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11
Jan 11

iTunes Challenge

I need your help. Or at least I think I do. It’s a technical problem.

Here’s the situation:

I have a media iMac at home. I have an iPhone and an iPad that sync music, podcasts, books, apps, movies, and photos to this media machine. I don’t sync the contacts, calender or email through iTunes as those go through the cloud.

I recently started using a MacBook at work. I’d like to switch synchronizing the iPhone and iPad to the work machine. I’m not sure entirely why. Some vague reasons that have crossed my mind:

  • It’s a nicer and faster computer than my 5-year old iMac.
  • I could download new apps or books from iTunes instead of searching within the App Store on iOS.
  • New podcasts would download during the day to listen to on my commute home.
  • I’m more likely to sync to my work computer than my home machine.
  • The old iMac’s USB doesn’t charge the iPad at all unless the screen is off, so I’ve started charging both devices at work.
  • I don’t really use the iMac at home other than to store stuff.

The problem, however, is the media. Podcasts will download on their own, so that doesn’t seem to be a problem. And with iTunes Sharing, I can sync the files — or at least a lot of them, but I won’t get the play counts and I don’t have the space for all of the media (the iMac has a pretty full 1/2  TB drive). And it only works at home when I actually have the work computer on with iTunes running. Yet, there does not seem to be a way to sync smart playlists (maybe I just recreate them? but again, the play counts which are vital to many of my smart playlists, are missing). And iPhoto synchronizing from a shared library is manual only. This is a bigger issue, because my wife and I take lots of photos of our kids, and I really appreciate how new photos taken with our SLR or iPhone just magically show up on the iPad after a sync.

So … is this a fictions first-world problem that I invented and needs no solution? Or is it a real problem? How would you solve it?

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04
Jan 11

AirPlay

Adam Lisagor on Why AirPlay Is Important:

“AirPlay is important in the evolution of media because the tech infrastructure Apple has been building for more than a decade is finally maturing enough to reach that holy grail of weightlessness.”

The idea that you can easily present a slide show, play a video or movie, play a song, play a video game or whatever … from the device you are holding to the TV on the wall is very intriguing. No need to switch remotes, configure the “source” for the video, or anything else. Just choose “play” and choose “that screen over there”. Weightless indeed.

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24
Dec 10

iOS Quality Apps not in Android Store

Gruber on app stores and the philosophy that shapes them:

“The differences between the iOS App Store and Android Market are a microcosm of the differences between Apple and Google. Apple is a retailer, a purveyor of well-crafted goods that people will line up to purchase. Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences.”

He makes a good point on the quality (and type) of apps you find in each store:

“iOS’s best apps could exist for Android but don’t. Android’s best apps couldn’t exist for iPhone. In theory, then, Android could be beating iOS in both regards. Android could be the platform with exclusive apps like Reeder, Twitterrific, Things,Simplenote, Instagram, Calvetica, PCalc, and Pastebot — in addition to the exclusives it already has like Swype and home screen replacements that the iPhone can’t have. What I find interesting is that Android just doesn’t have apps like this.”

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20
Dec 10

The Balmer Tablet

Smart talk about a Microsoft tablet:

“What’s remarkable—and what should be, for any Microsoft shareholders, a deeply troubling sign—is that Ballmer, apparently, wants to do none of this. For him, the PC model is the only option. It doesn’t matter that it has never worked for this market in the past. It doesn’t matter that the tablet needs a new approach to user interface design, one that is fundamentally different from that of traditional PCs. Ballmer wants the PC business model—a Microsoft operating system on commodity hardware—running PC software, and the unsuitability of that software is seen as an irrelevance.”

Apparently though, they have a new tablet to show at CES this year. Given how well their announced-at-last-year’s-CES tablets did this year, it’ll be awesome … oh wait, they never shipped. Never mind.

Anyone else noticing a pattern with Microsoft announcements?

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10
Dec 10

Justifying a Good UI

It is an old analysis, but still a good one, The Cost of Frustration:

“While it’s hard to measure whether a design is poor or not, we can easily measure when frustration occurs. With a little digging, we can usually associate a dollar cost to the frustration, thereby giving us a way to estimate, in financial terms, the cost of the poor design.”

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