Rick's World

Link: http://www.amazon.com

Yesterday, Amazon launched their new MP3 store. This is big news and I am very excited about the possibilities.

The interesting thing about the Amazon MP3 store is that all the tracks are stored in unprotected MP3 files! This means NO DRM! This is a VERY good thing. But what is even better is that their songs are cheaper than the iTunes DRM-free tracks. iTunes charges $1.29 for a DRM-free track, but Amazon charges $0.89-0.99 for their DRM-free tracks. Plus, Amazon has 2 million DRM-free tracks available. This means they have more DRM-free tracks available than iTunes does. The songs downloaded from the Amazon MP3 store are also automatically added to iTunes, so they can be easily added to your iPod. They also offer sales on certain CDs as prices much cheaper than iTunes.

While I generally like iTunes and the iTunes Plus section of the iTunes store, it's always good to see iTunes get some viable competition. You could make a very good argument that the iTunes Store is a monopoly in the purchasing of music online. The iPod is the only device that can play DRM protected songs, bought on iTunes. It also will NOT play DRM protected songs, bought on other online music stores. The only way to play songs on the iPod is to use a non-DRM file format. This means MP3, or in the case of iTunes Plus, this would mean unprotected AAC. In order for a company to sell songs that work on the iPod, they can't use DRM. This, no doubt is the only reason Amazon is selling unprotected MP3s and not highly protected WMA files, like everyone else has before. Amazon is at least smart enough to know that to complete with the iTunes Store, you need to work with the iPod. The only way to do this is to sell unprotected music.

This little bit of 'monopolistic' practices by Apple is actually forcing the industry in the right direction - away from DRM on music. People do not like that they don't own the song. With DRM, you could have the music you paid for taken away at any time. Without DRM, the song is yours and no company controls when or if you play it. This is a move in the consumers favor and I'm all for it.

I will definately be keeping an eye on how Amazon's MP3 store develops. I very much hope it is successful. If it is, it will likely force Apple to lower prices on the iTunes Store and also educate all the music labels that removing DRM from their songs is a good thing for everyone involved.

A week ago, I bought a 16GB iPod Touch. I meant to write a long fawning review praising this thing as an incredible device. I never got around to writing that blog. It's a good thing too. Now that I've spent a full week with it, I've had time to get a much more realistic opinion of it. Here are a few of my likes and dislikes about it.

The Good

• The screen: The screen on this thing is absolutely gorgeous. It's large, full color 320x480 screen is a joy to watch videos on and the album art looks positively huge on it. There have been some reports of problems with the screen on the iPod Touch, but I haven't noticed any problems on mine.
• Safari: The mobile browser on this thing is fantastic. It's the best mobile browser I've ever seen. I'm curious how you would program for it though. What screen resolution does it report? Is there any way to detect when the screen gets rotated between portrait and landscape mode.
• Onscreen keyboard: The onscreen keyboard is very well designed. It's also one of the 'smartest' keyboards I've ever seen. The keyboard adapts itself to whatever type of information you are entering. If you are entering an email address, it displays letters, an '@' symbol and even a '.com' button right on the main keyboard screen. If you are typing a company name into the Contacts, it knows to capitalize the beginning of every word automatically. If you double click on the space button, it inserts a period followed by a space. This is a great way to end a sentence and start a new one. If you are typing in a text field, and you hold your finger down on the text field for a few seconds, it will show you a 'magnifying glass' view of whatever area you run your finger over on the text field. Inside this magnified view, it shows you where the typing cursor will be as you move your finger. This makes it very easy to reposition the typing cursor, even on a small screen using a big 'stylus' (your finger.)
• Connecting to the PC: You no longer have to manually 'eject' the iPod from the computer. Just unplug it. If you are not syncing anything to it, you can unplug it at any time. This works beautifully on the Mac. I haven't tried it on the PC.
• Device construction: The iPod Touch has a surprisingly solid feel to it. It doesn't feel cheap. It's encased in metal with a nice, real glass screen, and it has a surprising weight to it, for a device as slim as it is.
• Storage capacity: I rather expected that I would have a lot of trouble living with 'only' 16GB on it, but I find that it's not really that big of an issue. Yes, if you put a large number of videos on it, it will eat the space fast, but if you limit it to just whatever music you like and whatever videos you are watching right now, it's plenty of space. I find that I use the iPod Touch to mostly listen to podcasts and music. Podcasts are a very 'transient' thing in that once you've listened to it, it no longer needs to be on your iPod, so they often don't stay on the iPod for very long - usually no more than a few days. As for music, by forcing you to limit your music selection to only the songs you like off of every album, it makes shuffling the music much easier. You don't even really need playlists. Just shuffle the whole thing and you'll still end up with lots of music you like.
• Contacts application: This application is very well designed and feels nicely 'Mac-ish'. It has lots of smooth animations from one screen to another, and it quite capable for creating, editing, and deleting contacts. The UI of it is very intuitive. I was easily able to make any change I wanted to a contact without any documentation. I certainly can't say the same for the confusing UIs on every other contact manager on the various cell phone's I've used.

The Bad

• No disk mode: There is no way to use this thing as a portable hard drive, as you could on the older iPods. It never even shows up on the Mac desktop at all when you plug it in. It only shows up in iTunes.
• VERY hard to hack: The previous iPods were very easy to hack into. The file formats of everything on the iPod had been long since reverse engineered and you could do just about anything you want with it. This thing is locked up as tight as a drum. From what I read, a lot about the file formats have changed, to include things such as hashes and other very difficult to crack changes. it's even considerably more locked down than the iPhone, of which it is otherwise nearly identical.
• No physical playback controls: There are only two buttons on the entire iPod - a 'Home' button that goes back to the main list of applications, and a 'sleep/off' button. There are no buttons to allow you to pause/play, fast forward, rewind, etc. a song. You have to actually click the controls on the screen to do this. The problem is, once you start playing a song, the screen will shut off to conserve power while you are listening. In order to get to the controls, you have to essentially double click the home button to turn the screen back on and display the controls. THEN you press whatever control you want. That means to pause the music, you need to press at least three buttons every time. This is an annoying feature. The old iPods where much easier. Just in the physical play/pause button.
• Wi-fi eats the battery: I've come to the conclusion that if you have the WiFi turned on, even if you are not using it, it eats the battery MUCH faster than if you turn the Wi-Fi off. I've even had cases where I pause a song, turn of the screen and walk away. I come back a while later, and despite the fact that it's been sitting there with the screen off, doing nothing, the battery has been drained considerably. My best guess is that since the WiFi was still on, it was still eating the battery trying to connect to a WiFi access point, even if I'm doing nothing else. if you want good battery life out of this thing, turn off the WiFi unless you need it. If you need the WiFi, turn it on just as long as you need it and then turn it back off (in the Settings). This should provide much better battery life. I will experiment with this and report back as to how much it seems to help, if any.
• Can't add Calendar items: It completely puzzles me why you have full access to create, edit and delete contacts, but you can only view calendar items. it makes no sense The iPhone can create calendar items, so why the hell can't the iPod Touch? It's the same application! This strikes me as a stupid attempt to differentiate the iPod Touch from the iPhone.
• No email application: The email application that was present on the iPhone is missing. While you could certainly make the argument that since the email requires a network connection, and the iPod Touch won't always be connected to a network, like the iPhone usually is, that the app is not necessary. Of course Safari also requires a network connection and it's on the iPod Touch, so that argument kind of falls apart. Stupid.
• No notes application: Yet another application from the iPhone that was removed from the iPod Touch for no apparent reason. Note that even on the iPhone there is no way to sync notes back to the computer, so even on the iPhone the Notes app is of little use. I wonder if this will change once Leopard is released. All in all, this mising feature is another stupid omission.
• No document reader application: The older iPods had a 'Notes' feature. This was a very primitive way to keep text notes on the iPod. You could then read these notes from the iPod at any time. There is no equivalent on the iPod Touch. This is a previous iPod feature that has gone entirely missing on the never version of the iPod. This makes no sense. What I had hoped they would do would be to design some simple way of syncing a list of PDF and Word documents onto the iPod Touch. Then all they would need is a very simple application that presents you with a list of the documents and lets you view them. The iPod Touch already has the ability to view PDF and Word documents loaded from a web page (and the iPhone can also do this from documents attached to emails.) It already can view the documents, so what's so hard about writing a simple program to show a list of documents and then pass the document onto it's existing document viewer? The iPod Touch (and the iPhone) would make gorgeous document readers.

All in all, I'm quite impressed with the iPod Touch. From a hardware point of view, it's downright beautiful (as is typical of Apple hardware design). As for software, it's mostly quite good, but has a few glaring things missing.

*sigh* These comment spammers are amateurs.

Note to comment spammers - if you use the same IP address to send all your comment spams you make it very easy to delete the spams and ban your IP. Today's winner is the IP address:

62.33.12.29

This guy sent 29 comment spams, all from this IP. The comment spam is deleted and his sorry ass is banned from my site.

Nice try moron.

Ok, it really sucks that there is no note taking app on the iPod Touch. It is such a useful feature that it puzzles me why it was left out. Anyway, if you want to take notes on the iPod Touch anyway, here's a very ugly hack to make that happen.

You can do this using the Contacts feature. Just create a new contact and set the 'Company Name' field to the title of your note. Leave the first and last name blank. Then scroll down to the bottom of the fields and click on the 'Add Field' button. Scroll down to the bottom of the list of fields and pick the 'Note' field. Edit the note field to have the contents of your note. Then just save everything. Your new note will show up in the contacts list as if it was a company name, containing just a note.

It ain't pretty, but it works. At least until Apple gets off their lazy butts and puts those missing apps back into the iPod Touch!

In the last 24 hours, I've received a flood of over 150 comment spams from the same IP address:

62.33.12.104

This IP appears to be coming from somewhere in Russia. All the spams were advertisements for various prescription drugs. I have banned this IP address from my web site. Whomever this spammer is, he's obviously an amateur at this. He sent ALL the spams from the same IP address, making it very easy for me to lock him out for good. Plus, while, I do allow comments to be placed on my site without registering, they are not actually shown until I approve them. This means that this guy's efforts have been wasted. His advertisements never showed up on my site. Because of the easy pattern to his comments, it was also very easy for me to go in and delete all his spams in one shot. (SQL is a very useful thing!)

Nice try buddy. Better luck next time...

Well, I did it. I bought one of the new 16 GB iPod Touchs. It is all set up and I'm typing this message on it. I have to say that the keyboard is much more useable than I expected. I am making almost no typing errors and I've never used the keyboard much before today. My web site administration software works perfectly and every we site I've tried has rendered beautifully in Safari. I have to say, I'm impressed so far. I'll write a full review later.

I've been reading reports that the iPod Touches have started showing up at the Apple Stores already. I may have to go by and 'look' at one this weekend. Hopefully I can come back 'unscarred'. :)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the iPhone vs. the iPod Touch. I love the features of both, but I'm uncertain which one to get (if any). Right now my decision is between an 8GB iPhone or a 16GB iPod Touch - both of which are $399. Let's look at the differences.

The iPod Touch definately has the advantage in storage capacity right now, seeing as how it has twice the memory of the iPhone fo the same price. I don't know how much longer that will be true though. The fact that the 16GB iPod Touch even exists, means that a 16GB iPhone isn't far off. The two devices are nearly identical when it comes to hardware, so if you can fit 16GB in one, you can fit 16GB in the other. There's even been some rumors lately that the iPhone will be upgraded to 16GB soon. It was also announced today that Apple will be holding a special event in the UK on September 18th. I suspect this special event is to announce the availability of the iPhone in Europe, possibly also with the announcement of a 16GB iPhone. The question is, will this 16GB iPhone show up in the US as well and how much will it cost? My guess is that it will show up in the US at the same time and it will cost $499. I don't think they will charge $200 more for the 16GB model. This means I could likely get a 16GB iPhone very soon.

The iPhone definitely has the advantage in convenience. I like the idea of only having to carry around one device - the iPhone. The alternative would be the iPod Touch and a cheapo slim cell phone. Right now I'm using a big, bulky, P.O.S. Palm Treo cell phone. It'll be a pain to have to lug around both the iPod Touch and a cell phone, when they can be easily combined into both.

The iPod Touch has the advantage when it comes to not having to be tied down to a two year cell phone contract. If you get the iPhone, you have to sign up for a two year cell phone contract with AT&T. This is something I'm very hesitent to do. Plus, the fact that the iPhone is exclusive to AT&T for five years, means essentially you are locked into a five year contract with them! Yeah, you can get out of the contract in two years, but your iPhone would then be essentially useless for the next 3 years. Granted, I doubt I'll be using the same 'ancient' iPhone even 3 years from now. I'm sure that if I bought the 8 or 16 GB iPhone today, that a few years down the line when they have a MUCH higher capacity iPhone out, that I'll want to upgrade the 'tiny' iPhone to the new one. But again that means another contract. Plus, the features on the iPhone - even the non-phone features are locked down tight. If you don't have that contract, the thing is basically useless. With the iPod Touch, there is no contract, so it works right out of the box and will always work without having to pay AT&T every month. Also, since my current cell phone contract doesn't expire until May of next year, I couldn't get an iPhone if I wanted to until then. With the iPod Touch, I could get one right now and not have to worry about that.

The iPhone gets the advantage in the number of applications available on the device. The iPod Touch lacks the email program, the notes program, the stocks program, and the weather program. It also lacks some features in it's calendar app that the iPhone's calendar app has. I find the lack of these apps puzzling. Yes, most of these missing apps require a network connection to update them. The iPhone, between it's Edge connectivity and WiFi connectivity is much more likely to always have a network connection available to update them. The iPod Touch only has WiFi, so unless you are within range of a wireless access point, these apps can't update. I really don't see this as any reason to exclude them though. WiFi access points are very common these days. Also, I find the lack of the Notes application very puzzling. This is NOT a networked application. It's just a way to take notes. What is the point in excluding that? I'm also at a loss as to why they didn't add some kind of document reader app to the iPod Touch (and the iPhone for that matter). The iPhone has the ability to read Microsoft Word documents and PDF documents that are attached to emails. It shouldn't be that hard to write a simple application that keeps a list of documents and lets you view them on the iPhone/iPod Touch. The functionality is already there! All they need to add is a list of files to view!

I'm also a bit disappointed that the iPod Touch doesn't use a hard drive for storage capacity. Yeah, it's nice to have a slim, sexy device, but they put a 160GB HD in the iPod Classic. Why not put that 160GB HD in the iPod Touch? Can you imagine having 160GB of video stored on that thing and be able to watch that much video on that gorgeous widescreen display? That would be fantastic. People have been calling this combination the 'GodPod'. I have agree. I'd love to have this combination. Having only 16GB of storage space on a device clearly aimed at displaying video makes little sense. You could also argue that since the iPod Touch is not a cell phone, it doesn't quite need the light weight and portability as much as the iPhone does. I have a large music and video collection. I could easily fill up a 16GB iPod Touch a dozen times over with that stuff. I hate having to pick and choose only the things I want to see, rather than having eveyrthing at my fingertips (literally). Granted, I'd never watch 160GB worth of video or listen to 160GB worth of music in the average day, but it's nice to have that stuff available if the mood hits me.

I'll likely end up getting an iPod Touch when all is said and done, but I'm not sure I'll get one immediately. I want to wait and see what happens with the missing apps on the iPod Touch. Will the reappear at a later time? Will new apps (like my document reader app) appear soon? I sure hope so.

Link: http://b2evolution.net/

Last night, I updated my blog to the new 2.0 version of my blogging software. I gotta say, that so far this new version is a very nice improvement.

Now I just need to figure out how to write custom skins so I can write an iPhone skin. :)

My friend Dave mentioned his experiences with using a Mac Pro - specifically using Windows on the Mac Pro. This got me thinking about my experiences with Windows on a Mac Pro.

While Dave is a pretty recent convert to the Macs, I've been using them nearly exclusively at home for the last two years. For the last two years, I've had two computers at home - a Windows PC and a Powermac (now Mac Pro). They were connected via a KVM so I could easily switch between the two. I liked this setup because I could easily 'multitask' by running both computers at the same time. I could be doing something on Windows and then hit the KVM switch and go back to the Mac, while the Windows machine does it's thing. It was a great setup. It was a horrible, messy 'bowl of spaghetti' behind the desk, but it worked.

I had considered just going with Virtual PC on the Powermac and running Windows in a virtual machine, thereby eliminating the need for a second computer. I even went out and bought a copy of Virtual PC for the Mac and tried it. The problem was, that Virtual PC ran absolutely horribly on the Powermac (a very powerful machine). While Windows did run, it was slow, and some things that I needed did NOT work right. This basically meant that Virtual PC wasn't going to work and I was stuck with the dual computer setup.

The Powermac is a PowerPC based computer. This is the old type of CPUs that Macs used to have before they switched over to Intel CPUs. Apple has pledged to keep supporting PowerPC computers, despite their switch to Intel CPUs and they've done an admirable job at it. That is one reason I was able to continue to happily use my old Powermac for a long time after Intel Macs came out. Most applications continued to work perfectly. The problem was that, with the switch to Intel CPUs, the PowerPC became a second class citizen in the Mac world. 99% of applications worked, but there were some that wouldn't. One of those apps was VMWare.

VMWare is another program that allows you to run Windows in a virtual machine. The problem was, that VMWare only ran on Intel Macs and not on my Powermac. Now, I completely understood why this limitation existed. For most apps, the differences between PowerPC and Intel CPUs are relatively minor because they operate at a very high level. For VMWare, it's quite different. In order to run a virtual machine, it's necessary to emulate the CPU itself. This is a very low level requirement and there's no way to avoid it. I can perfectly understand VMWare's decision not to support PowerPC. It would have required completely rewriting the application, from the ground up in order to support what is essentially a dead CPU platform (at least on the Macs). In order to run VMWare and have a hope of running Windows in a virtual machine again, I'd have to replace the entire Mac - not a cheap proposal.

I fought the urge to do this for over a year. I kept telling myself that my dual computer setup was just fine and it did what I needed. In the back of my mind, though, I knew I was living on 'borrowed time' with that Powermac. I figured that I could easily get another year of good use out of it, but beyond that, more and more apps would start to abandon the PowerPC and I would see my Mac become less and less useful. Finally, I decided it was time to 'move on' and get the Intel based Mac Pro that I'd been eyeing for a long time.

A few weeks ago I bought the Mac Pro. I was easily able to transfer all my files over from the PowerMac without a hitch. It was an amazingly smooth transition. I was now running an operating system on completely different hardware and I couldn't even tell the difference. This is fantastic! The Mac Pro, despite having twice the CPUs and being a lot faster, also runs a good 33% cooler than the Powermac! Once I got the Mac Pro and added a couple of gigs of RAM to it, it was time to try VMWare.

I grabbed a spare 250GB HD off the shelf and installed it as the second internal HD on the Mac Pro. I then setup a 200GB Windows XP virtual machine on that HD and went ahead and installed XP. I was amazed at how fast XP ran! XP was running faster in a virtual machine than it was running on a dedicated computer! After running some tests on the virtual machine, I determined that everything in Windows worked perfectly in the virtual machine. The problems I had in Virtual PC on the Powermac were now gone. I had a fully functional Windows XP machine now running in a virtual machine.

For the last several weeks, I've been running the Mac Pro exclusively, using that XP virtual machine for the rare times I need Windows. Considering how I'm a Windows developer, I spend very little time in Windows at home. I'm able to start up that virtual machine, do whatever I need for a few minutes, and then shut it down. My old Windows XP PC has been sitting there under the desk, turned off for weeks. Before I would turn that thing on every day and have two hot computers running, heating up the room and eating a lot of power. Now, I have one computer running cooler and using less electricity, and yet with all the same functionality.

I still kept that old Windows PC there under the desk though. I suppose it was out of habit or out of a feeling of leaving it there 'just in case.' I've come to realize that there is no 'just in case' anymore. That box is now useless. A couple days ago, I finally went 'cold turkey' and unplugged it - removing it from the desk. I'm now running a single computer, the Mac Pro, and I don't miss that other computer at all. I still have that mess of 'spaghetti' behind the desk to clean up, but I'm happy to say that I've given up the dual computer life and am now happily living with just a single computer.

I don't forsee myself ever buying a PC again.