First Of All

I read a post recently about moving from physical media to digitally distributed music. This kind of transition seems to be popular lately, but I myself am not quite caught up in it yet. Here’s my main reasons.

I love going into a store, holding an album in my hand and saying “I want this”. I love taking that album home, taking the CD out of the case, and inserting it into my CD player. I love reading the booklet while I listen to the music. I love looking at my collection of CDs all lined up in the bookshelf. These things are impossible with digital music. All I can do in iTunes is CoverFlow mode. And no, it’s not the same thing.

But let’s focus on the music itself for a moment. Most of the music that is available on the internet is encoded in MP3 at 128Kbit/s. It amazes me every day how the distributors can get away with calling this “near-CD quality” every day. Anyone who has listened to songs downloaded from, say, the iTunes store on decent headphones or speakers will be convinced that they just wasted 99¢. And the data will reassure them - Uncompressed music has a bitrate of about 1500Kbit/s. So much for “near-CD quality”.

These gripes of mine may be shared by others, and they may be exclusive to me. But I know that these few niggles will not stop giants like Amazon or Apple. All I can do is cross my fingers that some day they will learn how to encode music properly (respect to Linn for leading the way). Until then, I’ll stick with my CDs. What about you?

I read a post recently about moving from physical media to digitally distributed music. This kind of transition seems to be popular lately, but I myself am not quite caught up in it yet. Here’s my main reasons.

I love going into a store, holding an album in my hand and saying "I want this". I love taking that album home, taking the CD out of the case, and inserting it into my CD player. I love reading the booklet while I listen to the music. I love looking at my collection of CDs all lined up in the bookshelf. These things are impossible with digital music. All I can do in iTunes is CoverFlow mode. And no, it’s not the same thing.

But let’s focus on the music itself for a moment. Most of the music that is available on the internet is encoded in MP3 at 128Kbit/s. It amazes me every day how the distributors can get away with calling this "near-CD quality" every day. Anyone who has listened to songs downloaded from, say, the iTunes store on decent headphones or speakers will be convinced that they just wasted 99¢. And the data will reassure them - Uncompressed music has a bitrate of about 1500Kbit/s. So much for "near-CD quality".

These gripes of mine may be shared by others, and they may be exclusive to me. But I know that these few niggles will not stop giants like Amazon or Apple. All I can do is cross my fingers that some day they will learn how to encode music properly (respect to Linn for leading the way). Until then, I’ll stick with my CDs. What about you?

I have tried quite a lot of RSS readers in the past, and few have been able to keep me faithful for a long time. Google Reader is one of those, and for good reasons.

Before using Google Reader, I was a big fan of NetNewsWire - I just loved its syncing feature. It would always keep my feeds up-to-date across several computers. Of course, this required NNW to be installed on each one (the online reader was no good). As you can imagine, this is severely limiting.
Google Reader, however, syncs in the single most intelligent way imaginable: It doesn’t. You don’t need a client that has to be synced, you just access the Google Reader page from your internet browser, no matter where you are.

The ability to mark articles for later reference is priceless. This feature may not be unique to Google Reader, but it is still worth mentioning. I have about 30 to 40 feeds, so there is no way I can read every article that I get. What I do is I scan through all the new items in the morning, mark the interesting ones, and then come back to read them when I have the time.

Of course, Google Reader also integrates very well with iGoogle. You can add a widget to your custom Google homepage, showing you any number of your most recent feeds. Click on them to preview the article or just open them in a new window. Read more about iGoogle.

For me, the accessibility was what made me a Google Reader user. But there are a lot of other features that you can fall in love with. Give Google Reader a try, and see what you like best about it.

Last year, I went through a very difficult time computer-wise. I had sold my Mac to buy a new one, but Apple needed a few more months to come up with a good one. So in the meantime, I had to downgrade to my old Linux box. I quickly found out that there was little to no software on the Linux platform that held up to my insane standards. Mail clients, RSS readers, word processing, all of it was useless to me. I wanted all my apps to work together with me, like software on my Mac did.

Oddly enough, a search engine was the one that saved my day. I had read about iGoogle on someone’s blog and found it a very nice alternative to the dashboard on OS X, mainly because it was platform-independant and accessible from anywhere. I set up my own customized homepage, showing me my E-Mail, joke of the day, upcoming holidays and so on. Google had compiled a nice list of gadgets that I went through. As I browsed through the suggestions, I got the feeling that half the goodies on the list where actually made by Google. Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Everything. So I thought I might give them all a try.

One year later, Google rules my life. I have a computer again, but I still do 70% of my computing online. iGoogle has indeed become my home page, my internet hub. My to-do-list, My calendar, my twitter updates, my RSS feeds, everything I need to see on the web is right at my finger tips.

iGoogle has simplified my internet usage to a great degree, and I don’t think I could live without it. It’s where all the ends meet, where all the Google apps come together to make your life easier. I’ll be going into detail about the other apps in the weeks to come, but for now, I want you to go to www.igoogle.com and see for yourself. You’re gonna love it.

Josh Holat recently wrote an interesting article on Appletell, entitled “How Apple can help Aperture surpass Photoshop”. I thought it was an interesting read, so I thought I’d share this with you, and also give my 2 cents on the issue.

Basically, what he’s saying is that with Photoshop Express released, Adobe are sucking in more and more potential customers and Apple is doing nothing to put Aperture on par. Personally, I believe one should not forget that Photoshop can be used for much more than image manipulation, but still, the guy has some valid points.

His first suggestion is to use .Mac Web Gallery in the same way Adobe uses Photoshop express, just with an Aperture interface. This would of course benefit Apple, bring a little competition into the game, but is that really what they want? Adobe is one of the most prominent developers for the Mac platform, and Apple would make a big mistake competing with too many of their products. They do this with Lightroom already, so if they made a Photoshop competitor, Adobe sure wouldn’t be pleased.

Josh’s second point is far more interesting in my opinion. He suggests opening up the Web Gallery feature, making it social, and of course free. Now I’m a big fan of free Apple stuff, but I think starting up a social network of photo galleries would be pretty hard, what with Flickr’s stranglehold on that particular market. Now If I’m not mistaken, Apple and Flickr are quite the buddies. So why not just put a Flickr uploading utility into Aperture, integrate it well, and make the partnership big news? People would love that, and I’m sure Flickr would benefit from it as well. In the end, the reason not many people use Web Gallery is that they already have Flickr. Why bother with creating new stuff when you’re sitting right next to the source?

The third point cannot be stressed enough. Building a community around a product is the number one priority for any developer (or company) out there. Open up a Twitter account, Facebook groups, whatever it takes. Just plug into your existing fanbase and let social networking do the rest. If you tip it to the right people, even the news of Aperture integrating Flickr would create a buzz big enough to get quite a few new users. And trust me, any Apple fan would spread the word.

In the end, all I’m saying is that simply integrating Flickr into Aperture would solve most of the problems Josh Holat mentioned in his Article, so if anyone from Apple is reading my take on the issue as well, you know what to do if Steve asks you how to improve Aperture even further. Just do me a favor and do the same kinda thing for iPhoto. 200$ is great for prosumers, but the average guy can not be bothered to spend that kind of money.