The idea behind Coverflow is recapturing the experience of flipping through your music to find the album you want. I think I’ve fallen pretty far beyond that and I don’t really relate to albums in that way anymore. None the less, it is a very pretty app and fun to play with.
If you have two macs, or one mac and one pc, would you mind testing my latest version of Daappelganger?
http://homepage.mac.com/jhobbs/daappelganger/
I’m about to release it to the world, and I’d like to make sure it works before that. Essentially you will have to:
1) Turn off iTunes’ built-in music sharing.
2) Install the .pkg.
3) Run the Daappelganger.app installed in your application folder.
After that, it will compile an index file of your music and share it out, the same as iTunes; but without iTunes’ restrictions per simultaneous clients or clients per day.
Let me know if/how it works in the comments below or via email. Thanks!
~jeff
With the release of this thing, Apple wins the Christmas 2005 Most-Desired Gizmo Race by a mile. Sony comes in second place with their PSP; although, if they don’t get any decent games to market, Nintendo and their secret weapon may wind up crushing Sony altogether.
~jeff
• Lyrics pane. You can now add lyrics to songs in the lyrics pane of the song info. Better than the old comments field, which had a relatively low character limit. I’m not sure how to access them in a meaningful way once they are entered, but I’ll bet a visualizer comes out soon that uses that information. Is it stored in the mp3/m4a file, or in some metadata? They don’t appear to be picked up by Spotlight.
• “Skip when shuffling”. Huh. It skips the song when playing back songs randomly. Ok, that’s cool, but isn’t the check box a better place to determine that? Putting it in the song info window makes it kinda hard to see at a glance. I foresee confusion about why songs aren’t being played. You can’t access this tag from the multiple track info window.
• Playlist folders. Awesome!
• Aesthetic. Well, say what you will, but at least Apple seems to have found a look they like. I expect Safari will get the same makeover in version 3.0, if not before.
• Shuffle randomness. People have always complained about this. Neat that you can now make adjustments to it. Not sure how useful this is, but time will tell.
• Search. It uses Spotlight for searching now, which is nice. A bit faster than the old way. You can search for particular media (booklet?), and sort by artist, album, and name.
(seriously, what is booklet?)
Last night’s Daily Show was so good, it reminded me why we love the Daily Show in the first place; it reminds us that we’re not alone thinking the way we do about our government. Watch it if you can.
~jeff
~jeff
This site is now the number-one hit on google for the word “mumenschantz“.
For some reason.
Congratulations all around.
~jeff
As anyone who knows me knows, I’m a sucker for anything that glows. And I’m a sucker for anything USB. So when Target put their mini USB lava lamps on sale for $4.99, I *had to have one*. And it’s perhaps the most intelligent purchase I’ve ever made. The little lamps come in clear, purple, and toothpaste blue; the one pictured above is toothpaste blue.
~jeff
The scroll wheel is fantastic. It isn’t a nipple like the ThinkPad, but rather a tiny little rolling ball held up by a soft spring, allowing you to scroll in four directions. The use of the nipple never made sense to me physically, since you don’t move it, per se, and it has it’s own acceleration thing going. The ball or wheel makes much more sense in the context of a mouse, in which you are dragging and pushing things around already.
The side grips server double duty as a button now, but the construction leaves something to be desired. Since it serves as a gripping point, it takes an extra strong squeeze to activate it as a button. That aside, the overall construction is great. The mouse is lightweight, and it somehow can tell where you are clicking, though it feels exactly the same on your finger, no matter where you press. Apple gets points for the technical cool factor, and the user experience success factor. For as subtle as it looks, this mouse has 4 buttons, plus the wheel. Right and left clicks, clicking directly over the scroll wheel (you actually click the mouse, not the wheel), and gripping the sides can all perform different functions. But…
The software leaves something to be desired. You can’t assign keystrokes to buttons, which means I can’t set a button to be “back” in my browser. You can assign it to open any application or document you want, so I guess I could set it to open an appleScript that “pressed back”, but that would be crappy from a user experience perspective. The nice thing is that it is 1.0 software, and I’m sure that sort of thing will be addressed.
Google Talk is cool and all, but I don’t use my PC really. Apparently, you can use Google Talk as a jabber account in any one of a number of IM apps. Besides, don’t we all need another IM account?
Five quite excellent “Haunted Cipher” strips by Eric Haven. I found them in an equally excellent compilation of indie comics, “Strip Search“. Click to enlarge:
