Tech regressions: MORE, Quicken, PalmOS, iOS, Podcasts, Aperture, Music, iPad photo slide shows, and toasters.

One of the odder experiences of aging is living through technology regressions. I’ve seen a few — solutions that go away and are never replaced.

Symantec’s classicMac MORE 3.1 was a great outliner/editing tool with the best style sheet implementation I’ve seen. It died around 1991. The closest thing today would be Omni Outliner — 16 years later. There’s still no comparable Style Sheet support.

Quicken for DOS with 3.5” monthly diskette records of credit card transactions was the most reliable and useable personal accounting tool I’ve experienced — though even it had problems with database corruption. I think that was the 1980s. Today I use Quicken for Mac, a niche product with unreliable transfer of financial information, questionable data security, and limited investment tools.

PalmOS Datebk 5 was an excellent calendaring tool with good desktop sync (for a while the Mac had the best ‘personal information management’ companion). That was in the 1990s. When PalmOS died we went years without an alternative. I briefly returned to using a Franklin Planner. Somewhere around year 3 of iOS we had equivalent functionality again — and a very painful transition.

iOS and macOS have seen particularly painful combinations of progressions and regressions. OS X / macOS photo management was at its best somewhere around the end of Snow Leopard and Aperture 3.1 (memory fuzzy, not sure they overlapped). OS X photo solutions had finally reached a good state after years of iPhoto screw-ups — the professional and home products more or less interoperated. All Apple needed to do was polish Aperture’s rough edges and fix bugs. Instead they sunset Aperture and gave us Photos.app — a big functional regression. Apple did something similar with iMovie; it’s much harder to make home “movies” than it once was.

iOS was at its most reliable around version 6. So Apple blew it up. Since that time Podcasts.app has gone from great to bad to not-so-bad to abysmal. The iPad used to have a great digital picture frame capability tied to screen lock — Apple took that away. For a while there was a 3rd party app that worked with iCloud photo streams, I could remotely add images to my father’s iPad slideshow digital picture frame. There’s nothing that works as well now; as I write this I’m working through a web of bugs and incompetence (I suspect a desperate timeout stuck into iTunes/iOS sync) to sneak some photos from Aperture to an iPad.

Apple Music is following the path of Podcasts.app as Apple moves to ending the sale of music (probably 2019). At the same time iTunes is being divided into dumbed down subunits (iBooks regression). The last 2-3 revisions of iTunes have been so bad that this feels almost like a mercy killing.

We don’t have a  way to avoid these regressions. Once we could have gotten off the train, now the train stations are dangerous neighborhoods of lethal malware. We need to keep upgrading, and so much is bundled with macOS and iOS that we can’t find 3rd party alternatives. Data lock is ubiquitous now.

I think regressions are less common outside digital world. It’s true toasters aren’t what they were, but since 2006 Chinese products have become better made and more reliable. Perhaps the closest thing to tech regressions in the material world is the chaos of pharma prices.

This takes a toll. There are so many better ways to spend my life, and too few minutes to waste. I wonder what these regressions do to non-geeks; I don’t think it goes well for them.

iOS 6.01 Podcast app: Die, Apple, Die.

I had to update to iOS 6 sooner or later, and I knew that meant the Podcast app.

Still, a small part of me hoped that that it wasn't as bad as I heard.

Really, I was in denial.

It's true. All of my Podcast Playlists are gone.

Apple's share price is at 2001 levels -- really, that's not low enough.

Yeah, it's one tiny app that only a few geeks really use -- but we are the geeks that used Playlists and Smart Playlists. This is the kind of colossal screw-up that can't exist in isolation. It's worse than the infamous Maps mess because there Apple had a real business problem.

That podcast silence you hear is the dead canary.

And the big iTunes update is still supposed to be coming ...

Update: Listen to podcasts with Music app on iOS 6 - Mac OS X Hints says you delete the Podcast app and get Playlists back. I had to restart my iPhone with iOS 6.01 for this to work, but it did work.

Update 11/11/2012: After deleting Podcast.app and restarting video pod cats will again appear in Video.app. My kids like those.

Why I'll be deferring iOS 6 and iPhone 5: podcasts gone

I listen to several Podcasts; using smartlists to identiy partly played casts and those I haven't started.

That won't be possible come iOS 6:

TidBITS Networking: Does Apple’s Podcasts App Suck Cellular Data?

...In iOS 6, the Music app removes podcasts altogether ...

Leaving us with the crummy Podcast.app.

We've also been told to expect an iTunes update. I wonder if that will drop podcasts too. I expect smart lists to go. We already know iOS 6 will lose Google Maps.

For me iOS 6 and iTunes 11 look to be big regressions. iPhone 5 and it's new cable hasn't impressed me either. I'll be going slow on both, which means I'll likely defer my iPhone 5 too.

Post-singularity life is burning a lot of neurons

In 3 days I've tackled three monster Apple bugs.

One is with Apple ID infrastructure, one with Image Capture in Snow Leopard, and a third probably arose in an iTunes server during an iOS tunes purchase.

Two of these bugs defeated Apple 2nd tier support. All of them are likely rare; I will probably never see these particular bugs again. Unfortunately, there are a lot of these bugs arising from interactions of Cloud and software and data.

One bug I've definitely solved -- it was bizarre. I have a good theory and a test case for another. The third might be fixed but needs more testing.

It's mildly satisfying to figure these things out, but it's an insane waste of time and neurons. I could have been learned options trading [1] in the time I've wasted.

Note that only one of these was OS X specific. Two of them are Apple Cloud bugs. The ones I understand best appear to be complexity problems -- too many moving parts, too many edge cases, too many ways for things to break.

Post-singularity life does not scale.

[1] Yeah, there are no good investments any more.

Update: This Stross essay is pertinent.

SF, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done? - Charlie's Diary 

... We're living in the frickin' 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980... 

... to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF...

 Even dystopian science fiction didn't predict we'd spend all our time keeping our whizzy tools working.

Side-effect of the iOS in-app purchase model - the reviews are worthless

I haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere, so I'll get it on the record here.

Prior to the introduction of in-app purchases there was a difference between reviews of "free" (ad-supported) apps and honest apps. Reviews of free apps were worthless; a mix of fly-by reviews and scan reviews paid for by app revenue. Reviews of honest, pay for what you get, apps were useful. It was relatively costly to pay for a large number of favorable reviews.

With in-app purchasing freemium model apps though, the reviews ad-supported app quality - worth nothing.

Apple's FairPlay DRM, subscriptions, and the cost of MLB At Bat

Last year I bought MLB.com's At Bat for something like $10 or $15. Then it was an "App". That meant, based on Apple's FairPlay DRM, I could install it on multiple devices as long as each device was synchronized to an iTunes instance that was associated with my App Store/iTunes ID (and credit card). In our home that can be up to five devices, though in practice only my son used it.

No consumer loves DRM, but FairPlay was well named. It struck a Jobsian balance between buyer and seller, like those .99 songs we used to have. It didn't get in my way very often.

It's too badFairPlay doesn't work that way any more. This year MLB.com At Bat 12 is just a shell for a $15 subscription -- and Apple's subscription/In-App purchase policies are an inelegant mess ...

iTunes Store: About In-App Purchases

... Non-replenishable In-App Purchases are items that only require you to purchase them once, and can be transferred to multiple devices authorized with the same iTunes Store account.

• Bonus game levels
• City guide maps

Replenishable In-App Purchases are items that have to be purchased every time and cannot be downloaded again for free.

• Extra health
• Extra experience points

Subscriptions are one-time services that must be purchased again once the subscription period expires. 

• One-month subscriptions
• Location service subscriptions

Auto-Renewing Subscriptions are services that can be purchased with different renewing subscription durations.

• Weekly newspaper subscriptions
• Weekly magazine subscriptions...

... Subscriptions and replenishable In-App Purchase cannot be transferred or synced to another iOS device. Non-replenishable In-App Purchases  and auto-renewing subscriptions can be transferred to another iOS device authorized with your iTunes Store account. For example, if you transfer a game from an iPhone to an iPod touch, only the game levels will sync over, the extra ammo and experience points will not be transferred...

Four different classes of In-App purchase, each with different policies on renewal, transfer, and multiple device use.

So which rule applies to MLB.com's At Bat 2012? Is it a non-replenishable In-App purchase that can be transferred between devices? Or is it Subscription that cannot be transferred? I couldn't tell from the description, but the answer is in a customer review [1] ...

... if you make the in-app purchase it is available on another device ... regardless of whether you make an in-app purchase or not banner ads are still displayed ...

So, for this year at least, the effective cost of MLB At Bat is still $15; it behaves like an In-App Purchase if you pay the $15 up front. On the other hand, I wonder how it behaves if you pay the subscription fee ...

FairPlay was a Jobs-class compromise. Apple's subscription plans are post-Jobs; I hope they'll take a second look at the mess.

[1] This is unrelated to my post, but I have to say it's rude behavior to show ads in a paid app. It's worse than rude really -- banner ads typically include clickable links that break Apple's feeble parental controls.

Lessons in history: iTunes U and the quiet revolution in university education

Amidst all the noise and turbulence of humanity, what will become historic? Some things are obvious. If there are history books in 100 years, they will include a paragraph about 9/11.

Other historic events slide in slowly, and are little noted. I think the transformation of university and even secondary education is like that. Consider a two recent little noted stories (emphases mine) ...

iTunes U Downloads Top 300 Million (Apple press release)

... In just over three years, iTunes® U downloads have topped 300 million and it has become one of the world’s most popular online educational catalogs. Over 800 universities throughout the world have active iTunes U sites, and nearly half of these institutions distribute their content publicly on the iTunes Store®. New content has just been added from universities in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico and Singapore, and iTunes users now have access to over 350,000 audio and video files from educational institutions around the globe....

and then there's Sal Kahn (quote excludes stupid parts of this Fortune article [1])

... Khan Academy, with Khan as the only teacher, appears on YouTube and elsewhere ... Khan's playlist of 1,630 tutorials (at last count) are now seen an average of 70,000 times a day -- nearly double the student body at Harvard and Stanford combined. Since he began his tutorials in late 2006, Khan Academy has received 18 million page views worldwide ... Most page views come from the U.S., followed by Canada, England, Australia, and India. In any given month, Khan says, he's reached about 200,000 students....

Kahn, contrary to the silly Fortune article, isn't in the same league as iTunes U, but he's part of a the same quiet revolution as the UK's university lecture podcasts, OpenAccess Journals, MIT's Open U, and, yes, wikipedia. It's a revolution presaged by the vast lecture hall I visited in Bangkok in 1981, by the early morning TV lectures of decades past, and by the BBC's long history of radio education.

The transformation of higher education has been underway for ten years out of sight of the rich world. It is going to come to places like France's infamous Nanterre University, and it will come to America after the college bubble bursts.

Sometimes change that moves slowly can be powerful.

Managing the Google-Apple war: keeping options open, expecting the Android bicycle computer

The Google-Apple war continues, with a new front opening last week. The notorious Larry Ellison, close ally of the infamous Steve Jobs, has attacked Google from the left flank. With Schmidt, Jobs and Ellison business is personal. They are more like feudal kings than the mythical servants of the board imagined in business schools.

On the main front Apple continues to block iPhone customers from delicious Google (Android) Apps (emphases mine) …

Practical Traveler - Google Maps Add a Feature for Bike Riders - NYTimes.com

… “For Google Maps not to have bike directions is like the Gap not selling underpants,” said Eben Weiss, the author of the BikeSnobNYC blog. “Even though it’s not 100 percent reliable, it’s still better to have it than in no form at all.”

Yet the reviews within the biking community, notorious for its outspokenness, have been mixed at best. There are the technical glitches, like its unavailability on the iPhone (it’s available only on BlackBerrys and Androids) …

At the moment my family is still best served by the iPhone/iTunes/App Store/OS X ecosystem, but between iOS weaknesses and Android strengths the balance continues to shift towards Google. I can imagine the day when I’ll call on resolution 242 and write-off the sunk costs of our FairPlay investments for the entire family.

Towards that day we keep our family domain in Google Apps, and use only Google’s Calendaring, Contacts and Mail services. MobileMe is the enemy, Microsoft’s (!) ActiveSync is our friend. I track my Apple dependencies, with a close eye on Apple’s Data Lock.

I’m also expecting to see an Android showing up in special purpose devices, such as Android bicycle computers and Android car computers. I’ll be favoring those as a partial end-run around Apple’s failures.

Life would be a lot easier if Jobs and Schmidt weren’t replaying the 10th century. Given Jobs undeniable genius, I’d love to see Schmidt take early retirement.

Google TV, Flash, iPhone and Curated Computing - it's all about the DRM

Imagine that Drexler'sengines of creation were real. Imagine we all had devices that could make diamonds, phones, cars and the like on demand. All we needed were some raw materials and energy.

This would be disruptive. DeBeers wouldn't last the day. Economies would collapse. Hellfire would rain down.

Eventually, however, I suspect our complex adaptive world would return to a balance. A new generation of improved replicators would replace the old ones. The new ones would come with controls that made it, for example, impossible to replicate currency. Civilization wants to survive.

We saw this with VCRs. The first recorders were amazing at capturing movies, but later generation devices incorporated "macrovision" copy protection. Recording features became less common, VCRs became largely playback devices. The rebel was subverted.

We're seeing it now with the digital replicators of our era. First generation devices made perfect copies of CDs and even DVDs. Slowly, however, the market is moving from general purpose computers with computers that won't replicate some DRMd video to iPad-style "curated computing". Surprise -- the iPad won't rip a DVD. It won't even rip a CD. (If record companies aren't buying 2nd hand CDs and destroying them they deserve to perish.)

In 20 years, it will be fairly hard to replicate many things. In a world with limited local storage, you may find your purloined media won't survive long in the cloud. The system is strong, It wants to live.

If you think about DRM, a lot of things make sense. Why are Apple so virulently opposed to Flash [1]? Why is Adobe dissembling when they say Flash is open (they published the specs)? Because the video codecs in Flash are not nearly as important as the DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology in Flash. That is most assuredly not open; it's as closed as Apple's FairPlay. What's Google up to with Google TV and their app stores? Check out the DRM to understand. Why are Hulu and Netflix reluctant to sign on the iPad? Because they'd have to substitute FlashDRM for FairPlay. That means Apple would own them.

This battle will rage for a time, but in 20 years it will be largely forgotten -- and the digital replicators will have been tamed. Resistance is futile.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: The limits to DRM: my new car stereo (in 2007 I was still resisting)

[1] Personally, like virtually all Mac geeks, I despise Flash and consider Adobe to be as decrepit as Microsoft. I agreed with pretty much everything Jobs wrote about Flash in his open letter. I think, however, that even if none of those things were true Apple would be at war with Adobe. Part of Jobs evil genius is that he's a master magician -- he distracts with one hand while he moves with the other.

--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

iTunes U - the Singularity is behind us

Despite my IOT habit, I've only today rediscovered iTunes U in iTunes 9...

This still brings tears to my eyes. As I (incorrectly - Bill Gates Sr only did the foreword) wrote in 2006 about an early casualty of tech churn ...

The quiet demise of the CD

... I remember reading the book written by Bill Gate's father (yes, his father) called 'The New Papyrus'. It was all about the how the data CD would revolutionize the world. This was before the net became public. I was amazed by the CD back then, and I wrote a letter to a Canadian development organization on how it could dramatically change the delivery of knowledge to what was then called the 'third world'...

iTunes U, Aaronson’s MIT lectures on theoretical computer science, MIT OpenCourseWare, OpenAccess journals and the BBC’s In Our Time are now freely available to a good portion of the world. Even in poor nations, they are likely accessible in many universities.

I beat on Apple and Google all the time, but, really, the iPhone and iTunes U would stun a geek of 1986. We entropics do not appreciate how far we have traveled.

When DRM is a force for good - the Apple App Store software renaissance

Once upon a time we had a pretty good collection of educational software for children.



It wasn't quite as good as what we could find in the late 80s and early 90s (Windows 3.1 and especially Mac Classic), but it wasn't too bad. Of course most of it was written for Windows 3.1 and Mac Classic. Very little of it still worked when we gave this set away to people with older machines and younger children.

There's nothing like this software now. In the absence of a reliable and cost-effective distribution channel, a balanced approach to copy prevention (digital rights management), a stable computing platform and a process to eliminate semi-fraudulent garbage software prices were high and the quality was pretty darned lousy.

That market went away.

So is the web a replacement? Is there comparable educational software on the net?

This story gives one answer ...

Be the Best You can Be: Math fact drills for an Asperger's child - two excellent solutions

First I went to the web, where I was again reminded of an old unsolved business problem. We have yet to figure out a way to deliver quality web based software solutions to this kind of niche market. It's not a technology problem, it's a business problem.

The best web solution I could find was Math Playground, and that required digging through heavily ad surrounded sites, sensory overload sites that were annoying even to a non-Asperger's person, dozens of me-too sites, spam sites, suspicious domains, and so on. In other words, lots of junk or marketing efforts.

Once upon a time I might have tried finding educational software for OS X or even (further back) Windows, but that market hasn't just died, it's died a thousand deaths...

Of course there's also the Wii, but those apps tend to be very expensive (Nintendo's cut), heavy on the entertainment, and rarely focal enough for my needs.

So I skipped from the web to the astoundingly successful Apple (iPhone/iTouch) App Store.

There I downloaded five Math Drill apps. Some cost money, some were free. The ones that cost money were all less than $3 so, as far as I was concerned, they were as good as free ...

... Of the five apps I tried only one was a real dud (stupid advertisers), two are excellent, and two are quite usable...

So what does the Apple Apps Store have that the web, desktop OSs, and the Wii don't have? Four things:

1. A balanced approach to Digital Rights Management. App store games can be synched to as many as five devices from a single Library/user account. (Practically this means a single OS X user account a single iTunes user account. See also OS Xuser share design flaw.)
2. A distribution channel, albeit one that's currently overloaded (a solvable problem).
3. A quality filter, weeding out the criminal and the plainly stupid.
4. A stable computing platform
   

With these four advantages the iTouch/iPhone platform and the Apple App Store has created a renaissance in small market, targeted software - a flurry of creativity last seen in the early 80s.

And, much to my chagrin, we owe much of it to the DRM ...

Just imagine what will happen Apple does launch their widely expected netbook-variant, particularly if they bundle it with Amazon's iPhone Kindle app and back to school books ...

Jon Udell's 21st century radio: SpokenWord.org

Jon Udell, one of my favorite deep thinkers, is championing community collaborated audio sources, a kind of 21st century radio service ...

Introducing SpokenWord.org - Jon Udell:

...Back in the good old days, circa 2006 or so, I was a happy podcast listener. During my many long periods of outdoor activity — running, hiking, biking, leaf-raking, snow-shoveling — I sometimes listened to music, but more often absorbed a seemingly endless stream of spoken-word lectures, conversations, and entertainment. Some of my sources were conventional: NPR (CarTalk, FreshAir), PRI (This American Life), BBC (In Our Time), WNYC (Radio Lab). Others were unconventional: Pop!Tech, The Long Now Foundation, TED, ITConversations, Social Innovation Conversations, Radio Open Source....

... From the FAQ:

Think of SpokenWord.org as a funnel. You collect streams (RSS feeds) of programs from all over the Web, then combine them into a singe collection on SpokenWord.org. Then in iTunes you subscribe to just one feed: the feed from your SpokenWord.org collection.

Managing feeds, in addition to (or instead of) managing items, is an aspect of digital literacy that’s only just emerging. I think it’s critical, so I’m a keen observer/participant in various domains: blogging, microblogging, calendaring, or — in this case — audio curation...

... I’m hoping that SpokenWord will become a place where curators emerge who lead me to places I wouldn’t have gone...

That hasn’t happened yet, of course, since SpokenWord.org just launched in beta this week. Meanwhile, the site offers a variety of lenses through which to view its growing collection of feeds and programs: tags, categories, ratings, user activity... the Active Collectors bucket on the home page has alerted me to a couple of feeds I hadn’t known about, notably BBC World’s DocArchive...

I can't believe Jon ran out of In Our Time podcasts. My personal collection goes back about five years, and it offers a lot of listening and re-listening.

Then there are the Teaching Company's lectures. Not free of course, but you can by a lot from the backlist for a bit of money.

Still, if Jon's into it then it's worth examining. I've signed up.

New Macs won't let some video play on projectors

Old televisions, projectors, LCD panels -- they're not "HDCP" compliant. So they won't always work as expected with new Macs. Only media that enforce the DRM chain are fully acceptable (emphasis mine)...

AppleInsider | Apple's new MacBooks have built-in copy protection measures

Apple's new MacBook lines include a form of digital copy protection that will prevent protected media, such as DRM-infused iTunes movies, from playing back on devices that aren't compliant with the new priority protection measures.

The Intel-developed technology is called High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) and aims to prevent copying of digital audio and video content as it travels across a variety of display connectors, even if such copying is not in violation of fair use laws.

Among the connectors supported by the technology are the Mini DisplayPort found on Apple's latest MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air, in addition to others such as Digital Visual Interface (DVI), High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), Gigabit Video Interface (GVIF), and Unified Display Interface (UDI).

ArsTechnica reports that Apple has apparently acquired a license for the technology and is now using it across its DisplayPort-enabled MacBook lines to to prevent transmission of purchased iTunes content to devices that don't include support for HDCP.

"When my friend John, a high school teacher, attempted to play Hellboy 2 on his classroom's projector with a new aluminum MacBook over lunch, he was denied by the error you see [below]," writes Ars' David Chartier. "John's using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room's Promethean system."

... As a licensed adopter of HDCP, Apple agrees to pay an annual fee and abide by the conditions set forth in Inte's HDCP License Agreement [PDF].

For example, the terms stipulate that high-definition digital video sources must not transmit protected content to non-HDCP-compliant receivers, as described above, and DVD-Audio content must be restricted to CD-audio quality or less when played back over non-HDCP-digital audio outputs.

Hardware vendors are also barred from allowing their devices to make copies of content, and must design their products in ways that "effectively frustrate attempts to defeat the content protection requirements."...

Gee, I wonder why the makers of Audio Hijack couldn't get permission to put their apps on the iPhone.

We know where this ends up.

We will all have little chips implanted into our acoustic and ocular nerves. The chips will decode encrypted media, which will look and sound like nonsense to the unchipped. That way every family member will pay separately for their holograms.

You think I'm joking.

Hah.

Anyone know how I can make anonymous cash donations to the bandits of Sherwood Forest 2.0?

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

See also: Palladium.

Update 11/20/08: Additional details. If Apple had provided another port they'd have been ok, but that would have ruined the vibe.

Update 11/25/08: This is partly a bug. Apple has a QT fix. The Macs were supposed to be able to output regular video to non-compliant monitors, but not HD video.

iTunes 8: what really matters is the household library – and its DRM

iTunes 8 is coming out sometime soon, maybe tomorrow.

When it does, there will be the usual array of obvious improvements, and probably a few regressions.

The interesting parts, as always, will involve digital rights management in general, and iTunes approach to household media repositories in particular. Consider the setup described by a reader of my tech blog …

Gordon's Tech: The ultimate AirTunes, iPhone Remote, iTunes setup

From Jan ...

It looks like Remote with iPhones/iPod Touch and AirTunes is the solution for for the multi-room audio setup I was waiting for years to come.

I installed several AirPort Express boxes with AirTunes in the rooms and installed 3 users on a mac mini with fast user switching on. All users have their own iTunes setup and have access to a central NAS Server with all the MP3 files. This won´t work with Windows because Windows won´t allow fast user switching running iTunes !

With this setup every family member is able to hear their music independently on different AirTunes outlets….

Yes, and every family member can have their own media preferences and their own iTunes 8 recommendation profiles. They can’t, of course, sync DRMd music or iPhone/iTouch apps to their user profiles; currently only one account owns the DRMd media and only one account can add music.

Let’s see how iTunes 8 behaves. Apple can either continue to (very, very) quietly support this arrangement, or they can make things more restrictive, or they could validate household media libraries by allowing multiple accounts to add music and supporting multiple DRM accounts in a single media library.

I wouldn’t be shocked if Apple were to ship a revision of the AirPort Extreme that supported putting the media library on the 1TB AirPort drive …

Update 8/8/08: Adam Engst (tidbits) has the same thoughts about the household library, but he says he'd be shocked if Apple announced a fix. Either way, we agree -- what matters now is the management of the media library in the multi-device multi-user household.

iPhone remote multiple libraries - what it means

The iPhone Remote app supports connections to multiple libraries.

Macworld | iPhone Central | Remote lets you control iTunes from iPhone, iPod touch

...There is, however, support for multiple libraries. When you start up Remote after associating with a library, it’ll take a second to reconnect, during which time you can change which library you want to use (you can also tap the Settings button in the top left corner of any list screen). That’ll give you the option to add multiple libraries, delete existing associations, and toggle a “Stay Connected” preference (not precisely sure what that does at present)...

The implications are left as an exercise to the reader.

Ok, some hints:

1. iTunes is designed for a single user. It belongs to a user account.
2. iPod and iPhone binding is not to a user, and not to a computer, it is to a user account on a single computer. Unless everyone wants to share apps, contacts, calendar, etc a single iPhone syncs with a single iTunes library.
   
3. DRM contracts are to a single user's Apple identity (formerly .mac), they can be applied to > 1 computer (the number is shrinking over time).
4. DRM is far from dead. If the music industry succeeds in toppling Apple by allowing only Amazon to sell without DRM, then they will terminate Amazon's DRM-free privileges and assume the throne of Sauron. (You knew that, right?)

It's a complex world. Looking at the way the iPhone works, it's possible that we could move to a family account that all devices would sync to -- since iCal supports multiple calendar overlays and Address Book supports multiple subsets. Gives a whole new meaning to "all for one and one for all", a meaning of particular interest to teens.

Consequences, intended and otherwise ...

Software-as-service and DRM mean you don't own. You rent. Everything. Another lesson from Yahoo.

This would be the third time I recall that a major vendor has shut down a DRM service and stripped customers of all their products.

AppleInsider | Yahoo! Music's death at age 3 warns of DRM's risk

... Yahoo did its best to stage a rival to Apple Inc.'s iTunes, but after three years of lagging results, the Internet icon is putting its Yahoo! Music service to rest and leaving subscribers with copy-protected music libraries that can't be transferred to new computers...

Due the vagaries of computer life, within a year much of that music will be gone. Yahoo is telling users to burn CDs from the music. Anyone who's ever tried to do this will know what an inane idea that is. It's prohibitively time consuming, and future lossy compression of that music will generally produce awful results.

When Microsoft/MSN (? or was it AOL?) did something similar I think they refunded customer money, though that only works for people with current accounts.

They key lesson is that when you buy a used CD for $3 you have access to that material for an unlimited amount of time. When you buy the same CD new on iTunes for $14 you have use until Apple closes its FairPlay servers, or until it changes your iTunes contract.

We live in an age of transience. I suspect a younger generation will simply accept this as the way things are.

Incidentally, there's a cruel surprise slowly being uncovered. A surprise, that is, to the vast majority of people who don't bother thinking about DRM.

Lots of families are going to have multiple iPhones (great phone, fascinating computer, lousy PDA, Outlook sync broken, don't touch MobileMe before November, wait for 2.1 if you can).

They'll expect they can sync all their iPhones to what they think of as the family music and video library.

Cue evil laughter.

They'll discover then that an iPhone is a personal device, and it must sync to an individual user account. They will also discover that Apple's DRMd music and videos are owned by an Apple username, not a family. Lastly, they'll discover that iTunes libraries are personal libraries, not family libraries.

Slowly they'll realize the jaws are closing around them. They need to buy a copy of each video and song for each member of the family. [1] Eventually, they'll see the shape of a BrainLocked future, where we pay to keep access to our own memories...

[1] There used to be a workaround for non-DRMd iTunes media, but I've not tested it on iTunes 7.7. Sooner or later Apple will close the door on this; my transient DRM optimism has faded. I don't think Americans are going to figure this one out. Maybe the EUs will twig to this, and put some serious laws in place.

Update: Recently Apple terminated its .Mac web page authoring tools. All .Mac web pages are now inaccessible. For a scary moment I thought Google had done the same thing with my old Google Pages. Turns out they're only close to gone. Dang, but I sure as shootin' don't trust that cloud.

The end of Moore’s Law and the future of Dell

I can’t remember when the main feature of a major update was that it was significantly faster on current hardware:

Apple Gives Developers Safari 4 Preview | World of Apple

…Safari 4 currently has very few new features but is significantly quicker compared to Safari 3.1…

I have spent the last twenty years with the near certainty that every new version of a software product would be slower than the previous version on current hardware. [1] This drove hardware sales.

It’s not just Safari. Firefox 3 is faster than Firefox 2. The primary feature of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is that it’s faster on existing CPUs and GPUs.

An era has passed without remark. Hardware is getting faster, but the speed comes with power demands, heat production, and programming complexity. The cost of developing software is not falling, so there’s a desire to use common tools and technologies across multiple emerging platforms. That means performance on the lowest common denominator, whether that’s an ultra-cheap laptop [2] or an iPhone.

So if Moore’s Law is going the way of cheap sweet crude, should we expect our current hardware to last much longer than anticipated? What will that do to hardware sales for companies that don’t tie their software to their hardware, or their hardware/software to a recurring services-driven revenue stream?

Bad time to be working for Dell.

[1] Slight exception for OS X 10.1 and 10.2, but there were extenuating circumstances.)

[2] I remember when calculators went from $450 each to free. There’s no fundamental reason the same thing can’t happen to the ultra-cheap laptop.

The iPhone software advantage: strong Digital Rights Management

This is sad.

But it must be said.

I am no friend of Digital Rights Management. I don't buy FairPlay'd music -- because I can't play DRMd music on my car stereo [1].

On the other hand, I remember when there was a large selection of games and children's software for the Apple II and the original Macintosh. There's almost nothing left like that today - on XP or OS X. The CDs we bought 5-8 years ago were the last of that wave, and they no longer work on XP or 10.4 Classic [2].

There are such games today of course. They're on the Nintendo platform [3].

Why is this software on Nintendo, and yet not on OS X?

It's the Digital Rights Management. You can't give a copy of your favorite Wii game to a friend. You can't even move the games you bought at work to your home. This 21st century version of "copy protection" cannot be broken as easily as as the 1980s version.

The iPhone, like the Nintendo Wii, has very robust DRM. It will not be possible to download an iPhone app via iTunes and install it on your wife and children's iPhones and iTouchs [4].

Unlike the Palm, the iPhone and iTouch will combine robust DRM with a single contact built-in delivery mechanism for software developers willing to push through the distribution hurdles.

Guaranteed distribution. Guaranteed copy protection/DRM.

The iPhone will have a very large software advantage over the Mac version of OS X, and over the Palm and Microsoft mobile devices that have preceded it.

Ringtones were once a billion dollar industry, though that's dying now. The iPhone software advantage will be bigger.

We'll have to pay for the apps though.

I'm happy to do that. It's just too bad we need the DRM to make this work.

--

[1] Most know this, but it's worth mentioning that AAC is a format and not a DRM mechanism. AAC encoded music plays on our SONY car stereo and our Nokia and Blackberry phones).

[2] 10.5, of course, doesn't support Classic on any platform, so when our G5 iMac dies so will all our old favorite children's apps. My son collects the old CDs in his desk drawer, hoping, perhaps, that they'll one day come to life again.

[3] It is odd that no other game platform seems to have realized that teen players come from children players, and yet they don't provide entry level game software. Maybe the execs don't have children?

[4] On OS X and Vista there is a strong tie between a hardware device and a user identity. Each device must sync to a single account on a single machine, though Apple has screwed up the software/hardware/multi-user integration (See also). Once you start going down the iPhone/iTouch route, you will discover a very interesting set of problems with sharing your music library.

PS. An exercise for the Reader: Consider an alternative path that Google's Android might take, and how that path resembles a future funding mechanism for the New York Times.

Audio books for children: the list that's hard to find

Audio books are more effective than sleeping gas for quieting our kids in the car. Since I figured out how to use iTunes and Missing Sync for BlackBerry to put AAC files on my wife's Pearl I want to buy some more.

Of course I can't go to audible.com or the iTunes store or any of the obvious sources. The DRM makes these options unacceptable. I need a CD.

Surprisingly, Amazon doesn't have a unique collection. Google didn't help much either, though it pointed to a nice Kidsreads.com review.

Meaning, I had to actually think of a source rather than using Amazon and Google. I guessed a competing book seller might have taken a more thoughtful approach.

The great answer is the Barnes and Noble Children's Audio Collection. Today it shows 733 items, linking together the printed, CD and cassette versions.

So why'd Amazon miss this one? Is it because they have a growing business selling DRMd audio books? Is it because they rely too much on automated algorithms? Is it a sign that they've moved so far from their bookish origins that their original market is in play?

I clearly need to pay more attention to the B&N web site. Competition is good.

1/31/08: Amazon just bought Audible. I suspect their lack of an "audio book" CD catalog was not related to this acquisition, but it doesn't give them much incentive to push CD audio books.

The iTunes Store fails to impress

My 11 yo son has $30 in birthday credit at the iTunes Store -- and nothing to spend it on.

This ain't a good sign.

In the past we'd buy episodes of TV shows -- mostly for watching on plane trips or other travels. With NBC gone the pickings look slim.

Movies? Nah -- very few options in the family movie department.

We could get a game, but they only play on my aging fifth generation iPod; not my iPhone to come.

We can't get music! DRMd music (AAC is fine, just not FairPlay) won't play on the SONY car stereo -- it's a real pain. We avoid it.

The least bad option, despite the DRM, will probably be an audio book, and maybe a small game on the side. That's tolerable for burning to CD or even re-recording if we need to dump the DRM.

Still, not such a great showing. No wonder Apple's share price is tanking* ...

* I consider this a great thing really. They've loads of cash, and a lower share price will reduce Apple's tendency to delusional arrogance. Please, no more Air Books.