Posts Tagged itunes
An end to the Apple App Store
The company Apple, lauded and applauded for it’s innovative devices and software has hit some bumps in the road as of late. Continued controversy surrounding it’s methods for approving and (seemingly more often than not) denying apps from showing up in its iTunes Store has brought new decisions to light over the past several weeks. It seems that Apple can (and will) readily deny any app from showing up in the store for any reason. This could be something from not liking the look and feel of the application to rejecting it simply because it competes with an existing Apple-created app. This is the very definition of a company that has become involved in anti-competitive practices.
Yet, while I can’t necessarily comment on the legality of Apple’s operation, I will say this: every time I read an article about yet another app-rejection from the iTunes Store, it reminds me of a communist/fascist 2nd world government. Certainly it doesn’t align with the capitalistic system of business we strive for within the United States.
The Apple App store needs some drastic changes. I’m fine with them taking a cut of each app’s sales. They built a good infrastructure for app distribution and they deserve to profit from their efforts. I also believe that it’s okay for Apple to charge developers a fee for access to the SDK; however, I believe this should be a one-time fee. Not yearly as is the current policy. From there, they need to abolish the entire app-review process entirely (other than perhaps scanning for viruses or truly malicious code) and allow any developer to publish any app to the store, for any price, at any completion level they choose. They say they’re worried about half-baked and bad applications cluttering the store, but honestly this is probably not too much of a concern. Customers will indubitably continue to rate and review apps they purchase and download, so good apps will rise to the top and bad ones will sink to the bottom. This is the way a capitalistic system works! It is the customer satisfaction that makes or breaks the company or product. Not a 3rd party who has no idea how useful or useless a product may be to any given customer.
Take two apps rejected just this week: Google Voice and Riverturn VoiceCentral–the former rejected because it supposedly competes with AT&T’s mobile service and the latter not approved because it allegedly “duplicates existing iPhone functionality.” The funny thing is, four months ago, Apple approved Riverturn’s app along with several updates in the interim only to pull the app from it’s app store this week after rejecting the Google Voice app. Additionally, customers are requesting refunds for purchased copies of VoiceCentral since it’s no longer available. That sort of thing could break the company’s bank especially since RiverTurn would have to foot the entire bill whilst Apple keeps their 30% profit margin. I can see the contentedly smug expressions on their faces already.
Ultimately, developers will leave Apple’s fold in droves if the current conditions and policies continue in effect. They’ll abandon Apple for other more friendly developers. Can anyone say the Palm Pre? Or what about the Android Marketplace?
The consumers and developers will decide the fate of Apple’s App Store. But the way things are going now–it’s just a matter of time…
Music Everywhere: Lala.com
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on April 15th, 2009
Ever thought it would be cool to have your entire music collection online? Or that Amazon.com and iTunes are either too clunky or too expensive? Enter my favorite online music service: Lala (http://www.lala.com). Lala gives you access to more than 6 million songs in it’s online library, allows you to match any song in your current digital music library (or, if they don’t have the song, they’ll just upload your copy of the audio file). As long as you have access to the Web, you have access to your music. Best of all, the service itself is free!
Lala calls the songs in your online music collection “Web Songs.” Just for signing up, they give you 50 free web song credits (and by referring your friends, you can earn an additional 50, 5 at a time). Listen to any song once, no questions asked (and with 6 million at your disposal, you won’t run out), then use a credit to add the song to your Lala online library. Once you run out of credits and each song becomes $.10 for your web library. If you’d rather download the song to your computer, you can do so for a flat rate of $.89. Way better than the new pricing at Amazon and iTunes!
Give it a try today, and refer your friends! It’s music like you’ve never heard it before.
Macworld keynote = *shrug* (mostly)
It’s no secret that today’s keynote address by Apple’s Phil Schiller would be lower in excitement than previous years in which Steve Jobs took the spotlight, but that didn’t stop Apple fans around the globe from speculating on what new products and announcements might be unveiled once the presentation was over at 10:30am PT. For the most part, I think Schiller did a great job presenting his agenda and filling in for Jobs, whose health has been questionable as of late. Here are the highlights of today’s keynote (in descending order):
- iTunes goes (almost) DRM free
- New 17″ MacBook Pro
- iLife ‘09 announced
- iWork ‘09 announced
The most important announcement was definitely about iTunes and how Apple is making everything DRM free by the end of Q1 2009. I have been annoyed for a long time at Apple for not trying harder to get rid of DRM from all iTunes tracks. Sure, iTunes Plus has been around for awhile, but it included only a limited number of songs and they generally cost more than the $0.99 fee for their DRM-enabled counterparts. The new pricing structure (featuring songs at $0.69, $0.99, and $1.29) is also more lucrative. This move will probably bring back some customers who had gone looking elsewhere (like Amazon’s MP3 store) for their music, especially those who use Macs or really like iTunes. I, for one, hate the actual iTunes software product and refuse to use it except when absolutely necessary (which is about 0.01% of the time). It’s clunky interface really just needs a complete refresh and the Windows version needs to feel more like a Windows app. But I’ll save those comments for another day. I could see myself buying songs via the iTunes store (when they’re cheaper) and then converting them to MP3 so I can move them around to other places.
The latest MacBook Pro also deserves a mention. If you want the relative power and big-screen of a desktop but really need the portability options, then the 17″ MBP might be a good buy. Unfortunately, its caveats outweigh most of the benefits. First, you can’t replace the battery or swap it out with a second battery. I guess since they didn’t make this thing to be carried around everywhere, this might not be too bad, but for designers who want to hit the road, this could be a disaster. Sure, it has greater lifetime longevity and a supposedly more run-time (up to 7 hours?), but I think most users would gladly trade this for a removable battery. Plus, once the battery does die, you’ll most likely need to send your machine back to Apple for a costly replacement. Cheers! (Did they not learn their lesson with the iPod fiasco??) Second, Apple still isn’t allowing a matte screen and I really just don’t understand that. Glossy looks nice if you’re a casual user sitting at home, but for anyone who does serious work, they’re going to want the no-glare matte version. Apple’s $50 anti-glare coating option will help, but not alleviate this issue. Finally, it looks like this MBP does not have user-upgradable RAM or Hard Drive options. The 320GB (5400RPMs still…why won’t they go to 7200RPM!?!) drive will be fine for now, but many users would probably want higher capacity (if not higher speed) drives not too far down the road. Also with the growing demand for more and more RAM, upgrading that will be important. I give this machine a rating of 6/10 tops.
iLife ‘09 adds some pretty cool features. Faces and Places are two new and quite useful additions to iPhoto. Just tag a photo with a place and it’ll give you a map of that area. Also, with new facial recognition software, iPhoto can catalog people’s faces so you can search through an album by just typing in someones name. Search by as many people as you want to pull up only those pictures containing the specified individuals. This is pretty cool. GarageBand adds some new lessons/tutorials, but not much else. iWeb and iDVD were not represented at all during the keynote, so any new features won’t be seen till consumers get their hands on the actual software. iMovie 8 received many updates as well in attempt to quell the backlash from version 7–which was pretty much a step backward from version 6. I think Apple may have succeeded here.
Finally, we take a look at iWork ‘09 (all yawn). Basically they implemented better functions, charts, etc into Numbers, added some nice new transitions and effects into Keynote, and added full-screen editing and new dynamic outlines to Pages. Among all of the iWork apps, you get some new collaboration features that allow users to upload documents to iWork.com for viewing and sharing. This really isn’t anything new since Google Docs pretty much started this and Microsoft Office Online began offering this type of feature just a year or two after Google. It’s really nothing new or exciting. Probably the biggest announcement about iWork ‘09 is the new app for iPhone/iTouch. It allows the device to act as a wireless presenter, displaying either the presentation outline or the individual slides based on the device’s orientation. Very useful. Overall though, Apple is still playing catch-up with Microsoft Office, and while a few loyal Mac die-hards are using iWork, anyone trying to get real work done will just buy Office–the de-facto standard. Most of the big Apple players attend the Macworld keynote each year, and when they all but groan at the announcement, you know it really isn’t even worth mentioning. Those who believe Apple is the next great religion, on the other hand, will scoff at my words. Their loss.
Well, that pretty much sums up the Apple keynote at Macworld ‘09. Ultimately, I think Phil is a great speaker and should probably get more time in the spotlight, especially since Jobs won’t be around forever. I’m waiting to see what other goodies Apple will announce later this year, but for now, my sights are set on CES ‘09 starting Friday, where Steve Ballmer will concentrate much of the presentation on Windows 7. That’ll be an exciting event!
Stay tuned.
UPDATE: It appears on Apple’s website that the MacBook Pros (both 15″ and 17″ versions) now have optional 7200RPM drives available for an extra fee.
Apple’s 6th-gen iPod not all it’s cracked up to be
I’ve always wanted/needed a good solid digital media player (e.g. iPod, Zune, iRiver, etc) – a device that had a lot of storage capacity for the ever-growing media library, had solid performance, an intuitive interface, support for major standards, and of course it needed to look good too. I’d narrowed my selection to two contenders: Apple’s iPod and Microsoft’s Zune.
I wanted the Zune to be honest. I own PCs running Windows Vista and XP, I’ve carefully engineered my music collection for Windows Media Player 11’s amazingly intelligent media library, and I have files scattered across multiple computers in numerous folders. The Zune would have been perfect for my needs since it easily integrates with the technology I already own. I wanted to buy a new or almost new device (and certainly the latest since this thing needs to last awhile), so I started looking on Froogle, Amazon, and eBay for the best deals on Zunes and iPods. I came to this conclusion: I could buy a Zune for nearly retail price or I could get an iPod for $100 less than what Apple sells charges on it’s website. I decided that the iPod had a good enough reputation that it would definitely suit my needs and since 99% of my audio files are in MP3 as opposed to WMA, I could let iTunes catalog the files and transfer them to the iPod. So that’s what I did–I bought the iPod Classic (6th gen) 80GB. And I got a good deal.
It took about a week to receive the unit, but once it finally arrived, I excitedly opened the package and took out a small black box from inside. Wow, I thought. That’s pretty small! It was an open-box item, but looked like to be in mint condition as I lifted it from it’s packaging. I carefully examined it and upon deciding that it was in perfect condition (minus a couple fingerprints on it’s brilliantly reflective back), I removed the quick start guide, headphones, and charge/sync cable from the bottom of the box. A few short minutes later, I was plugged in and waiting for the iPod to charge.
I walked away for awhile and gave the device the recommended 2 hours for a quick charge, deciding that I’d play with it while waiting for the other 2 hours of its 4-hour complete charge cycle to finish. First thing that happened was iTunes launched. I’d made sure a couple days previous that I had the latest version of the software (in this case v7.7) so that it would have the latest bug fixes among other things. At first, iTunes kept giving some strange unknown errors and recommended that I reboot the device. I ignored it momentarily and noticed that it had been run through initial setup by the previous owner, but there was nothing actually on the device. So, like a good tech-savvy individual, I told iTunes to look for a firmware upgrade and then restore the machine to the factory-condition settings. This would reformat the internal drive, reset the RAM, and then upgrade the device software/firmware to the latest revision. All of this went smoothly and a few minutes later I was happily clicking through the initial setup screens within iTunes. Everything seemed to be great!
Now, I decided, it was time for the true test. I had 10GB of audio imported into iTunes, a few video podcasts, and an audiobook or two that I would sync to the iPod directly after the initial setup had completed. Everything was ready and then with great enthusiasm, I clicked “Sync.”
The speed pleasantly surprised me! Everything transferred over in just a few minutes and then reported that synchronization was complete. I unplugged the iPod, popped in the included headphones and started surfing around the device. First I opened a video podcast-the image was crisp and reminded me of HD quality video. Pretty slick. Next I decided to try out the music, since that’s primarily what I’d bought it for. I opened up an album or two and played a few songs. Flawless! I opened a third album and that’s where all my troubles began.
I selected just a random song from the album and waited for the music to start-only when it did, it was the wrong song! Figuring I’d just accidentally moved the selector before hitting ‘play’ I used the click-wheel to go back a track and tried again. That’s when I knew there was a problem. Read the rest of this entry »