Family Macnight?

Stitch, I emailed you at your SabreJim address, and I'm not sure you received it. I proposed a family Macnight for Friday October 2. The following day we will be visiting my grandmother for her birthday, so it would be nice to get together if possible. I know it's late notice, and my apologies! Let me know when you get a chance!

Macnight cluster maps

Have you noticed the Cluster Maps link at the bottom of the Macnight blog web page? It shows a map of where in the world the most hits to our blog come from. I found it odd that we seem to get a pretty good spread of people from around the world. Some from the southeast Asia, some from Europe, and North America. But one thing absent is South America. No hits? Don't they sell Macs in South America? Aren't there other Mac fanatics there? I am puzzled. Even if people randomly found our site you would expect a few hits from South America too.

iTunes 9.0 A big upgrade

I would have to say that after downloading iTunes 9.0 that it is a serious upgrade. My favorite new feature is the new layout of the iTunes Store. It is much easier to navigate. And it has a more modern look to it. One area I would like to see an improvement is the rating system. I believe the rating system is overly inflated by teenagers or young college students. Almost everything has a 4 or 5 star rating. Too many times the review say that "the video is the best of all time". Everything cannot be the best of all time. One rating system I found that worked well was on the Fandango.com web site. This is the movie theatre web site for tickets, previews and showtimes. It lets you filter the ratings by different criteria of the rater. Such as by age group, if you have kids, and others. It is interesting how the reviews change with the filtering.

Maybe Apple could put a rater on hold for a while if they give too many high ratings. The other extreme is the one star of death rating where people are irritated about something with the iTunes store or Apple and they use the review as a complaint forum.

Anyways, back to iTunes9. The home sharing feature is good if you have a bunch of libraries as in teens in the same household. I wish they made backup of the system a bit better. Where everything is stored and not breaking the setup is too complex. Having an auto backup feature built into iTunes and archiving to another network hard drive would be the best. iTunes is so big now that a hard drive crash can wipe out a significant investment. Auto backup should be a key feature of iTunes. I know Time machine does this, but this is not available on Windows and older Macs. Plus I don't really want access to every version of every file I have ever created on my computer. I found a program written by a computer science student that lets you auto archive selected directories in the same tree structure as it is on your main drive. Simple, automatic, no compression, encryption, it just works. Should be part of iTunes too.

Another requested feature would be to have different user settings for the same library. It would be like multiple accounts on the same computer. The library is the same but each users settings are stored in their seperate area. Each person could do their own customization. I know Christina does not like a bunch of the songs on my library and we share libraries for easy backup. My worst iTunes experience was trying to merge two libraries which had some duplicate songs and some unique songs. I had to go by hand and find all of the duplicates. iTunes will list them. But you need to delete them one by one clicking visually. Sad.
iTunes is getting better each time but I wish Apple would allow for user input for requested features. Maybe they don't because of potential lawsuits if they use your idea.

What do you think about the new Nano?

Any thoughts about the new Nano? It seems that Apple needed to do some major feature enhancement to keep the Nano a tempting option in the MP3 player market. Especially with all the new features of the iTouch. This gives people with a smaller budget a reason to buy the Nano. The demographics is probably younger teens or people who want a device to exercise with that is very small but still has a screen.

I read some reviews of the new Nano and many of them gloss over the ability to pause live radio. After owning a DVR for so long and getting used to being able to pause or rewind video, I find myself assuming I have this ability in my car radio. If you miss something that is said, you assume you can just rewind it and hear it again. Yes I am conditioned. I guess for radio it is not as big of a deal unless you are listening to a talk show or something like that. Rewinding a song to hear again may not be that great. I wonder how long the recording goes for and if it is still there next time you power up. The key marketing feature with this is the iTunes taging which allows you to tag you hear on the radio for iTunes. Then when you sync with iTunes you can download the song from the iTunes Store. HD radio advertises having this feature too. It has been driven into my skull with the HD radio ads I hear 5 times a day.

The camera/video feature could be good if the pictures are better than the crappy cameras typically on cell phones. That lens looks pretty small. My cell phone touts a Megapixel camera but the pictures are almost always grainy and blurry unless under very bright sunlight.

I still think the "shake to shuffle" feature introduced in the last update is pure genious and will greatly appeal to the younger crowd. My son opted to get a PSP (Sony handheld gaming device) instead of an iPod Nano for about the same price. To him, games are more important than music right now. And the iTouch was quite a bit more expensive.

Problems with AppleTV

Stitch, this article seems like it was written by you!

Apple TV Problems

He makes an observation that the media companies are probably just not playing ball with Apple. THe result is that the AppleTV will be a crippled device for the foreseeable future.

Squash the serious AppleTV features upgrade

Stitch, check out the link:

No AppleTV Upgrade

I know that you can't always rely on analysts' reports, but it seems they met with the Apple CFO for their information. Now there may be an AppleTV refresh coming soon, but I don't think it will be tomorrow. I know I've heard in the past that Apple is working on it. Hopefully it will be soon enough for them to be competitive.

AppleTV needs a serious upgrade

I have noticed that there is starting to be a lot of competition developing on the AppleTV market. Netflix has Roxio which allows you to view a limited selection of their videos on demand as part of your regular subscription. The reviews have been good and the simple device starts at $50. Then there are more and more PVR's which are like Tivo. Where you can digitally record TV/cable/dish programming to a hard drive for later viewing. Tivo has sued most of the competitors out of the market so this is more the build it yourself market. If Apple can expand their movie database to be on par with Netflix and offer a PVR built in this would be a big advance. The killer app would be something like a cable/dish package which has a minimal fee and loads of ad supported TV. I think the pay per show model for TV is a bust and is only a nitch market.

Speaking of Heavy Handedness!

Stitch, here is another example: Apple didn't like one developer's "bubbles" in a chat application, saying it was too much like their own. Can a company patent something like that? Maybe Apple should be happy that their iPhone has an App that is almost the same as their refined "look and feel">

Bubbles!

Special Event Sept 9

Stitch, I'm sure you have already heard that there is a special event coming up. Speculation is rampant on some tablet idea, but I seriously doubt it. This is about music! That happens to be the same day the Beatles release all their albums in remastered form, and everyone thinks Apple will let customers download them from iTunes. Are you interested? Thinking about a new iPod? Word is they could have cameras!

Apple's arrogance revisited

I think you may have missed my point in the previous "Apple getting to arrogant" post. I added another comment.