (though a tech I spoke with said he’d be out working on Sunday.) This pretty much can sink one’s whole day.
• There is no way to use the automated system to say, “We only have this problem when it’s raining.” If the lines have dried up by Monday, this will waste a technician’s visit for no good reason.
• Speaking to a human rep is just as useless. All they can do for you is close out the ticket, or leave it in place for the time / date when you know that the problem won’t manifest itself. They have no way to escalate the case, or at least they claim not to.

I cancelled the visit scheduled for next week, and I think we should strongly consider cancelling our service. As horrible as Time Warner cable is supposed to be, I have far more faith in that technology’s ability to carry the bits and stay online than I do with DSL… even if the company itself is reputed to be just as bad, or worse.

One other option would be to consider AT&T’s ‘U-verse’ service. Our friend has it and has reported ridiculously fast bandwidth speeds. However:

• You have to be within 2600 feet (as wired, not as the crow flies) from the nearest cross-box with a fiber termination;
• Maximum possible distance where it could work is 3300 feet;
• We live between 0.6 and 0.7 miles from the nearest crossbox, which is 3168 – 3696 feet… not likely to work. (The “is it available in my area?” system says no.)

Suck.

Some of the most successful ones are those that insert chunks of text from freely available sources. (One spammer frequently samples works from Project Gutenberg.)

Usually these will get run through some primitive form of Markov Chainer, which will munge the contents up enough so they’re not easily matched to existing sources, but language-like; …enough to fool the heuristics on most spam filters, anyway.

Since I still browse most of these emails using PINE, I am thankfully spared the graphic ad (usually for male enhancement supplements) and instead only see [IMAGE].

But I usually glance over them, just to double-check. And today I found myself reading the whole message body from one of them. It’s a somewhat jumbled, but otherwise touching, glimpse into another person’s life. My guess is that someone got some spyware on their computer that ransacked their inbox or their sent-mail, and it stole their email.

Here’s the content of the email, formatting preserved and all:

i was born in orange county where my parents had lived in the same house
for like 20 years they had both lived in so cal all their lives
     i think they are so cute i love her litte handwriting and she is beyond
      excited to pass them out some other projects she and i looked at but
             didnt get around to (of course) from martha (of course)

i swear nothing makes me happier than a peaceful space and some needles
with that heres the stuff i eat salad with chicken a different salad with
chicken repeat repeat this is the hard thing about it not a ton of
delicious options im kind of kidding ive found a few other yummy things
too
how have you been surprised what can i say
cate and i went through some of the free options around the web for
valentines to download and print
acre of land is my favorite song of his
    breakfast i always have two eggs and salsa always i dont really get sick
      of it and it would really stink if i did because theres not a lot out
       there for breakfast actually when you are at your ideal weight and
       ovulating regularly you can have any kind of whole grain hot cereal
     without a problem you know steel cut oats etc i am not quite there yet
    berries and grapes are pretty low on the glycemic index and i have those
                   too oh and i love cottage cheese with fruit

just a phone call one night she had an aneurysm and although this was a
surprise of the worst kind it was the most spiritual time of my life much
good and understanding has come through that loss
i have been laying in bed sick since monday it seems to be getting worse
by the day not better i am so irritated and antsy i miss my family and i
want to clean my house
      but i couldnt stop looking at the picture because it shows the place
                where i played for the first 12 years of my life

i bet that block is not nearly as big as i remember it being but i
remember it being quite a trip
    it was the first time i realized that things dont always go how you think
         they will and that it all can turn out better than you imagined

isnt life surprising i was laying awake thinking last night about how
different my life has gone then what i thought (in a good way)
       she follows me around all day just in case she might be needed for
      something anything cute little penny is just a wee dog but she feels
      strongly that part of her duty is to scare the crap out of anyone who
     gets near our house just so they know no one is going to mess with her
      family not on her watch she is undeterred by bigger animals and scary
                    men- they all get yelled at to stay away

i went to the fabric store tonight in search of prints to make some new
spring scarves with some will probably end up in the shop too i just love
this look also i love toast (the catalog and the cooked bread)
this week i am getting all my ducks in a row so that this weekend i can
hole up and sew myself some desperately needed skirts for church and
summer
hey my little family
     and then suddenly and to my surprise i met and married the man i had no
    idea i was dreaming of but he was perfect for me and better than anything
                      i had imagined or sought after before

i remember that too it was really fun i hope it gets warm again real soon
i cant wait to go to the park again with you two love mom

It is a fairly common thing these days to see people wearing small bluetooth headsets on their ears, for use with cell phones. One common term for these people is ‘The Borg’, or if you don’t follow Star Trek, you could think of them as ‘dorks.’ The joke is that it’s getting harder to tell the truly crazy people apart from all the people walking around talking to themselves, until you realize that they’re the ones wearing the headsets.

My gut aesthetic sense (and popular culture’s opinion, it would seem) is that anyone wearing one of these earpieces is ‘different from us’, and something about these headsets makes people uncomfortable or irritated in some way. We make jokes about them, but it’s to ease pressure — perhaps to mask the annoyance of having them bring their half of a conversation into our public listening space — and now they can do so hands-free, meaning they can do more everyday things while chatting. A technology miracle! But more annoying. Even if you’re not actually being a bozo, the fact that you’re wearing one (or even that you own one) calls to mind a prior unpleasant experience that someone else has had with one of these Borg people yapping it up in their earspace.

Your new Third Eye

These days it’s also becoming more common to see people snapping pictures of objects with their cell phone camera. Maybe they think something is cool or funny, and want to make a note of it, or share it with their friends (on facebook, perhaps.) Or maybe they’re walking around looking at items in a store, using an image-recognition service (like SnapTell) to browse reviews or check the prices of items on the shelf against those online.

But there are subtle boundaries that people are encouraged to respect. For example, if someone was talking on their Borg headset in a library or during a play, you might feel justified in interrupting them to ask them to take their conversation outside. If you see someone taking your picture in a public place, they may have the right to do so, but it might still creep you out. If you saw a stranger taking a picture of a child, it might also make you even more uncomfortable. (Enough to encourage dumb legislation, even.)

And your Spare Brain

There’s an argument that having a PDA as an ‘offboard brain’ makes you dumber, because your own brain doesn’t have to remember as much stuff, and that losing it (or having the battery go dead) cuts you off from all of that information. While this is probably true to some degree, David Allen (of Getting Things Done fame) makes a pretty compelling counter-argument that if you can offload the important details into a trusted system, then you can blissfully Zen Out, knowing that you’ve got everything under control. Just don’t misplace your battery charger, I guess, and be sure to keep a backup of your spare brain.

Whose Rights are Right?

Whether you’re on the side of the techno -philes or -phobes, we have to balance the rights of the people empowering themselves with these technologies against the rights of everyone else… to reasonable expectations of peace and quiet (from their inane conversations), and privacy from their cameras.

Along these lines, I would argue that there are pros and cons to making the technology more or less conspicuous. Depending on your beliefs, you may choose to assert your right to take photos of items in a store. (I was once asked to stop photographing a set of wall hooks at The Container Store.) Or to take pictures of other people, if you’re in a public place. But there may sometimes be social or legal consequences, or at least some degree of conflict with others over your choices.

Your Outsourced Sixth Sense ($9.95 in the App Store)

I’ve been kicking ideas around about this TED video by Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry from MIT’s Media Lab, entitled “Unveiling the “Sixth Sense”, aka ‘game-changing wearable tech.’ It’s basically a Wearable + Gestural + Cheap/off-the-shelf mashup with cell phone-as-brain; in its current implementation, people wear a small projector hanging downwards from their neck, with a 45-degree mirror so it can project out in front of them. There is also a web cam above this, which studies the scene looking for four small colored marker caps (worn on the pointer finger and thumbs of each hand). This is how the user interacts with the system.

Images copyright MIT Media Lab and whoever else, yadda.

The system has some pretty neat applications written for it. We see demos of various features: Pranav framing his hands to ‘snap a photo’, then reviewing and sorting his ‘snapshots’ (projected onto a wall), later on; drawing a watch on his wrist to see a clock projected onto it; ‘pinching’ in and out and scrolling around a map (again on the wall); dialing the phone (with dial pad projected onto his hand), etc. (It’s his actual phone number, too. I wonder how many people have called him as a result of seeing the video?)

Then we see Pranav in a grocery store, picking up a roll of Bounty paper towels. He is shown a ‘yellow light’ (think traffic light), projected onto the packaging. (This presumably refers to how eco-sensitive the manufacturer’s processes and products are.) He swaps this for a set of ’365′ (Whole Foods brand) paper towels and now sees a ‘green light’, and can touch the green circle to get more information. Pattie points out that these indicators could be tailored to the user’s personal consumption preferences; perhaps they just want the softest brand of tissues, and damn the other consequences.

Now he picks up a book, and we see an Amazon product rating. Turning to some random page offers up an annotation. He picks up a newspaper (with the photo cleverly pre-whited out) and a headline picture is projected onto it. An airline ticket reports (in the margin) that a flight is late. He even walks up to a person and sees a ‘tag cloud’ representing that person — right on their shirt. However, it is missing one key piece of information about this person:

• Thinks you are a huge dork.

Wearable Computing is Not New

As an undergrad student at the University of Michigan in the late nineties, I was a member of ‘entity’, a student group that exhibited digital art and was working towards the advancement of a cross-disciplinary multimedia degree program for students. During one of our conferences (Immedia 98), I helped Steve Mann (originally from MIT, then at University of Toronto) present slides about the evolution of wearable computing. This sidebar from the wikipedia article on wearable computing is a great example of how much the technology has changed, and how much more stealthy it has become. The glasses (which are now hip again, for what it’s worth!) contain a camera and a heads-up display.

Steve relayed an amusing story about how he would walk into a store with a (non-functional) Hi8 camera and pretend to be filming the ‘maybe-cams’ (black opaque or mirrored camera domes, some of which are just there to fool you into thinking there’s a camera behind them) until someone would ask him to stop. He would use this as an opportunity to have a dialogue with that person about why it’s okay for them to film him, but not vice versa? Usually the person would be very confrontational, at least until he’d put down the Hi8 camera, at which point they would relax a bit and explain the policy or whatever. Meanwhile, Steve is still filming and making an audio recording of the whole thing through the camera in his glasses. Too funny.

Steve also talked about an app that used head tracking to capture spherical images of the user’s environment, and featured the ability to make notes about certain locations or items in a room. So once again, this stuff is not new; it’s just being tied to an ever-expanding number of mash-up sites and data pipes which are getting easier and easier to access with EDGE, 3G, and so on.

Real-time, portable, Gestural Computing, however… is more new

And that’s why this demo is cool. Products like the iPhone and Microsoft Surface are becoming more mainstream; Apple’s trackpads are supporting gestures. The iPhone has an accelerometer (and some Mac programs use the one built into the MacBook, the Sudden Motion Sensor) which programs can take advantage of. Smaller mobile CPUs are getting powerful enough to decipher simple gestures, particularly those done on-camera; while this concept is certainly not new, the fact that it is possible on an inexpensive, hand-held device is. And that is opening up some new doors for applications like this.

Why this isn’t the Sixth Sense — yet. (5.5th Sense?)

This particular implementation doesn’t work well because it doesn’t track where your head is pointing; the camera just looks straight ahead. It is a chest-cam. (Please form an orderly line to present your jokes.)

A pair of camera/HUD glasses would more often be able to see (and display output) where the user was looking, though I wonder about one side effect — people move their head around a lot more than they move their torso, and I didn’t see too many examples of this system being used when the user was in motion. I wonder if a head-mounted system is too jerky for the current hardware platform?

There was a camera on the bill of Pranav’s cap in the outdoor ‘take a photo’ example, which is a little bit better — but being outdoors in the daylight raises another issue: Notice he’s not wearing his projector outside.

Sunlight washes out just about any projector’s light output, no matter how many ANSI lumens. A really good pair of HUD glasses might feature adaptive optics (like Smart Tinting to adjust the amount of outside light they let through, or the transparency of the HUD graphics) and a really good pair might even track the user’s pupils and determine not only what they were looking at but even the focal distance so the camera could change its focus to match. (I suspect that this would be outside of the contraints, the stated price range.)

Pattie points out that this version is by no means a finished product, and that one of their goals was to implement the system with inexpensive, off-the shelf-technology. But I cannot imagine that a pair of the camera/HUD glasses that Steve Mann was wearing in a photo that is now ten years old could be that much more expensive than a webcam/mini-projector, which she said would cost no more than $350 to put together today.

Finally, the fact that they’re using a projector means that they constantly have to find appropriate physical surfaces to project onto, and may further need to find sub-regions within those surfaces that are appropriate to project data onto.

I think it’s impressive enough if the system can analyze the video input, determine, “What type of object is this: a book? Okay, what’s the current page number?” etc, then go fetch someone’s annotation from the internet and just display it outside of the margins of that page of the book so it doesn’t clobber the text on the page.

But since you have a projector, you not only have to analyze that surface looking for context clues, but now that you have your annotations for the book, you have to say, “Okay: where’s the margin? How can I fit this long-winded user review into this tiny space at the bottom of the page? Hmm. Scroll bars?” etc).

If they’re really doing all of this additional thinking and processing just to be able to use a projector, and they’re doing it all on an affordable cell phone, then I’m certainly impressed by that. I just feel that the delivery of the I/O is a bit off.

My gut tells me that these are just demos with some very carefully programmed parameters, and a well-made video. But hey, I’d love it if this were much more real than I expect. (And downloadable open-source, for that matter.)

The Argument for Subtlety

‘Cole Sear’ (Haley Joel Osment’s character in The Sixth Sense) had an innate ability to see the spirits of dead people. But he seemed to just know about them; he didn’t come out wearing some ridiculous Ghostbusters rig on his back (like Steve Mann, ca ‘Early 1990s’) or it would have fundamentally changed the way we perceived and interacted with his character. Pair this with the phrase attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

People who have subtle, effective tech should ‘just know’ things and it should seem magic to someone who doesn’t know what’s going on. You show up looking like a Ghostbuster, and they’re not going to take you seriously. Well, they’re not going to take you out for a beer with the guys, anyway.

This goes back to my argument for inconspicuous technology. Don’t get me wrong; I am a dork, and these are my people. I would love to be able to use face recognition, image recognition, gesture recognition, and all of the other things shown in this video — but NOT with a big obvious camera hanging from my neck (or the bill of my cap) and NOT projecting that information out into the world for everyone to see! I am no stranger to the concept of projecting information onto objects; but I do it to make a point, and because I know that other people will see it. And quite frankly, the use of a projector for this application seems rather intrusive.

(Besides, how long before someone is running around making money by projecting G*ldenP*lace dot com onto everything? Mobile meme spammers with cheapo projectors, blinking subliminal messages… yuck. Sounds like a Charles Stross story.)

Once again, just as there can be consequences to using your bluetooth headset or your cell phone camera at the wrong time, there might be even more severe downsides to using this sort of HUD/cam glasses technology, especially if you abuse the freedom or knowledge that your ‘subtle tech’ gives you. You may just look really weird because people have no idea that you really are doing something by drawing circles on your arm… or you might get locked up for walking around while gesticulating in front of your face while wearing big aviator glasses and colored marker caps on your fingers, because people think you’re on LSD.

At least the projector makes it easier to convince other people that you’re not crazy, if they aren’t scared off by all that crap hanging from your neck. (Ooh! Ooh! I know; get the clip of Princess Leia saying, “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!” and make beeping sounds while you project that onto people. Hot date: guaranteed.)

Pattie says, “Maybe we’ll see you back here in ten years with the direct-brain implant version!” but that opens up a whole different product aisle-full of many varieties of canned worms. You think it’s horrible when some Second Life griefer figures out how to hack flying phalluses onto your glasses’ heads-up display? Wait until you can’t take the glasses off anymore.

In light of Apple’s recent announcement of what will be coming this summer in the iPhone 3.0 OS, I thought I’d revisit some of my wish lists / complaints from previous posts and recap what’s “solved”, what I’m hoping to see, and what still appears to be broken / missing.

Hardware

Apparently the rumor mill is blogging about the fact that there’s a new hardware identifier buried in the mix of gobbledygook that comes with the new SDK. This, they say, usually points to a new class of iPhone hardware. Sounds about right, given the timing, so here’s what I’m hoping will change in hardware:

More built-in RAM.

Not storage space, that’s inevitable — more temporary RAM so the iPhone can hold more in memory simultaneously. Frankly I think this needs to happen now more than ever because of Copy and Paste; users will be switching between apps a lot more, and if you think it’s annoying right now when Safari reloads the page you were just on, imagine how much worse it’s going to get. Come on.

Update: doubled.

Better built-in camera.

I’m not just talking about more megapixels, though that would of course be nice. I’m talking about the ability to shoot video, which the rumors say the new model will probably be able to do. I’m also talking about focal distance. Current iPhones cannot focus close enough to clearly read a one-dimensional (traditional) UPC barcode. I bought the Griffin Clarifi case for this specific reason, but trying to get iPhone software authors to support the very small subset of Clarifi owners is an uphill, and losing, battle to fight. Better to just give all new iPhone owners this ability, and that will solve the issue.

I’ve talked about wanting a ‘social consciousness’ app, and we’re getting closer to that — there’s apps like SnapTell and so forth — but I still feel that barcodes is a lower bar to entry for a truly standards-based social consciousness comparison app. (Otherwise, you are restricted to dealing with the API or the app of the people who own/run the picture-based product-recognition product.)

Update: better camera, auto focus, macro. Takes video.

Better Battery

So Apple made a big deal about their new MacBook Pro 17″ model with a non-user serviceable battery. I wonder if/when that technology is going to trickle down into the iPhone’s new product revision?

Update: better battery.

Third-party hardware support / Better Bluetooth communication

I’m very excited about this, but in a guarded sort of way. Mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I’m really happy about the fact that the diabetic 15-year old girl will be able to monitor her blood sugar levels on her iPhone. That is really, really cool.

And it is for reasons like this (health and safety, FDA regulations, etc), plus FCC regs about electromagnetic interference (Wow! It will sync with my pacemak–” BZZT) that I’m glad that Apple has strict regulations about which products are certified as “Made for iPhone” and allowed to develop products using the proprietary dock connector, etc. Those are good things.

On the other hand, think about how many cool hardware applications there are out there which are too rough-around-the edges for Apple’s tastes. Maybe they’re just not pretty enough for Jony Ive. Or maybe they’re just homebrew hacker stuff, things nobody ever could get permission to do but they want to, anyway. I mean, will we be seeing an Arduino iPhone development shield any time soon? I don’t think so.

This still runs into what I believe is an existing limitation:

I don’t think Apple allows development of interpreted languages or compilers for the iPhone, which is the excuse we always seem to see for keeping Flash off of the phone. (And frankly I don’t blame them; Flash simply dogs my mac, I can’t imagine how long the battery would last on my phone.)

But this causes problems when I want to have a very small development environment on my iPhone so I could program my toy robot, for example. Think about the Big Trak (programmable dump truck) that was around when we were kids. I loved that. HeathKit’s Hero robot? Tomy’s OmniBot 2000? Robotix? (Sorry, waxing nostalgic and showing my age there.)

Okay, now think about the Lego Robotics that today’s kids (and big kids) are playing with. My guess is that if a company like LEGO wanted to put out a mini-compiler to let kids directly program and edit their RCX, ROBOLAB or NXT-G source on the iPhone, Apple would flip over backwards to let that happen. Because they’re a big company, they make pretty (and safe) things, and there’s a huge revenue stream there. And Synergy. Ooh.

But what about the Arduino, or any other hardware hobbyist hacker toys that you can talk to via usb, serial, etc? I’d love to have some kind of Processing implementation on my phone. I know my friend Brian would flip for that too. But probably not Apple.

Frankly, I hope they don’t forget that they started in a garage. Let’s hope that there’s still a little bit of that garage spirit alive and well on the Apple campus, even if they did take the pirate flag down.

Furthermore, what about the much simpler possibility of a dock-to-”USB-A” cable? (the small square end.) This would make the iPhone the ‘host’ (computer) instead of the peripheral, and let you plug other peripherals in. Will there ever be a printing capability that isn’t done via wifi, bluetooth, or some special kind of print sharing on a host computer? My gut (and freenode’s #iphonedev channel) tell me no, because iPhones probably don’t have the right kind of USB ‘host’ controller inside of them. But frankly there has got to be a way to do this kind of thing. And once it’s been used for one such purpose, you can bet someone is going to figure out a new way to pervert the hardware to make it do something entirely unexpected — and much, much cooler.

Micro-directional D-GPS wish

I’m convinced that there is an untapped (as of yet) market for micro-GPS and wayfinding, mostly for indoor areas, offices, homes and so forth.

Most of the stuff that I’ve seen (that attempts to ‘solve’ this problem based on RFID or some kludgy wifi triangulation) just seems to fail.

I’ve seen some really cool demos of products where a control object (like a 3d mouse or something) is ‘located’ relative to a base station, then turned and manipulated in their air, etc. And there’s always great stuff going on with WiiMotes, too. But those are ‘tethered’ apps, in the sense that you can’t stray too far from the receiver or base station. I want a system that makes it easy to navigate a whole building and have a pretty good idea where you are, and how your device is oriented.

I’m convinced that there still could be some kind of system — perhaps augmented by cheap, plug-in wall-wart looking things (they could even have a power passthrough, sort of like lamp timers do) which would skim a little power, listen for some kind of signal from a PDA type unit, and then transmit very directional info to help it locate and orient itself in space.

This technology — whatever it is — has a whole lot of applications and could open some new doors. But I don’t know if it exists yet.

Update: added compass. Not exactly what I’m talking about above, but a step in the right direction.

In the meantime, here’s my more mundane wish list for third-party hardware:

External, fold-up keyboard.

I know, Steve hates the mere thought of it. Tough. I loved, loved, loved my fold-up external docking keyboard for my Palm III. (If there was a bluetooth version that was just as compact and slick, I’d buy it in a hearbeat; I’m not just married to the ‘must dock’ criteria.) Having a fold-up tactile keyboard would be a godsend in certain situations. (Think ssh.) A roll-up rubber keyboard would be acceptable. The ‘laser projection’ keyboard… thing is still a little too Star Trek for me and needs a certain kind of surface; frankly I don’t think it’s there just yet.

An OEM’d version of those awesome Burton iPod coats.

Okay, admit it, you wanted one too. Burton has made a few versions of their snowboarding jackets which had integrated controls (fabric soft-buttons) on the sleeves for controlling iPod playback. First as the headphone-controller on the 3.5mm jack (remember that one?) and later on, I think as a dock connector. These days there’s some english company that is making an ipod compatible jacket that has the hood that turns into built-in goggles when zipped all the way up. Don’t ask me, I have no idea. Okay, apparently it’s the Hero 3 ICU iPod Jacket (they also make a speaker jacket, oh joy) which uses the Fibertronic CONNECTED-wear integrated control set. So apparently this is farther along than I had hoped. Cool! (Now what do we need to do to get more manufacturers to start putting this kind of stuff on their jackets?)

Cycling accessories

Right now I have a Garmin Edge 305 cyclocomputer. It came with a cadence / speed sensor (detects magnets on the crank arm and back spoke) and also a chest strap with a heart rate monitor on it. I’d like to get an Edge 705 because it also supports the ANT+ protocol and lets the computer talk to devices like the PowerTap hub or SRM power meter. ANT+ is a special 2.4 Ghz low-power signalling protocol which probably won’t work with bluetooth or wifi out of the box, but I imagine there will probably be a dock connector with an ANT+ transmitter/receiver sticking off of a ruggedized iPhone sport case with a handlebar mount before too long. Because seriously, if I already have GPS and 3G capabilities, why do I NEED to buy an Edge 705 from Garmin? I’ll just buy their (or someone else’s) chest strap and cadence sensors, thank you very much. Seriously. The Garmin interface is not that great; it’s just the best of all the bad options out there that I could afford.

Who knows, though — part of me is still convinced that small, dedicated, ‘embedded’ and ruggedized devices like the Edge are still the way to go, especially when you go over the handlebars (because your phone is hopefully still tucked away in a safe place, so it still works when you need to call someone for a ride.) But I know that if you manufactured this sort of adaptor and did a bit of programming, you’d sell a ton of these things, just because it’s there and cool.

Prediction: Barcode and/or Credit-card swipe capabilities.

I’ll say it here: I predict that six months or less from the general release of the 3.0 OS this summer, we will see some hardware vendor release a rugged add-on for the iPhone which allows you to swipe credit cards, and (optionally) has a laser barcode scanner. Why?

Apple stores.

Do you know how much it must just GALL Steve Jobs and others to see their otherwise meticulously-groomed, smiling and approachable sales staff, having to hold onto these ugly, bulky Symbol PDAs that they run their point-of-sale system on? Now imagine them selling you Apple products using Apple hardware. If it doesn’t make you smile a little bit inside, then drink some of this kool-aid and I’ll check back with you later.

Seriously: Do you have any idea how many millions of dollars Apple, some third-party hardware manufacturer, and some third-party software development house are going to make if they can make an iPhone (or iPod Touch!) point-of-sale system that lets people scan barcodes and swipe credit cards right in front of the customer?

In fact, take away the barcode bit and you still have got a great restaurant POS system. Your server can use their iPod Touch to show you mouthwatering pictures or video of your dish, use the touchscreen to take your order, and when the meal is finished they can even swipe your credit card right in front of you. (I think there are rules about this in the UK, which is why they already have wireless at-table card-swipes.) Heck, you could even tack a thermal receipt printer onto the thing if you were so inclined.

Besides Apple stores and restaurants, just imagine inventory tracking with barcodes. And RFID readers. It’s another thing that’ll inevitably happen. So many possibilities here.

Having just worked six years at a museum: I can forsee some kind of museum navigation system based around iPod touch + either that micro-GPS I wished for earlier, or an RFID scanner, perhaps. Imagine using RFID tags or some kind of localized geohashing to call up specific content, then play back audio, video or rich text with links, in your museum.

…but let’s get back to the list.

Stuff AT&T still needs to work with Apple on implementing, but probably never will:

• Automatic shifting calls from cell network to WiFi, like T-Mobile
• SPAM Caller: a button to report them, after the call; notification (or “probability that this call is spam: 72%” etc), when they call me; a ‘google this phone number’ underneath the detail view (where it currently says, ‘add this number to an existing contact’, etc.)
• WiFi voicemail access: If you go out of cell coverage, but have Wifi, you could still download and listen to your messages and be notified of new ones.

I’ve mentioned all of this stuff before; it hasn’t changed, I’m not holding my breath. But I can make wishes, and put these ideas out there.

Stuff that Apple has improved in the 3.0 OS itself, or their own apps:

Search is improved

Not only is there now the ability to search email (yes!) but there’s also more integrated search capability in more of Apple’s built-in apps, and even a special ‘search screen’ (spotlight) that you get to by swiping left from the main app screen. Very cool. I assume this also means that Apple is exposing more APIs for searching core data and other functionality like that in the 3.0 SDK. Good deal.

Push is (finally) here

Okay, Apple says they’re sorry, they dropped the ball, but here it is. Background apps are a no-no because they drain batteries like crazy. So Push capabilities let you ‘badge’ an app (red circle with a number in it, meaning how many ‘unread’ or whatever ‘new’ items you have), lets you show a message (imagine if you were to Twitter @thombrooks and I got an instant notification with the buttons ‘Reply’ or ‘Close’ … scary good), or even play a custom sound, like the cute ESPN app they demoed. All good stuff.

The one thing that I still wish Apple would enable (and this certainly goes back to battery life!) is some kind of hooks for allowing remote apps to determine your location. Specifically using GPS. There is already a rumor of some kind of ‘Where’s my iPhone?’ functionality, possibly through MobileMe, so I’m sure Apple is working through the ramifications and policies associated with that one. Real can of worms if not handled properly.

However, I would certainly love having an app where I could grant permissions for specific users that I know (like my wife, for example) to touch base and find out if I’m dead by the side of the road while I’m out cycling. Just a thought.

Expanding on that thought (more wishful thinking):

Maybe this is possible but somehow I doubt it: When I hit the top button to lock my phone, it automatically turns the internal GPS receiver off, correct? I wish I had a way to give certain apps permission to periodically poll Location Services to find out where they are, but only if the user deliberately hit some kind of ‘start’ button, got the stock warning, “This will drain your batteries faster! Are you sure?”, etc.

That way, you could leave the display powered down but you could check every so often (the purpose of the application would determine the frequency) and maybe vibrate or chime an alarm or whatever if the user was getting close to a specific location, leaving an area, or whatever. And/or you could disable the auto-sleep mode while using this feature, if the device were plugged in. (This seems counter-intuitive until you think about using the Maps application in your car, with the iPhone plugged into the cigarette lighter and the ‘track me’ crosshair turned on. It’ll stick around.)

Turn-by-Turn GPS

Apparently Apple has relaxed the limitations on the SDK so we can finally get our beloved turn-by-turn driving directions. This has been rumored for so long that I’m sick of it; first the TomTom app was going to come out any day now, then other rumors, etc. Apparently there’s still a licensing snafu where you can’t use Google’s own map data to provide the directions. Fine, whatever. These are workable problems.

What I’m most worried about is that it’s A) going to cost a lot of money for a good solution and B) the new App Store pricing model is going to let providers really screw over the customers for new datasets, per-city directions, and so forth. Frankly, I hope that Apple keeps making improvements to their own Maps application just so it raises the bar and forces companies to be really competitive with their own turn-by-turn apps. Well, at least we’ll have the option now. Gentlemen, open your wallets! (And vote with them.)

In the meantime, at least developers can now use google’s map data in their own apps and add custom icons over it. That by itself will be a very handy widget for anyone’s toolkit.

Disk mode

I will keep saying it until I’m blue in the face. I own this device. Please give me access to a partition on it for file storage. Don’t make me buy third-party apps just to store things on it, and jump through unnecessary loopholes to do so.

Still wish Remote.app was better

I’ve asked before: Why can’t Apple’s free Remote.app talk to Front Row? Regardless, I solved the problem by buying Front Rowmote, which runs a little daemon on my Mac, and the app even looks sort of like the little white IR remote you used to get for free with Macs. So much so, in fact, that Apple made the author change the graphic design. But it still looks very nice and works great. The author is a really nice guy and very responsive to questions and suggestions.

Sync the Map bookmarks

Can I do this in iPhone 3.0 OS? Not sure. Really wish I could. I know I can send them via MMS, and I think I can copy and paste them into things like emails too, so I know we’re getting closer. Still, since there seems to be a pretty ubiquitous google map widget on the desktop apps these days (like in iPhoto, etc.) you’d think I could sync my map bookmarks and maybe even get them into Google Earth, etc. What’s up with this?

Yellow notes will finally sync!

Yay, how two-years-ago this should have been solved. Solved problem already with EverNote. Next.

Third-party App improvements / wishes

I love OmniFocus. I recently saw that Omni Group posted a job description looking for folks to help them do web-app related programming. I can only hope that this benefits OmniFocus and/or OmniPlan.

I have two main wishes for those apps, added to some kind of web-enabled goodness:

1. Working with a team of people on projects. It would be great if there were some kind of integrated to-do list where people could share their progress on projects.
2. Collaborating with your spouse, children, etc. on to-dos or appointments.

The second one gets into MobileMe / iCal / BusySync / Google Calendar territory, which is what we currently use. And the todos, though weak, can be sync’d from OmniFocus to the calendar.

Still, it’d be really nice if OmniFocus supported multiple databases so you could keep multiple projects (or your business / personal life) completely separated from one another, or view them all merged, or whatever you wanted.

Fewer sucky apps

This is sort of being solved by the fact that there are currently apps which don’t fit the one-size-only pricing model. New pricing models means we’ll see less “one app per book” type of stuff, since you can buy subscriptions and expansions and so forth.

Still, I’m divided on this one. On the one hand, I wish that Apple would have had more faith in their own standards process, could have forseen the incredible demand that there was for the revew/app-vetting process, and said NO to a lot more people, or given constructive feedback on how folks could have improved their apps to bring them up to a certain minimial quality level to be considered worthy of inclusion in the App Store.

I make that wish because for a while I was actually tracking every single new app (using a couple of RSS feeds) and there were just some really stupid, poorly-thought out apps. And now there’s such a deluge of them that I have stopped trying.

I also think it’s kind of unfortunate that some really good, talented programmers are feeling like they have to cut prices on their really excellent apps to below-survival rates, just to compete in the ever-growing field of lookalike apps that are in the same space as theirs.

On the other hand, I’m glad that it’s so easy to get an app out there because it gives me some hope that some more cool open source apps are going to make their way to the iPhone. WordPress has a great app that just keeps getting better, for example. And the source is free, which is great.

Speaking of which,

Apple relaxing the SDK

Wow, developers can finally talk about their apps? Great move.

Stanford posting the notes and videos from their Apple Engineers-taught class

Awesome.

Update: I have watched the first three lectures. (And FWIW, Evan Doll is a better teacher than Alan Cannistraro, IMO.) They are great. I have downloaded the materials, and done all of the homework assignments so far. (I’m a little bummed that they don’t seem to be covering their ‘optional’ Friday sessions, especially because they stressed the importance of debugging, come to this lecture, etc. and then didn’t make it available. But apparently there will be materials available later on.) Regardless, for Stanford and Apple to make this a free downloadable series is a genius move. It will get a lot more people over the initial app development hump.

Since I’d never volunteered for SXSW before, I had no idea what to expect. Being new to Austin, I’m still looking for a job and figured that this would be something fun to do while I’m looking. And in fact, it turned into a positive couple of connections — I connected with some folks to work on a contract job, and met some other people who I’ve since hung out with. Very cool.

What would I change, if it were up to me?

More awareness of available shifts, ahead of time.

It probably just takes having done it once to know what’s going on, but it would have been nice to know that I could have logged some hours ahead of time to ‘bank’ them. For example, some guys spent a few hours making some RJ45 patch cables.

What I would have like to have known ahead of time: I had no idea that I would get six hours’ credit for bag stuffing (though it only took about three) or that I could have helped with shifts on some of the logistics crews, ahead of time, to grab a few hours as well. I also learned that shift leaders are credited with “time and a half” hours (1.5 x) which is why most of them had platinum badges. Lessons for next time.

The way it turned out, I was going for a gold badge (interactive + film), but that meant I was missing out on some of the panels I wanted to hear if I didn’t get to work in that room during the panel. “Oh well, I should have bought the badge.” Meaning, of course, be happy with what you’re given! My shift leaders were very nice and let me ask for specific placements, and arranged things so rooms were covered if I wanted to go grab a keynote or whatever. Once or twice I missed something I wanted to see, but as things turned out it was good that they put me where they did.

More training, ahead of time.

I was nervous and ended up sending email to the organizers, asking them if I had missed any messages from them. Nope, I was told, we’ll just do training before the first round of panels, day-of, and do subsequent follow-ups each morning. It’s understandable that you wouldn’t necessarily have access to the rooms in the conference center or the Hilton ahead of time, and that it costs money to rent this stuff. In spite of that, I think that it would still be possible to set up something ahead of time just to give people more of a clue. Done properly (oh man, I’m envisioning role playing here) it could actually be a really funny way to make people aware of some of the situations they might face.

More sound board training.

On the one hand you have people saying, “Okay, for the most part, don’t touch anything except this one fader.” (Which is the Master volume.) I can understand why we tell this to some interactive conference tech volunteers. There are a lot of knobs and buttons, most of which do not need to be touched. And there is a podcast crew running around making sure they’re getting good levels from each of the panels, so they might make adjustments to the board.

On the other hand, the podcast people don’t stick around. They don’t work with the panelists. They don’t have to shove the mic right in their face, in case they don’t project enough… or deal with it when the panelists lean away or push the mic away because they think they’re being too loud. $$%#^#^%$. Or when they need a lav mic because we don’t have enough desk mics, and they’re in the wrong place or just not picking up the sound properly… Then it’s Q&A time, and who needs to remind folks to step up to the mic to ask their question, or hassle the panelists to paraphrase questions from folks in the audience who didn’t step up to the mic?

So: I can ride gain, or adjust individual channels’ levels. I know where the levels should be, but I don’t think that some other folks on our crew had any idea about these issues. This results in bad podcasts. (I just listened to a few of them.) These guys are trying to post podcasts the next day. Odds are very slim they’re going to try and pick through the podcast to find the place where they need to amplify someone’s question, asked off-mic, to bring it up to listenable levels.

Video as podcast / Video as image magnification

Some of the people walking around with cameras (again, another crew – not much interaction – why?) needed a line out from the sound board, not a big deal. They came with the adaptors they needed. But then I saw two guys show up with cameras and only one of them is taking the sound from the board. And they don’t do the flash trick or any kind of sync — so how easy will it be for the poor guy at the editing suite to sync feeds from multiple cameras? (Given the turnaround time, what do you want to bet that even happens at all?)

During some of the keynotes, image magnification could have been done a bit better. They send one guy with one camera to cover the Nate Silver talk (full house in Ballroom A, overflow seating in ballrooms B and C. HUGE crowds here) and he’s panning back and forth between the two of them. I was getting seasick. Send two cameras to that, throw a simple and cheap video switcher in between them. If you want to get really fancy, put intercom headsets on both camera people and cut to B while you tell A to reframe the shot.

Meanwhile, folks in the B and C ballrooms were having an even worse time of it; not only do they not have folks up in front to look at and use as a reference, but they’re getting the sound and the video very far apart. Again, there are tools for fixing this and I’m surprised that Freeman / AVS didn’t provide any – but I’m sure it was made worse by the choice of cameras being used for image magnification.

Better issue tracking and coordination / Putting resources in the right place / Having a very good understanding of what we’re allowed to give panelists

We had a few frustrating things happen during one panel. These guys (Paul Boag and co from Boagworld) wanted to do a live podcast. They said they’d mentioned it to the guy in charge of tech (probably meaning the guy running Interactive, whose name is Hugh, I think) but mysteriously this never made it down the chain to us. They also brought the right audio adapters that they needed, to come out of the sound board.

Sadly, the problem was, in this location the board was at the very back of the room (why, I have no idea) and they wanted a hard wired ethernet drop, which was only up at the front of the room. We set up a dedicated laptop with a sound feed coming from the board at the back of the room (where it should have been), didn’t have the hard-wired ethernet cable and didn’t want to risk the wireless (which probably would have been just fine, TBH). So they pulled it and sacrificed an audio generation for a hard-wired ethernet feed. (Meaning they got the audio source for their live podcast out of the PA speakers next to them. Ouch.)

This also took place at the Hilton, which was one of the farthest locations from the tech ‘home base.’ And our chosen mode of communication looked like this:

• I’m on the front line. If I have an issue, I tell my shift leader.
• My shift leader sends a text message to a repeater service being used by tech crew. There is no guarantee as to how fast it will make it to the rest of the team.
• Someone else on the shift leaders/crew chiefs pool who is closer to the tech home base goes off to find the guy who has access to the resources we need.
• That guy shows up with a 60 foot ethernet cable, apologetic and out of breath (we’re geeks, not marathon runners, after all) but he’s too late and we’ve already gone with (a really lousy) Plan B.

To finish things off: As a result of this situation, the panelists ask us if they’re going to be able to get a clean recording of this panel from the podcasting crew, since they’re digitally recording it off of the board. So we say we’ll ask the guy when he comes back. The podcasting guy is pretty tired (this panel went late, until 7 pm or so) so we’re trying to be really nice to him. He tells us that all media recorded is property of SXSW and these guys will have to talk to his boss to get it cleared and etc, etc. This, of course, frustrates the panelists (who themselves are podcasters) because they’ve promised their audience that they’ll have a nice clean version of the audio up on their site by such-and-such date.

I have no idea how it worked out, but hope it all turned out well.

Having better laptops (bring back Macs!)

I don’t know what the deal is, but if this is all donation/sponsorship stuff then it’s sort of backfiring. Apparently last year and this year are the first time that SXSW hasn’t had Apple laptops on hand as spares. Instead they have a bunch of Dells. We went through and made sure that Firefox, Chrome, and a bunch of other apps were installed on them.

However, based on what I saw, almost 85-90% of all panelists brought Apple laptops to present with. And if their personal machine was having problems, or if they forgot their adapter dongle (common mistake!) then we still needed to have those mac-compatible things on hand… because odds are, they did their presentation in Keynote. This means an extra step of exporting their presentation as a powerpoint file, losing some of their transitions/effects, etc.

Alex Bogusky (of Crispin Porter Bogusky) did a panel on shared bike programs. (Neat idea, but tell them to wear a helmet, please?) He just shows up (with maybe 10 minutes before he goes on) with a USB stick. Sorry, but not a smart idea. The memory stick should be the fallback, not the primary. So we copy his presentation to the Dell laptop and ask him if there’s any special audio or video stuff. He says he’s got one video but don’t worry about it.

Of course, during his presentation, he talks up this video he’s about to show, and not only does it not work (oops, guess we should have made QuickTime part of our standard install — and it doesn’t always work the same way on Windows anyway) but it pops up one of those irritating repeating dialog boxes. So he looks like a jackass in front of his audience and some guy makes a crack about, “Want to borrow my Mac?”

What we could have done better: Point is, we could have been better prepared (quicktime), but so could he (bring your own laptop, bring a mac in fact, show up earlier.) And while we’re at it: Get the heck out of the room and take all of your groupies with you in a reasonable amount of time — either there’s going to be another panel in the room within the next half hour, or it’s the end of the day and all of us (unpaid) volunteers would really like you to leave, so we can leave and lock up the equipment.

And frankly, I don’t know what Dell is doing for SXSW — please bear in mind, my opinions are solely my own and I am in no way speaking on behalf of SXSW — I know they’re a local hometown computer company and all, but their products are just looking bad. Either they sit up there unused, or they get used and they fail and make everyone mad. How is this working? Meanwhile, Apple is making the laptops that most of the presenters are using anyway, and SXSW ends up looking bad because we aren’t supporting them well enough.

More Dongles!

As I mentioned already, most presenters have Mac laptops, and there are many adapter dongles. They didn’t always bring those. We had a collection of them on hand, but not always the right ones. I’d say we had 80% coverage, which was not bad. But we had to spread those between 20 simultaneous conference rooms in four main areas, which was still too much of a stretch.

SXSW Accelerator / Platinum Track

I got asked to sit in on both of these events. Both of them were new, so nobody knew what to expect. They were already staffed by AVS / Freeman guys, so we were just there to help out.

In Accelerator, the job was to make sure that the laptops being used to give these two minute pitches were outputting the proper signal (1024 x 768 @ 60 hz) for the video switching equipment.

In some cases we also had to work with the sound guy, Jamie, and make sure that the laptops were sending good levels out to his board (on a preview bus) before they went ‘live’. The pace was: sprint to get everyone set up during a changeover, then sit there for a long fricking time in between these pitches. Some of them were very good ideas. Others were horrible. Listening to Guy Kawasaki commenting on them was pretty fun.

What we could have done better: The kid from Freeman who was in charge of video switching pointed out that all of the audio and video equipment was being fed by one circuit. And all of the laptops being used to give the presentations. Which meant that he didn’t want us plugging in our laptops while we were there. Frankly, I think he was just overreacting a little bit, but he had a good point. There probably should have been more than one circuit to put the equipment on.

During Platinum Track, most of the panels went fine. I didn’t realize why turnout was so low (typically 30-50% of the room’s capacity) until I re-read the description: Only Platinum badge-holders were even allowed in. Sorry, but that seems kind of lame. If someone pays for Interactive, they should be allowed to see all of Interactive. Hopefully this policy doesn’t bite them in the butt.

Anyway, I got to help out an award-winning composer, who gave us a sneak peek at the new movie that he had just scored; that was nice, but he showed up in the beginning and wanted to see/hear his stuff, up until five minutes before the first panelist was supposed to go on stage (and his own talk wasn’t until that afternoon.) I ended up using my personal machine to play back his DVD, again because of issues with the Dell laptop… good thing I brought it with me.

Lights!

The lighting controls in the rooms were an issue at times, both in the Convention Center and in the Hilton. At one point, the lights kept going down in the room but we weren’t touching them. Turns out that a cleaning guy in another room had turned the lights down after finishing cleaning up — and the rooms’ controls were ganged together. So we were fighting with him for control of the lights until I ran in there to tell him to knock it off.

Other times, the panels should have been ganged but weren’t meaning that volunteers had to run between two sets of controls to adjust lighting in ‘connected’ rooms.

I’m sure there were a couple more tech issues that we could have dealt with better, but I think those were the biggies. Besides, this post is already way too long.

We’ve also been eating healthier. The main staple is brown rice, either chicken or fish as a main entree, and a vegetable. This isn’t always how it goes, but it’s becoming more common. Eating earlier is also important, as is going to bed earlier.

Living in a place with nicer weather helps (it’s supposed to hit 86 F today, and it’s the end of February); not just because it’s warmer, but also because there are longer days and more days with sun. This is better for staying positive and in a good mood.

iPhoto ’09 became available in stores today. I was excited about it because it has two new features that I think we can use at our camp, Places and Faces. It also makes it easy to publish photos to Facebook or Flickr. I tested out the new version by opening our Wedding iPhoto album… lots of people and a few locations to identify.

Locations

If your camera has GPS capabilities (like the iPhone 3G, for example) then iPhoto will automatically recognize that from the photo’s metadata (EXIF tags). If not, you can select one or more photos and it will bring up a map so you can find a location, ‘drop a pin’, and label it.

I am hopeful that there will be an easy way to associate third-party GPS tracks with photos taken based on date and time. I don’t have a lot of experience with this myself, but I know that there are plenty of people out there who are interested in this… so it should happen soon enough.

Faces

The face recognition portion is impressive, but clearly 1.0. There are still some rough edges, but at this point, it’s like the dog that walks on its hind legs; it’s not how well it does it, it’s that it can do it at all.

Faces that are head-on are usually identified pretty well. Faces that are obstructed, side profile, making weird faces, etc. it might have trouble with. Mustaches and glasses (especially sunglasses) gave it problems as well. Faces on an angle (unless it was 90 degrees) confused it, too.

Uh, get that junk out of my way

When iPhoto recognizes (or thinks! it recognizes) a face in a photo, it puts a white box around it. Underneath that there’s a caption, which will either say, “unknown face”, or, “Is this So-and-so?” You can tab between these boxes and hit return, either to fill in a name or to confirm/deny the “so-and-so?” question. It can be a bit confusing, and more than once the focus defaulted to the ‘Done’ button, which kicked me out of ‘Names’ mode.

The unfortunate thing about the white name boxes is that group shots tend to have a LOT of these boxes in them, all at once. So iPhoto might be asking you, “Is this so-and-so?” or telling you it’s an “unknown face” but you can’t see the person because they’re blocked by all of the white boxes and captions! It also does not seem as if you can zoom in on the photo in order to spread the boxes out, which is frustrating.

My long-lost cousin twice removed

If you start typing in the name of a person, it presents you with a list of the already-known people that might complete the name you’re typing. However, it gives you an alphabetical list. This is frustrating because my wife Christina shows up about a million times in our wedding photos, but someone named Christian (who is in about three pictures total) shows up before her in the list. It would be nice if iPhoto would order the photos by ‘most frequently used names’, or at least give you the option. Or, if you just dragged a face box, maybe it could re-analyze that area and make a best guess.

Did you think much had changed in the last few seconds?

There were also photos where it was basically the same picture, two or three times in a row. (You know, you take a few in the hopes that at least one will come out?) Sometimes iPhoto would know everyone in one photo, and nobody in the next one, or get people wrong. This made me wonder if anyone had thought about comparing the date/timestamp on each photo and comparing the positions of the faces it found (maybe weighted by probability that this face belongs to so-and-so) to make a better guess as to who is in this photo that was taken five seconds after the previous one.

I already identified this

Our wedding photographer had given us an album of his hand-picked, color-corrected photos. I had these in another ‘event’ (iPhoto smart album by date) but had already gone in and identified all of the people in the original versions. I was surprised that it wasn’t better at even guessing who the people were, since I had basically identified the same exact photos a bit earlier. (The contents of the boxes was almost exactly the same, just with different color levels or contrast.) It frustrated me that I would have to go in and do this all over again, drag boxes over people’s faces, etc.

Cousin Ned looks like a Yheti (I mean, even moreso)

When you view the list of faces (which is cute: they’re all “Tacked up” on a corkboard), iPhoto ’09 will show you the first photo of each person you identified. This is NOT necessarily the best picture you have of them! Fortunately, you can double-click to view a custom album of all photos that have that person identified in them. If you highlight one of the better photos, in the Event menu you can pick, ‘make key photo’ and now that will be the photo displayed on the ‘corkboard’ display of all Faces. (That one took a minute to figure out, but I’m glad you can do it.)

Facebook

I realized that you can’t just publish a single image to a specific gallery on facebook; iPhoto wants you to put photos into an album, then publish that whole album to facebook. I created one called ‘Wedding Photos’ and went ahead by titling and adding a description to all of my photos. However, only the titles of the photos made it over, not the descriptions, as far as I could tell.

The cool thing, however, was that all of the photos I had tagged with people’s faces were automatically added to Facebook! This was a very nice surprise and I give it an A+. One thing to be cautious about: if you put kids’ last names in when you identify them, you may want to remove these from the Facebook albums unless their parents are okay with it.

First impressions

iPhoto ’09 has some cool new features. There are still some rough edges to be worked out, but I’m hoping that we see a minor version update very soon with a few fixes and improvements. In spite of these, the new features are very strong and make the product even easier to use. Well worth the money.