RetrophischMichael turned me on to Synergy, a menu-bar utility for controlling iTunes, and it freaking rocks! Well worth the $5 shareware fee. One feature is the transparent floater that pops up when tracks change. Click on the thumbnail below for detail, then cruise to Wincent’s site, download, and register!
While I’m very glad Apple provided us old iPod users with a way to sync and listen to AAC-encoded files, the one other feature I’m envious of, in the iPod 2.0 software on the new Pods, has to be the text notes. If I had that, my Palm handheld usage would likely drop off by fifty percent or more.
(Thanks to Lee for the link.)
My lovely bride pointed me to this Fortune article on the new iTunes Music Service. Obviously written for publication before the service was officially announced, it provides a great look at Jobs’ vision behind the service, and the inadequacy of the music industry in its previous and current efforts at online distribution.
A few items I’d like to address:
One thing’s for sure: If ever there was an industry in need of transformation, it’s the music business. U.S. music sales plunged 8.2% last year, largely because songs are being distributed free on the Internet through illicit file-sharing destinations like KaZaA.
I take issue with this statement, since it’s impossible to prove that illegal file sharing has had this much impact on the U.S. music biz. There is a ton of physical piracy (blanket CD copying) going on overseas, especially in Asia, that eats in to the music industry more than a bunch of geeks swapping songs online.
I have downloaded a lot of music from peer-to-peer networks, as well as some centralized sites I have access to. Some of it was digital copies of CDs and cassettes I already own. The rest was stuff I wanted to listen to before I went out and bought it. A lot of that got trashed when I realized it wasn’t for me.
I know I’m not the only one who probably spent more on music (albeit looking for sales and good prices online) because I was pulling music off the net.
Second, it seems as though hardly anyone in the music business thinks that the problem with falling sales may be attributed to the product itself. Elsewhere in the article:
For years they have been able to get away with releasing albums with two or three potential hits bundled with ho-hum filler cuts. That has been wonderful for the industry, but it has made a generation of consumers who pay $18.99 for CDs very cynical. “People are sick and tired of that,” says singer-songwriter Seal. “That’s why people are stealing music.”
Amen. That’s it right there. And we see further evidence of the music industry’s slow-to-catch-on attitude:
But MusicNet users still can’t download songs onto portable players. “These devices haven’t caught on yet,” insists MusicNet CEO Alan McGlade. Never mind that U.S. sales of portable MP3 players soared from 724,000 in 2001 to 1.6 million last year.
Hmmm. I would think a better-than-two-times annual growth, in a year, in any segment of the tech economy would be cause for consideration of said segment.
As for the service itself, I think it’s great. I haven’t actually bought and downloaded any music yet, but that’ll change any day. I’ve spent quite a bit of time searching through it and listening to samples. It’s going to change the way I buy music. It’s going to change the music business.
Lee notes David Pogue’s column on the individual song pricing structures at Apple’s new online music store. Good points all around.
So after three crashes in a row today, I’ve decided to dump Safari as my main browser. Despite this being v73, aka, Public Beta 2, and fairly rock solid, and despite disabling the cache, known cause of myriad problems, it’s still not stable enough for my liking.
Granted, Safari doesn’t crash every day for me normally. More like once a week or so. It’s just that it chooses to crash at the most inopportune times!
So I downloaded Safari Bookmark Exporter, and got my Safari bookmarks into Camino. I’ve noticed that Camino consumes less RAM than Safari, and doesn’t seem to get bogged down as usage is extended day after day after day. We’ll see where this goes, and wait for Safari 1.0.
Thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner, my TiBook has gone from four partitions to three, without missing a beat. Well, there was obviously some downtime, but no muss, no fuss!
The new desktop pic is courtesy of my new Canon PowerShot G3.
Michael has quietly updated DropDMG to version 2.1. Enhancements include the ability to create Internet-enabled disk images, and the ability to encode .dmg images with MacBinary. Numerous other improvements abound.
Bill Palmer offers an excellent summary of why it’s so great to be a Mac user.
I’m a complete Photoshop novice, often getting FranX or Lee to walk me through stuff. One observation I thought I would share about Photoshop 7 running in OS X: when working on a JPG (and maybe any file), be sure to not have that file selected in the Finder.
I had clicked on the JPG in question in the Finder (column view), and the Finder was previewing the pic. Photoshop no likee this. As soon as I clicked to another pic in the Finder, Photoshop saved my changes to the JPG.
Looking for a little help from the retrophisch readership (all 3 of you): I’d like to create a slide show-style screensaver, like those that come pre-installed with OS X, but I don’t want to use the .Mac Slides Publisher to do it. I know I can just point the Screen Effects pane to a folder of pics, but it tends to limit the number of pics to five. And I’d like to provide the screen saver as a download to other OS X users.
Of course, I’m looking to do this cheap and easy, so recommendation on products such as iScreensaver Designer, PhotoCircus, or any others would be appreciated.