Idée Fixins

After a friend told me about using her iPhone to help tune a capella singers in a rehearsal, I started thinking about just how many products the iPhone has eliminated, or will soon eliminate. Things that used to be standalone tools, now seem totally unnecessary, and in a generation will barely be remembered.

Here’s what I came up with in two minutes:

• Walkman, Discman, and MP3 player
• Calendar / datebook
• Address book
• Wristwatch
• Kitchen timer / egg timer
• Point-and-shoot camera
• Dictaphone
• GPS navigator
• US Atlas
• Metronome
• Tuning whistle
• Digital photo frame (more the iPad)
• Handheld gaming device like GameBoy, PSP, and Nintendo DS
• Portable DVD players
• Some sort of health / heartrate / exercise pedometer device, though I’m not really sure which one or how true this is
• Compass

I didn’t put E-Book Reader on the list, since I just got a Kindle and am now convinced it’s here to stay.

That’s just a start. What did I miss?

The MacBook Air looks gorgeous. And though the performance of past Airs — and being realistic about how mobile I really am in a week — gives me pause, none of those concerns are serious enough to stop me from buying one as my next computer.

Electronics being smaller is almost always significantly more important than it seems while you’re looking at a product online.

I remember a friend mocking the first iPod Mini when it first came out, incredulous that anyone thought the iPod — which already managed to cram 1000 songs into your pocket! — needed to be any smaller. Have you seen one of the original iPods lately? After you experience a mini version, the previous full size feels cumbersome and ridiculous and unecessary. 

That said, I’ve got a unresolvable problem with the Air: storage space.

And this problem of mine is really Apple’s problem. I blame them for two reasons.

One, I need storage space as a direct result of Apple’s brilliant digital hub strategy. I’ve got a 500GB hard drive in my MacBook Pro filled up a little more than halfway right now:

• 69.7 GB — iPhoto library (Also to blame for that: our friends who bought us a great Canon DSLR for our wedding) 
• 49.8 GB — Music
• 34.7 GB — Video projects (Final Cut Pro and iMovie stuff, not video podcasts or TV shows or anything like that)

Those three categories total about 150 gigs — more than all but the largest MacBook Air hard drive, and too big for any 11” model.

Apple created an OS and great software that inspired me to store all of my photos and music on my computer. And because they created amazing video-creation software that I use for my job from time to time, to huge-GB effect.

Two: Apple should have seen this coming and solved it by now. I know there are perennial rumors about them working on iTunes for the cloud, and endless speculation about their NC data center, and they bought Lala, and all the rest. But they haven’t delivered yet.

There’s one obvious solution, though I don’t know if it’s the best solution, and I don’t think there’s any chance they’ll actually do it: A home media server that works as easily as the Time Capsule. It could be based on syncing parts of the master library (like laptop -> iPhone relationship now) as well as streaming (like the laptop/iPhone/iPad -> Apple TV relationship). I see a need for both, unless they manage to make streaming work anywhere — not just over the same wireless network.

Of course, the other way to do it is entirely over the cloud. But while that might work with music, where 99% of my songs are copies of something that Apple already has in its servers, that won’t do the trick with photos or video. And I still spend enough time away from wifi or in bad-3G areas that I’m not comfortable having none of my media on the computer I’m carrying with me. I’m hoping for some sort of “check-out / sync” option as well as robust streaming.

But so far, Apple hasn’t come close to solving the problem.

So for now, I’ll just keep putting the MacBook Air in my cart on store.apple.com and then taking it out again every few days. But as soon as the 11” model has a 250-500 GB hard drive, and/or Apple comes out with a serious, modern media-server or cloud-based media organization solution, I’m clicking buy.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/three-million-businesses-have-gone.html

A TPM reader who’s a Hill staffer

(Source: talkingpointsmemo.com)

A really fantastic presentation on (mobile) web development, via @natekoechley (my brother).

I use at least 7 different syncing services every day to keep everything current between my laptop and my iPhone:

• Gmail, over IMAP, for email;
• MobileMe, for contact and calendar info;
• BusySync, to sync my iCal with Krista’s iCal via sharing with our two Google Calendar accounts;
• iTunes, via USB cable, for my music, podcasts, videos, photos, apps, books, PDFs, and other random files; 
• Simplenote and Notational Velocity, via Simplenote’s own homegrown web service, for notes of all kinds;
• SimpleText.ws, another homemade small-developer sync service, for my to-dos in Taskpaper;
• Dropbox, for backing up my most important writing and recent work files, and for maintaining a good “To Read” folder for PDFs that can’t be fed into Instapaper but that I might theoretically want to read while on the go (though this has never happened);
• Time Capsule wifi network, at home, for backing up our computers wirelessly every hour (not exactly syncing but not exactly not).

And that’s not to mention all the other apps that are less crucial to my life that also sync using their own self-written code.

Not only is it a hassle to set up and maintain all of these various non-integrated systems, it’s expensive: while most are free, MobileMe is a notorious ripoff at $99 a year and BusySync is just under $40. 

And it’s not like they’re all great. I ran into serious problems with BusySync and the MobileMe Calendar beta, which took me a whole afternoon to debug. iTunes and MobileMe stopped working after I upgraded to an iPhone 4. Taskpaper’s syncing often overwrites, garbles, and loses data, but that developer is in the process of rewriting the program on top of Dropbox’s new API, so it should soon be as seamless as the best of them.

Seamless, invisible, 100% reliable, cross-platform, over-the-air syncing should be built into the iPhone for free, and the SDK as well. Users shouldn’t have to be half-geeks like me to set it all up and maintain it. Developers shouldn’t have to figure out their own solution instead of focusing on their own core features. And none of it should require a wired iTunes connection (except for media syncing).

This is one of the areas where Android is way out in front, and while it’s not nearly enough to get me to switch, it is nice to see another company demonstrate that it can be done, and done very well.

One good solution would be to make MobileMe free, as many others have suggested, and offer an API to use its cloud-syncing tech. Do you think Apple hasn’t done that because a) they never do anything for free; b) they don’t think MobileMe could stand up to the strain of lots of people actually using it; or c) they know MobileMe is not very good and they’re waiting until it’s better to roll it out widely?

Why don’t coffee grinders — which are almost exclusively used in the early morning hours, when other people in a house are likely to be sleeping — have an insulated, noise-muffling outer shell? This is a problem for everyone else in the world, too, right?

Blargh. The .docx format is the end of me. It causes so many problems with interoperability and attachments, and as a user, I see no upside to it. (I’m sure there are engineering or product design upsides—it’s just that none of them are obvious or visible or important to me.)

Amazingly, my version of Pages.app opens them, but my last-year’s-version of Microsoft Word does not. Nor does Google Docs.

What percentage of computer users have the latest version of Office? Tons of corporate PC users are still on XP, and many others are just a version or two behind.

A rather pleasant set of colors here on this water cooler that make it super obvious which one is hot, cold, and room temperature. (At least my guess is that white is room temperature.) And the “endless fresh water” slogan makes me think that it’s hooked up to a tap and purified in the machine, which also makes a lot more sense than lugging around massive jugs.

This is a great example of horrendous aesthetic design — that whole upper area is marvelously ugly and cheap looking — saved by really nice usability design.

Warren Buffett

“Business” & “War” in a Kalispell, MT bookstore. The world would be a better place if these two ideas were associated a little less closely.

As I watched Steve introduce Ping last week, I was impressed. Sure, he came off like an uncool dad trying to sound hip while talking about music—who name-drops the “Honda Civic Tour”?—but the project itself seemed like a natural, reasonable way for Apple to get into social networking, and an addition to the iTunes experience that some/many people would enjoy.

But then I played with it. And it’s terrible. So what went wrong? 

You can’t DO anything with it. You can’t post a status message about a song or an artist or a lyric that’s stuck in your head. You can’t click “like” on a track you’re listening to in iTunes. You can’t find any artists on there to follow, other than megastars like Lady Gaga and guys I don’t know like Rick Rubin. (OK, that last failing will probably change as more artists starting Ping™ing, but the rest seem permanent.)

The only way to express yourself with Ping is to buy things or make comments about your friends’ purchases. Campaign finance reform opponents argue that money equals speech, but even they don’t claim that money is the only way to speak.

My theory is that Ping is so bad because it was made by the iTunes STORE team, instead of the iTunes team. It feels like a product made in a profit-focused silo without any real thought given to how it fits into the whole, or what actual everyday users would want. It’s like a new feature dreamed up by the Photoshop-Layers-Sidebar Team that has no hooks to the rest of the program.

You can’t even get to it from your iTunes library. And on the iPhone where the listening app is discrete from the buying app (rather than being part of one massive conglomerated-but-contiguous mess) it’s even further removed.

In addition to being a bad experience, is extremely disappointing to see from Apple. This is exactly the kind of thing they’re supposed to be so good at. 

UPDATE 9/7: Seems like you can click “Like” on an album without buying it. But only from within the iTunes Store—not from within iTunes.