2011-05-04
A Quick Thought On Planetary
Yesterday, Bloom launched Planetary. As I don’t have an iPad, I can’t really comment on it, but it did remind me of one of the better talks I went to at SXSWi, Finding Music With Pictures. For an hour, Paul Lamere of Echo Nest went through a variety of music visualisations and players, ending with a call to arms- music players shouldn’t look like spreadsheets. Planetary definitely doesn’t.
The thing is, a few years ago, this ambition might have seemed impossible to achieve: after all, on the desktop, iTunes was dominant, and nobody was going to choose an alternative UI, especially given the pain of reconstructing their photo library for it. Meanwhile, the iPod was a closed device.
Now, though, iOS offers an API for apps like Planetary that’s good enough to allow them to be built (both with access to the device’s music library and play/pause controls). There’s also a playfulness - and immersiveness - to phones and tablets that seems more likely to encourage use than the same app in a windowed UI.
2009-07-05
post/135808914
Thing to do when bored: create artwork for all those sad faceless songs in iTunes and pretend you work for Factory.
I really should upload my on-a-theme Underworld live album covers. Except the images are nicked from Flickr and the music itself is bootlegged. Still, who’s going to care?
2009-06-23
Kindle’s DRM Rears Its Ugly Head
In summary, kindle books can only be resynced to a kindle or iPhone a limited number of times. The number of times varies book to book. The number of times is not publicly listed. Once you exceed the number you have to buy the kindle ebook again.
From reading the follow-up post, it turns out that the limit is actually on the number of devices; the number of downloads is unlimited per device.
There’s a parallel here: when iTunes music was DRMed, you could authorise five computers to play the tracks. (iPods and iPhones didn’t count, because it’s harder to copy the music to them.) There are obvious differences. Apple made it clear what this limit was (five), when you added a computer (either via the iTunes menus or putting a password into a dialogue box), and it allows you to deauthorise machines (even, once a year, doing a full reset and removing all authorisation).
As the follow-up concludes,
You are able to redownload your books an unlimited number of times to any specific device.
Any one time the books can be on a finite number of devices. In most cases that means you can have the same book on six different devices.
Unfortunately the publishers decide how many licenses, that is devices, a book can be on at any one time. While most of the time that will be five or six different devices there will be times when it’s only one device.
At the present time there is no way to know how many devices can be licensed prior to buying the book.
According to the customer rep, there is a project to try to get that information available to the customer but it’s not yet available.
The last part is key. If Amazon insist on DRM, then allowing people to register (and de-register) devices would, while not solving its problems, at least give users the tools to avoid being bitten quite so badly by them.
2008-09-17
post/50539510
Version 1.1 of Apple’s Remote for the iPod touch (and iPhone)… well, let’s see what the Apple copy says, shall we?
Edit playlists.
Now you can edit existing playlists in your iTunes library right from your iPod touch or iPhone. Change the song order with the drag of a finger or delete a song with a tap. It’s your music mixed the way you want it.
Which is nice. (I previously published a fairly rudimentary hack which let you sort of do the same last year, but it looks like the Apple version actually saves your changes back on the remote library. Presumably this is because they’re able to guarantee a single lock- Remote gets a different sort of connection to a vanilla DAAP share.)
While I’m on the subject, Remote Buddy lets you stream to an iPod from your main machine, like Simplify Media, although it does it all via HTML/AJAX rather than being a local app. Still, it’s running a separate app, which as I said before, I’d rather avoid.
