Sigh, Another Box

I'm happy and sad. The recently announced Netflix Player, by Roku, seems like something I would have ordered the second I saw it. I've been a Netflix customer nearly as long as they've been around. I talk up their service to anyone who will listen. I eagerly joined in on the Watch Now beta testing, and put up with the new client downloads seemingly every time I watched something. I even keep a Windows partition around on my MacBook, just so I can have IE and watch now capability (no Parallels on the MacBook).

Then there's my good buddy Roku. Well, it's more like a friend of a friend. The founder of Roku, Anthony Wood, is the man that gave us the ReplayTV, and it is well documented how much I love that thing.

So we have Netflix and Roku...together. They give us a fairly priced, one time cost, little box that will let me watch Netflix movies on my TV with no computer involved. This should be awesome...but it's not.

It's another box. I don't want another box. The days of a towering electronics stack being cool are long gone. I was there. I wanted to buy a separate CD player from my DVD player because it would be better and it would look sophisticated and privileged. I don't care about that sort of thing anymore. I want my hardware to blend in with the furniture. I want it elegant, but minimal. I want fewer things to dust. Fewer cords to plug-in. Fewer remotes to handle. Fewer interfaces to tolerate (most of them suck).

So what happened Netflix? We saw reports that you were bringing your service directly to the TV. Is that still coming? That's where it's at for the end game. No extra boxes. Just a service in the box. TVs are frickin finally getting smarter. Samsung's InfoLink looks pretty interesting for a start. RSS feeds for stocks and weather. Sounds familiar.

I think Apple has Netflix beat on everything but the price with their Apple TV. The Apple TV isn't just a movie box. It's a content box, with movies being one of the content types. Apple is pushing hard for you to buy stuff through the Apple TV, but is quite capable without spending a penny. I love its ability to subscribe to video podcasts. Where's that feature Roku? I love that it can play YouTube and view Flickr. Can't Netflix make these partnerships too?

Did I mention the Roku box is fugly? I'm eager to see what the other hardware vendors that have deals with Netflix will bring. The Roku box looks like a Radio Shack composite video switcher from the 90s.

The thing that kills me is that even though this thing is ugly and another box, I still want to buy one because that crappy experience will be amazingly pleasant compared to the crappy experience of booting a whole other OS just to access Netflix content and then sit at my computer desk for 2 hours.

Factory Reset Your Rental Car

On a recent business trip, we drove a Ford Edge with the Microsoft Sync system that I'm sure you've seen on TV lately. We played around with the system quite a bit and in the process turned off some of the beginner options and put the system into the advanced mode. This got me thinking. Will the next person be screwed? Will the rental company bother to set the Sync back to the settings that are appropriate for new users? I highly doubt it.

This is an interesting problem because not only are cars getting more and more gadgets, but we might be seeing opportunities for your private data to stick around.

5 years ago, the only traces you'd leave behind in a rental were how tall you were based on the seat position, the radio station you liked, and maybe some trash from your favorite fast food place. Now, you might have a navigation system with the customers you were visiting stored as waypoints, or your phone's contacts loaded into the Bluetooth handsfree system.

So will car manufacturers build a way to reset or wipe all of the car's systems with a simple keypress sequence? Are they even thinking about this sort of thing? Does anyone know of solutions available in the marketplace today?

iTunes Housekeeper

I think I read somewhere that once you have a house over 3500 sq ft, you require a professional to keep it clean. This got me wondering. How big of an iTunes library can you handle before you need professional help? Mine is getting quite large.

I tell you what, I sure could use someone that comes in once a month to correct album art, rename incorrect CDDB tags, and fix the playlists that I screw up when dragging stuff around.

But would an iTunes housekeeper be more hassle than they are worth? Would they drop your favorite playlist, shattering it into the dozen original pieces? Would they dust that new punk album you bought, ruining the sound that you paid good money to sound bad? Would they steal the 50 Cent you left sitting on the counter?

Maybe they'd make your music sound better than you ever thought possible. Perhaps they'd rearrange some tracks and make your library feel spacious and airy. But maybe, just maybe, they'd invite over their boyfriend, Zune, and make a mockery of your whole existence.

5 of the Now

• Fujiya & Miyagi - Ankle Injuries
  I've recently gotten into these guys. I have no idea why I hadn't found them sooner.


• El-P - Stepfather Factory
  This track is so unconventional. It owns me.


• Jori Hulkkonen - Customs Person
  Catch Jori on the Sid Loves Turbo podcast.


• Asle - Hifi is Dead (Dumb Dan Remix)
  I really love the lyric...Hifi is dead, hifi is soooo dead. Take your digital shit and get rid of it...It really makes me smile. The 30sec sample is really boring. The song is more fun than this. Go have a listen at Beatport if you want to hear the whole thing.


• Nathan Fake - You Are Here (Four Tet Remix)
  This one is best consumed in a mix or perhaps as an edit. Like other Four Tet work, the music is great, but it tends to wander a bit. Still diggin' it.

Apple Dogfooding

Apple has been seeing great success with Safari on the iPhone, but there's always room for improvement. On a recent trip to Chicago, I wanted to visit a local Apple retail store. The problem is that there are 7 of them in Illinois and I couldn't really tell you right off which one was close to me.

I was easily able to hit the retail site in Safari and figure out the store I wanted to visit, but then the gotchas started. The iPhone doesn't have copy/paste. Google Maps on the iPhone is superb, but you have to get the address in there. To transfer addresses from the web to Google Maps you have to play a game to have the people around you each remember a portion of the address and feed it back to you once you are on the maps screen.

I'd expect Apple to integrate this a little tighter. Perhaps they embed some geocode or microformats that Safari would know to pass to Google Maps. This is the kind of delight feature that Apple fans have come to expect ;)

Update
I found a workaround. It still isn't ideal, but better than nothing. With the address onscreen in Safari, select the search icon. You can now type in the address that you can see through the shaded screen. When you search, Google will give you the Google Maps link at the top of your search results. If you select that link in Safari, the iPhone will launch Google Maps within the iPhone, not Safari. This is what I want, but with the extra step of reentering the address. As Josh mentioned in the comments, a context menu like you get in the desktop Safari with the option to "Search in Google" would be an even better answer. The end game is still a one click map-to-this.

Censorship and the DVD

The DVD release is an interesting chapter in a movie's life. For some, it is a wash of years old clothes that makes it look sparkly and new. For others, it is additional scenes to tell the story like it should have been told, at least as far as the director thinks. For others still, it is an opportunity to adjust the film to fit today's taboos and culture.

Wikipedia will tell you all about the scene in E.T. when guns were changed to walkie-talkies. We also have George Lucas altering the behavior of his reluctant hero Han Solo in Star Wars, Episode IV.

Modifying gun scenes is obviously not new. Imagine my surprise when I read that the newly released on DVD, Horton Hears a Who has a scene where a fish caricature of Peter Lorre shoots himself in the head. Surely they wouldn't ship that in today's world, right? Well, they did. I had my finger on the remote and skillfully skipped this 3 seconds of the Horton Hatches the Egg cartoon, and when I did I found myself thinking quite a bit about what I would and wouldn't let my kids see. This was over the line for me, especially for the age that these cartoons are aimed at. How about you? I'd love to get some reactions from folks that were parents when this cartoon first came out in the 1940s.

iTunes Pro

iTunes has grown quite a bit over the years. That growth has slowed a bit recently as Apple has focused on the other revenue streams that iTunes enables. That's probably a good thing. iTunes is getting dangerously close to doing too much. And what do you do when an app does too much? You make a pro version :)

I would pay for iTunes Pro if it had even a few of the following features

• Real library sharing - Yes, I can listen to my library from my other computers, but that's about it. I can't change ratings. Play counts don't increment, and I can't edit metadata. I hate having to make notes to myself on things to change when I get back to my main library. Leopard's Screen Sharing feature makes it a ton easier to just jump in and do it right away, but I still have to share the screen and deal with the resolution differences.


• Auto iPod convert - I'm sure you've seen the messages. "Blah blah wasn't copied to your iPod because it can not be played on this device." Fine, don't copy that one, but convert me one that will and put it on there. Let iTunes Pro come with a license for Quicktime Pro to make the transcoding possible.


• Better handling of multiple libraries - You can use multiple libraries with iTunes today, but it feels like something that got slid in so no one would notice. Make this a prominent feature.


• Stats - Plays per day, average rating, purchasing trends, most listened artists. I can think of tons, but then I like silly numbers like this :)


• VIDEO_TS support - This would allow streaming a DVD rip to the Apple TV and perhaps even tie to the convert for iPod feature I mentioned. Apple's DVD player supports this, why not iTunes?


• Codec plug-in support - Spread some love to the FLACers and Divxers. The iPod probably still won't play these. Hmm, maybe if there was a feature to auto-convert for iPod? Who cares if it looks like crap because of the transcode. If you don't want it to look like crap, turn off the feature and don't watch it at all.


• Cross library consolidate - Rip a CD to the MacBook, have it sync back to the main library on the iMac.


• Thru-sync - Plug my iPod into the MacBook, have it sync content from the main library on the iMac.


• Library sync to other computers - I already talked about this one in another post.


• Stat sync via .mac - As playcounts grow and ratings get added to an iPhone or iPod touch, let that data sync back to my main library via .mac. These are Internet connected computers. Let them use it and keep some .mac subscribers as a bonus. I want this so bad for keeping up to date on podcasts. I watch podcasts on at least 3 devices, but end up starting to watch ones I've already seen because I haven't yet sync'd the device that would tell my library I've already watched it.


• Sell through iTunes - We know software sales are coming. How about a similar model to sell your own music through iTunes. We know the tool already exists for the labels to use. Spin that into iTunes Pro and make the iTunes store *the* indie store to beat.

Those are my wishes. What features would you like to see?

Apple TV Take 2 Review

Likes

• Non-sync'd content from the sync source shows up integrated with the sync'd content. Thank you!


• Buying content from the Apple TV is fantastic. It is so much nicer to pick something from your couch and watch it instantly instead of going to the computer, picking something, then waiting for it to download, and then maybe waiting for it to sync to the Apple TV before watching.


• Purchased items sync-back - Buy a TV show, watch it, Apple TV syncs it back to your main library. This is very nice.


• HD movies look great. I saw no compression artifacts and no skips the entire playback. It was awesome.


• You can play rented movies multiple times. Ignore the lies in the other blogs that say you can only watch the movie once. After it got done playing, I simply selected to watch it again and it started right up. You can also forward and rewind just fine.

Dislikes

• Menus are slower for me and they seem to get slower over time


• I hate the top menu. Just as Apple's menu bar is great because it has infinite height, the old Apple TV menu was great because the top level menu also had infinite height. Well, sort of. No matter how deep in the menu structure you were, you could just hammer the menu button a bunch of times to get to the top. Any extra presses just resulted in some clunk clunk "you can't do that" sounds. With the new menu, you better hope you pressed the button in extra multiples of 2 because an extra press will dismiss the menu as the top menu expects you to arrow around rather than hit the menu button. I also really liked that you only used 3 buttons for navigating before. Menu, up, and down. Now you have to add left and right and it just feels slower.


• Further hate for the top menu comes with them pushing iTunes store content a little too hard. For instance, items like Search show up, but that's to search the store, not my content - boo. Music videos shows up as a top layer music menu, but that's to buy music videos from the store, not to watch my music videos - boo. I have to go an extra layer deeper to get to my music videos, most of which I bought from the store! At least give us an option to disable some of the pointers to the iTunes store, or even put them lower on the menu. Yes, the menu does remember where you were in it, usually. Sometimes this resets for no apparent reason too.


• Responsiveness - I know this isn't the most powerful box in the world, but I want it to respond to all of my remote button presses when I press them. The old Apple TV would queue up button pushes, which was sometimes annoying, but if you remembered how many times you pushed it, you'd get where you wanted to go. Take 2 seems to toss out button pushes that occur when it is busy doing another task. This is especially annoying as the old Apple TV trained me to wait a few seconds to let it catch up to my button pushes. Now I don't know if it is catching up or ignoring me. This is very frustrating.


• Long menus still "reboot" while browsing them. I don't know why, but sometimes as you go down a long menu, it will jump back up to the last thing that was playing and you have to re-scroll down the list. This is not new, but still a dislike.


• 24 hour rental - This is terrible for people on schedules, like families. If my wife and I start watching a movie at 9pm and she falls asleep an hour into it, she will not see the end of that movie, period. There's no opportunity to watch the rest of that movie before 24 hours will roll by, so she'll just miss it. If the period were simply extended to 36 hours, it would give her the opportunity to watch it as the "free time for movies" would be available the following night before the rental expired.


• In theory, surfing podcasts without requiring a subscription is cool. In practice, the servers the podcasts sit on aren't fast enough to feed it to you as you want to watch it so you spend a ton of time looking at still frames of the podcast you are trying to watch. Not fun, but not really Apple's fault.

Overall, I like what they've done in Take 2, but they also made the product harder to use and slower to perform. If it weren't for integration of non-sync'd content, I think I'd find a way to downgrade.

5 of the Now

It has been awhile, but I finally made it to another concert. It was Sia, with Har Mar Superstar opening. The concert was at Park West in Chicago which is a great venue. The place was clean, good sound, nice balcony seating, and they let you just walk in with whatever you are carrying. Most concerts I go to result in a pat down, so this was refreshing. I'll definitely go back.


Huge thanks to Shadowsarah for posting videos of Sia's performances. You obviously can't capture the truth of a concert with a compact digicam, but it is better than nothing. Sia's Breathe Me was absolutely amazing and goosebump generating. I was also excited to hear her perform Destiny and Somersault from her Zero 7 days.

• Sia - Breathe Me (Live at Park West, Chicago)
  As is yelled as she starts, "best song ever". Maybe not, but it ranks up there.


• Sia - Day Too Soon (Live at Park West, Chicago)


• Sia - Buttons (Live at Park West, Chicago)
  This is the Jimmy Kimmel performance, but it is pretty much the exact same thing.


• Sia - The Girl You Lost to Cocaine (Live at Park West, Chicago)


• Har Mar Superstar - EZ Pass (Live at Park West, Chicago)
  I picked one track, but these guys just rocked the house. The whole thing was great. Har Mar is entirely too talented at dancing sexy. I highly recommend you do a Google image search and get an idea of the performance. Better yet, check Shadowsarah's flickr page.

Shapes and Colors

Yes, this is another color blind post.

When the iPhone came out, I complained that their availability chart was poorly designed because it only used color to convey meaning. Even worse, they picked colors that are commonly known as colors that color blind people can't tell apart!

I was delighted to see today that they've made things better. The current availability chart for the MacBook Air uses colors and symbols to convey the meaning. Yay! The world is now a more accessible place.



Thanks to Engadget and TUAW for the source images for the above image.

CRbus

In my previous post, I mentioned I was working on an app for the iPhone. It's done and here it is. It's called CRbus and is an iPhone optimized view of the Cedar Rapids public transit schedule.

The app took about an hour from start to finish thanks to the great iUI framework. The data in the app took much, much longer. At the start I wrote a quick Perl script to take pasted data from the official PDFs and package it for inclusion in the app. That worked fine, other than there were a bunch of special cases in the data that I didn't want to spend the time handling in my code. I didn't think this would be a big deal, and it wasn't, until I got to those special cases and found I need a lot of hand tweaking of my data (boo). That's all done and the app is ready for use.

If you want to give this a try, you don't have to have an iPhone. Firefox and Safari will run it fine. Just hit the CRbus URL and then drag your window into the shape of an iPhone (hint: tall rectangle) to get the experience. You start with a list of routes. Follow a route to get a list of stops. Follow a stop to get the times. You can follow the bread crumb arrows at the top back up the tree.

This is just a bare bones version of what the app could be. Obvious features would include Google Maps and Transit integration, syncing with the clock in the iPhone, and even (currently disabled) next/previous stop jumps that you'll see at the bottom of the pages. We'll see if I ever get motivated to add any of those :)

Hello World - iPhone Style

I'm excited about mobile development again. I'm eagerly awaiting the iPhone SDK and while I wait, I figured I'd at least try some iPhone development in its current, web development, form.

I'll post about what I made in a future post. For now, I just wanted to link to some of the things that got me going.

Apple has some great developer resources, including the iPhone Dev Center. I'm not sure why they hide them all behind a login curtain, but they do. Once you create (or buy) an ADC login, you can access 2 hours worth of videos about iPhone development. The videos range from UI elements to how to simplify your app for smaller form factors. Even if you have no interest in Apple and the iPhone, you might enjoy the usability aspects of the talks. Most of the concepts apply to Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, and other mobile development. If you watch and it all seems like common sense to you, good, you are better off than most developers that build UIs.

If you're ready to start building right away, look no further than iUI. iUI is a great framework to build web based apps that look native to the iPhone. Within an hour, I was able to build a great looking, highly functional, app using iUI. I tweaked the included CSS a bit to include some further button samples I found at the iPhone Dev Center. Thanks go to Joe Hewitt for his work on iUI.

Finally, if you want to follow some discussion and get some links to other apps people have built for the iPhone, head over to the iPhoneWebDev Google Group.

Tick tock on the SDK clock.

Snob Check

It was filler there, and it will be filler here, but I figured it would be fun to comment on the recent TUAW post that tackles the thought that Mac users are snobs.

I'll list the characterization and how it applies to me.

• to be perfectionists --- I have an eye for detail but I wouldn't say I'm a perfectionist (close)


• to use notebooks --- Yes, I'm typing this post on one now


• to use teeth whitening products --- nope, never, but I could probably use it


• to drive station wagons --- my parents had a family truckster when I was a kid, but I drive an SUV


• to pay for downloaded music --- yes, hundreds of dollars a year


• to go to Starbucks --- I'm not a coffee drinker, but I'll have a hot chocolate or something if my wife wants to go. I've probably been to Starbucks 5 times in my life.


• care about "green" products and the environment --- absolutely, in fact, I participate in a green blog


• to own a hybrid car --- not yet, but I would


• and last but not least ... to buy 5 pairs of sneakers in a year --- I'm probably close these days. I used to buy more than 5 a year, as I was a bit of an adidas freak

Am I a snob? Eh, I like to think of myself more as a self-deprecating elitist.

Learn a bit about how to give and take

This is the MacBook Air post. This won't be as funny or as provocative as Wil Shipley's MacBook Air post, but you might like it anyway,

If you've seen the commercial for the MacBook Air (who hasn't?), you might recognize the title for this post. Apple takes such care in their marketing that they even managed to find a cool song with lyrics that fit perfectly with what the MacBook Air is trying to achieve. You know, "new soul", "strange world", "give and take", "felt the joy and the fear". Some would say that the only relevant lyric in the song is "making every possible mistake". So let's take a look at those mistakes.

• Sealed Battery - Yes, some folks carry around spare batteries and swap them during the day. I'm not one of those folks, and I don't know anyone who is. The only time I need to swap a battery is when it starts to hold less juice than a Florida orange. I buy a new one, swap it, and the old one pretty much sits around hoping the new battery will die and it can live life again. The battery costs $129 (same as the MacBook battery I just bought) and can be replaced with nothing more than a screwdriver. Sounds like this is more accessible than headlights on modern cars. Save weight and space on a battery latch daily, but require a screwdriver once every 1 or 2 years. Sounds like perfect give and take to me.


• Too thin - Have the people that toss this complaint out ever been on an airplane? Are they the ones with dual rolling carry-ons? I like to travel light. A messenger bag is all that goes with me on the plane unless it is a really short trip and I don't want to check a bag. A nice thin laptop would be fantastic for me.
  Thin means less material. Apple used aluminum rather than plastic for durability. I think aluminum weighs more than plastic, right? (my material engineer friends will certainly tear me up in the comments if not). So Apple kept the screen and keyboard full size, used heavy construction materials, and still kept the weight at 3 pounds. My MacBook weighs 5 pounds. My work Dell weighs over 7. You can absolutely feel 2 pounds when you're travelling all day.


• 1 USB Port - Who would use an Air? I'm guessing students, travelers, sales people, anyone on the go. How many USB ports do you use on the go? I use none. 1 USB still lets you plug in a thumb drive or a mouse. Any more than that and you can have a mini hub in your bag that you must be carrying to hold all of those USB devices you want to plug-in. I'm also wondering if the 1 USB port is a hardware limitation. We know that the external optical drive requires additional power from the USB port to run it. If they put more than 1 USB port on, they wouldn't know which port you'd plug the drive into, which might drive larger power supply requirements, which drives the whole product larger and heavier. The MacBook has 2 USB ports. I can't recall a time when I've ever used them both at once.


• No optical drive - I already covered this one in another post. If you want an optical drive and removable battery, buy a MacBook.


• Slow harddrive - This one gave me pause, but the Air is intended to be a secondary machine. Do the heavy lifting on your main box. The slower harddrive drove smaller size and weight, but it might have also been a cost saving issue. If the Air uses the same drive as iPods, they're saving a buck or more per drive, which translates to 10 bucks or more for you buying it at a price that people already think is too expensive.


• Price - If $1800 is too much, how much should it cost? For a real rough comparison, let's start with an $1100 MacBook and make it into an Air. Start by doubling the RAM as the Air comes with 2GB. Let's say $50 for that. Lighted keyboard, another $50. LED backlight, another $50. Tight design, $100. Weight savings, $100. No optical -$50. Even smaller power supply $50. Multi-touch trackpad - $50. Aluminum construction - $50. Slower processor - $50. First gen - $100. I gave it $100 for the first gen because today's MacBooks give you a hell of a lot more than the first gen for the same price, so we're comparing a new product vs. an established one. Do the math and that comes to about $1600. Would anyone that wouldn't buy one at $1800 buy one at $1600?

It's obvious I'm a fan of the Air. I think it has a place. It won't be a huge seller, but that doesn't make it a bad product, or a bad investment for Apple.

It's not all good. I do think they made some mistakes. Firewire for one. Give it one FW port. Battery life needs to be better too. Could it be that the battery was limited to meet the aggressive size and weight goals? For as much as they seem to want this thing to be used on the go, it should beat the battery life of the MacBook. Finally, the video out options. Another connector Apple? Really? I've got a drawer full of adapters for the iBook and MacBook that already aren't compatible. If I ever did buy an Air, I wouldn't be happy having even more dongles.

Receipt for a Donut

As Mitch Hedberg used to say, "I don't need a receipt for a donut. I give you money and you give me the donut, end of transaction." This is so true, until you're traveling on business. Then you need a receipt for every last donut, steak, copy expense, and shuttle ride.

If you're anything like me, you get credit card offers in your mailbox daily. I have no need or want for another credit card. I'd change my tune in a heartbeat if a credit card company could solve my receipt problem. I don't want receipts, ever. I want a record of my purchase, sure, but I don't want that record to be a 2x6" piece of weak paper with survey offers printed on the bottom. What I want is Visa or Mastercard to build a transaction culture that allows merchants to email me PDFs or XML of my purchase information.

Do you realize how easy this would make filling out your expense report for business travel? Everyone hates expense reports. We only fill them out because if we don't, we don't get our money back. I can't stand tracking 4 days worth of crumpled paper so I can manually transfer the data to an Excel spreadsheet. I always lose one, they're hard to read, and they're just wasteful.

The Life Takes Visa commercials love to show people flowing through a shop, swiping cards and getting on with things. But you never see a receipt in those commercials. Maybe they've already built this magical receipt email system and forgot to tell us. The technicals have to be simple. They have an account number that is tied to my name, physical address, and many times, my email address. Get some nice business to business web services going and the data can flow to me. This won't be free to build, but you can build it with the money you save on receipt paper and wasted sales while the minimum wage cashier pounds on the jammed printer.

BTW, this isn't my first set of thoughts on receipts. I've complained about them before.

Edit: I forgot to mention that some retailers are already jumping on this. Apple retail stores have "line busting" handheld computers that allow you to buy equipment right on the store floor. They'll then email your receipt to the account in your Apple ID. This is slick, but I'd still like something that applies across all merchants.

The Private Button

The revolution is being televised, well, at least uploaded. Between the Eye-Fi card and its ability to auto-upload to Flickr and Facebook, and cameras from Casio and others with built-in YouTube modes, it has become easy, too easy to float your life on the web.

We've already seen that just about anything you put on the web can and will be made public. It doesn't really matter if you've tagged it private. The only real way to keep things private is to not put them on the web in the first place. So...how long before every new camera you buy has a big private button that you push when you just captured something that you don't want the world to see?

Check-in Challenges

My wife and I recently returned from a trip to Florida. As usual, we flew United Airlines. Our checkin process was a little interesting. It sounds like something you'd read on The Daily WTF. For starters United could use a UI overhaul on their automated kiosks. First off, you're given the option of employee/companion travel. I think that's for employees and companions of employees, but it isn't really clear. Second, you're given 4 options to identify yourself, the most common being a credit card swipe. Unfortunately the picture really doesn't convey that message and you have to read pretty close to know which option to pick. Other airlines just have you swipe your card (or passport) from the start.

It was also pretty funny to hear the guy next to me arguing with the United employee about how he didn't need to swipe his card because he'd already paid for the flight. It took them a few minutes to convince him the credit card was for identification only. Call me crazy, but couldn't they use the drivers license that they require as identification to start the identification process? It must be easier to read a credit card than 50 states worth of different data formats.

So, I swipe my credit card and it pops up my wife's name. No problem, we'll just check her in first. We're told that the FAA may delay our flight and we should look for alternates if possible. Ok, look for alternates then. It tells us none are available almost immediately. Why even bother to tell us to try alternates if it knows there are none?

We finish checking in my wife and I slide the card again expecting my info to pop-up. No, it's her again. Please note that the card I've swiped both times is the one with my name on it. Obviously the number is the same, but I'm pretty sure my name is encoded on the card as well because it shows up on the receipt at restaurants. Is this a common problem? Do related people not check-in to the same flight often? Being skilled in tricking crappy software (I write plenty of it myself), I pull out a different credit card which thankfully produces my name for check-in.

So now we are both checked in and waiting for the tags to print for the checked baggage. Why don't these print from the same kiosk? The helpful lady behind the counter asks us if we checked bags. We reply yes. She asks if we pushed the button saying we were checking bags. We reply yes. She tells us nothing is printing so we must not have. Well we did and we were sure we did and we went back and forth a couple of times. Eventually she decides the printer isn't working, but why did she have to even argue with us? If we had screwed up and forgot to tell the computer about our bag, there's nothing we can do at this point anyway, so she should just go about doing what needs done to make things right. That's what I hate about the automated kiosks. We've traded 5 knowledgeable ticket agents for 4 kiosks, 2 goofball agents that appear to be skilled in little more than sticker folding, and a knowledgeable agent that comes and cleans up when the goofballs don't know what to do. Questions like can you change our seats so my wife and I can sit together? stump the goofballs and require the roving expert. Before the kiosks, the ticket agent would just sit you next to the people you were checking in with. Hmm, progress.

Don't get me wrong. I love the kiosks when they work. If you aren't checking a bag and you aren't traveling with anyone, the kiosks are a breeze. When you need to change anything the kiosks just aren't up to the task yet.

Hey United, simplify please.

Nits List - iTunes Edition

I love iTunes, usually. It's a great app and one that is always open in my dock. It does have its issues. Most of them are minor. Here's my nit list:

• iPod syncing isn't as good as it could be. It needs the same interface you get when building smart playlists. For example, I might want to sync the 3 newest unwatched episodes of some shows, but the 3 oldest unwatched shows of others if I'm catching up on a season. I could do this by generating the playlists first and then syncing those, but why should I clutter my library with playlists only meant for the mobile device? Update: Ehh, maybe I just talked myself out of this one. I could just make an iPod sync lists folder to hide all of the playlist mucking.


• You should be able to drag a TV Show directly into the TV Shows library source. As it is, you have to add it to movies and then go set the type to TV Show. Yuck.


• Music videos are a video type, but they aren't a type in the library. Movies and TV Shows are, why not Music Videos?


• The iTunes store needs a wishlist in the store so it can follow me across the computers I log into.


• iTunes needs a "look again goofball" function for when it forgets where half of you library lives, even though the place it thinks the files live is the very place that they are. If anyone has a script to auto-fix (not auto-delete) the !'d tracks, let me know.


• The albums list on iPods needs to have a threshold applied. 1 track off of an album is not an album! I have a couple hundred actual albums loaded in my library. Unfortunately, I'll have many times that amount in the Albums list when browsing the iPod. This forces me to flood my playlists with playlists that are the real albums in my library.


• Building on the last one, they finally added folders to the library list. This makes it nicer to organize the albums in my playlists, but my iPod doesn't respect the folders, so it is of little use to me as most of my listening is on the iPod.


• I want to remove an item from my library within a playlist. At the least, give me a "Show in Library" right next to the "Show in Finder".


• Don't stop background syncs because a dialog has been popped up. I don't know if this is still an issue, but many times I've cursed at the not-updating podcasts on the Apple TV only to go find some message box in iTunes that had halted all downloads and syncing. I shouldn't have to check-in with iTunes every day to keep the related systems running.

Edit: Jason reminded me of the one that irks me the most (message boxes stop syncing). I have added it.

Spread the Sync

This is not a MacBook Air post. Trust me, you'd know if it was. That said, one of the complaints I've read about the MacBook Air is that the 80GB harddrive is too small. One reason folks think it is too small is that today's iTunes libraries would suck up at least half of that. You know what? They're right...if that's your main machine and keeper of your iTunes library.

Me, I wouldn't consider a MacBook Air a primary machine, but this isn't a MacBook Air post :) The meat of this is that the MacBook Air and every other secondary machine could make due with an 80GB drive just fine if iTunes had a new feature. Well, not a new feature, a feature that's been around since 2001. The feature I'm talking about is the ability to sync a subset of your iTunes library to a device, usually an iPod. I want my MacBook to act like an iPod to my main iTunes library. I want to use Smart Playlists to keep it popping with fresh content. I want my ratings, last played times, and playcounts to sync back to my main library. I want new content that shows up in iTunes on the MacBook to sync back to my main library.

With this feature, I can take 20GB of content on the go, and still have full access to all of my content using shared libraries when I'm back on my home network. The MacBook can wireless sync and I don't even have to know it happened. It would be great!

.Moonlit Snowflakes

I have posted a new iMix called .Moonlit Snowflakes.

I'd describe the music as quiet, pingy, elegant, and emotional. iTunes is stupid and can't manage to make a complete iMix using songs that you didn't buy from the iTunes Store, even though those songs are available on the iTunes Store. Therefore, the link to the iMix won't give you all of the songs. Here is the playlist as I intended it.

1. Lemongrass - Polar Nights


2. Boards of Canada - A Moment of Clarity


3. UNKLE - Twilight


4. Milosh - Push


5. Booka Shade - Lost High


6. Circlesquare - Fight Sounds Pt. 2d


7. BT - Good Morning Kaia


8. Underworld - To Heal


9. Lemongrass - Eclipse of the Sun


10. Trentemoller - Miss You


11. Underworld - Good Morning Cockerel


12. Chicane - Arizona, Pt. 1

Let me know if you like it or let me know if you hate it.

Previous iMixes
.Sunrise Skyline, .Dust and Rain, and .Slushy Streets.