Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Wednesday, September 7, 2005
12:00 - Stirring the Secret Sauce	(top)
Well. Now that everybody reportedly has Apple's number, and now that Napster and the various subscription services are poised to eat iTunes' lunch, and now that the iPod is <deep breath> doooooomed... here they go again, grabbing up the goalposts and scurrying off downfield again, cackling. Just when I'd finished the book, too. iTunes 5: Now with Even Less Aqua! It's all Tiger-style now. No more brushed metal, which I guess was bound to happen sooner or later as Steve tired of it. But this is an even weirder, newly mutant look: the corners are barely even rounded anymore. The radii of the curves have been reduced to only about two pixels; this is the first time I believe we've ever seen this look, and the first non-rounded upper corners on a primary (non-palette) window since OS X debuted. What new chapter in the UI Guidelines are they trying to write with this one? iTunes 5 now has a Spotlight-style search function, too; whatever you type into the Search field, a bar appears above the navigation window that lets you select the searching scope at a single click, between "All" and "Music" and "Podcasts", among other sources. This has definitely become necessary as iTunes has subsumed media like videos and podcasts recently; this goes some distance toward unifying them all within the same navigation structure, just as they were threatening to break loose. Speaking of structures, when you install iTunes 5 it updates your music library�meaning there's a schema change. For what, you ask? Lyrics! Well, it's nothing but a text field, and it doesn't present the lyrics in time with the music or anything, like I still hope someone figures out how to make AAC do. But it's definitely a start, and I applaud it. I'm less sanguine about "folders for your playlists". Well, I guess I shouldn't say I don't like the feature, because I've often found myself wanting some way to organize the playlists better, particularly when doing screenshots; it's not easy to get the Source pane looking exactly the way you want it to when there's exactly one way to sort its contents. Folders�particularly nested ones�fit the bill nicely. I guess what I was worried about was that Apple would bend to clueless peer pressure and put in "hierarchical playlists", a concept that fits into Windows-navigator-style music players with the ease of a prepackaged toolkit but that has no bearing on music listening patterns or ease of use. Smart Playlists cover the "playlists that contain other playlists" angle, and this way you don't have to have things nested in weird places unless you specifically put them there, using a folder, which has no effect on the music's behavior�just its organization. I can deal with that. "Effects" in the Preferences is now "Playback"; other than that it's the same, except that now there's a feature called "Smart Shuffle" that gives you an interesting continuous slider letting you coax iTunes into grouping your "random" music into sets grouped by artist or album. This is actually something I suggested to Apple three or four years ago, in a feedback; I'm not going to claim that this was "my idea", but it's strikingly similar: I wanted a way to have the iPod "shuffle" the music through a series of links between songs, where every consecutive pair of tracks would have something in common�artist, album, genre, whatever. But, as usual, this way of doing it is quite a bit more elegant than what I'd come up with, and looks like it's been carefully engineered to match real people's listening patterns. This is what makes iTunes what it is: it does what people expect it to, and they don't have to jump through any flaming hoops to get it to happen. The "Importing" tab in Preferences has been moved to a sub-tab under "Advanced", as has the "Burning" tab. Good thing, as that bar was getting pretty crowded. And now we've got a "Parental" tab, which lets you disable podcasts, shared music, and access to the Music Store, and has a lock that password-protects the settings. Probably a good idea; wouldn't want your kids listening to Air America or IMAO, after all. Other than that, iTunes itself seems to be pretty much unchanged�just lots of cosmetic updates, most of which make it look a lot crisper, if blazing trails into a whole new realm of UI language. I guess if iTunes is to be a true cross-platform application, Apple's thinking is that it may as well not look like a Windows app or a Mac app. That way everybody wins! Anyway, now we've also got this: Nano nano! So much for the iPod mini, then. This baby's priced the same as the mini, but it's Flash-based and considerably smaller�like a mega-Shuffle, really, with a color screen and scroll wheel and everything. The styling is regular-sized-iPod-scaled-down, not mini-like in that regard. And it's available in black, which everyone has been saying would be a big hit. So we'll see. Meanwhile, the mini itself is gone from the Apple Store; but interestingly, the ad copy on the main iPod page discusses the mini and even has a link to an iPod mini buying page that's not available through the Apple Store itself. So I guess iPod minis are still available to those people who are dorky enough to read Apple's ad copy, or something. (Me! Me!) Meanwhile, there's this Harry Potter tie-in, where all six books are now available as audiobooks, and you can even get a special-edition Harry Potter engraved iPod. That's something that may or may not fly well, but they've got plenty of data now on how well the U2 edition sold, and meanwhile it gives Apple that coveted Harry Potter mindshare, for whatever that's worth. Certainly it's not something these guys can boast. Oh, and "one more thing"? Be still my beating pancreas. Do forgive me for not leaping for joy at this one; aside from the ugly screen and the uninspired interface (no scroll-wheel on this thing), I really don't want to have to think about people using their phones as music players, or vice versa�whole downloaded songs used as ringtones, for example. I'm dreading the inevitable: soon, twenty times a day I'll be hearing I LIKE TO MOVE IT MOVE IT... I LIKE TO MOVE IT MOVE IT coming from tinny muffled speakers in the cubicle next door; then, once the owner manages to fumble the thing from his pocket and it's no longer muffled, you hear it again, louder: I LIKE TO MOVE IT MOVE IT... I LIKE TO MOVE IT MOVE IT �and it keeps playing while he gropes and stabs at random buttons trying to answer it. I just know it's going to happen. Maybe this was an inevitability of some sort; maybe Apple had to get into the cellphone market or be eaten alive. Maybe it was unavoidable that we'd one day be seeing text like "As the exclusive U.S. carrier for the Motorola ROKR E1, Cingular Wireless offers great plans to go along with your iTunes-enabled phone" on Apple.com product pages, each cellphone-marketing-weasel-penned word a tiny little rusty dagger to my heart. But I don't have to like it, and I can't help but think that all this does is dilute the iPod/iTunes brand and make it less cool and more the stuff of tedious workaday drudgery. I guess that means iTunes has officially become infrastructural, in any case; but nobody ever said that wasn't a mixed blessing. UPDATE: Now this is genius. Poor guy.