I came across a great post this morning from recent switcher Rob Manuel which is a very nicely written and amusing post about his switch where he concludes that the ex-PC user may well be to the Mac what an ex-smoker is to a non-smoker - The most irritating person in the room :)
Definitely worth a read, but really the post can be summed up in one paragraph from his list of ten things that annoy him about the mac:
You know what? I can’t find ten things that annoy me about the Mac. I’ve been racking my brains and there’s no more. In fact, I’m writing this within a web browser and I’ve just realised that there is a spellcheck built into Safari. How cool is that? Not only is it cool, it’s the same spellcheck that works in Textedit and Pages so any words I add to the dictionary are available in all aps. God damn it, I love my Mac. It’s giving me the horn.
Those of you that watched the screencast in my previous post may have noticed that my iTunes library doesn’t have many albums in it! This is because I am toying with how to actually do this on my MacBook. I have a ~80Gb library on my PC which I obviously can’t just move to the MacBook because it would entirely fill my HDD :)
So far I have around 30 albums (~2Gb) imported but I am really going to need an external HDD to get my library properly imported into iTunes. The problem here is that when I do that, I won’t be able to listen to any music at all when I am not sitting at my desk here at home which will make hotel rooms suck again! Are there clever solutions to this problem? (apart from buying an iPod!)
Yup, iTunes is outta here! Not because I don’t use iTunes to play music anymore but because I have a new way of launching it.
When I listen to music, I prefer to listen to full albums rather than random shuffles, I also quite like the interruption of the music stopping after an album finishes (it reminds me to take a break or at least makes me think about what I want to listen to next) so the ‘flow on to the next album’ style of iTunes default library mode doesn’t suit me very well.
Luckily, I found CoverFlow, a gorgeous little piece of freeware which really gets past a limitation of digital music that has existed since we all started ripping music onto our computers. At the time when mp3 really started to take off, finding and displaying album art was the last thing on anyones mind and while most media players now support in some form it is usually a second class citizen when it comes to choosing music to play, shunned in favour of text based lists.
Lists do the job but the human brain is significantly better at association with images than text and so it is a poor imitation of that old low-tech CD rack. I don’t know about you but wasn’t sitting down in front of your record box and flicking through it a thoroughly satisfying experience?
Enter CoverFlow, the virtual CD rack! There is no way to describe this app properly with words, so I made a little screencast.
I love it, so much that I have removed iTunes from the dock completely.
One exception to the rule of album art being a second class citizen is the iTunes music store. I will spare you my views on DRM and especially AAC DRM but the visual format of the music store shows that someone at apple understands this issue and the pages on the store are as much about the album and artist art as the album name and track listing.
Anyway, try CoverFlow if you haven’t already and go low tech again, it feels good.
Note: I just got told about a feature of iTunes I didn’t know about, in the library view if you click the Browse button then you get a filter view where the selection in the main library window filters down depending on your selection of genre, artist and album above and this basically does the same as CoverFlow . I won’t go to deep into the poor UI design of making a button with the same look and feel do such fundamentally different actions (Burn and Import are OK together because they are the same class of command, just available in different contexts but browse? Where is the connection!). But thanks for the tip anyway Eifion.
A little bit of a lighter (and shorter, again!) post tonight after the security posts of the last few days.
I have been going through and rating all of my mp3’s on my mac and have been really enjoying it because it has made me listen to stuff I that I haven’t heard for ages and that is always a good thing!
Anyway I launched iTunes tonight to play some music and noticed that every song in my view was rated at least 3 stars, I scrolled up and down and everything I had rated was 3 star or above which I guess makes sense because why would I keep songs that I only rate with 1 or 2 stars? But at the same time, it does make those stars kinda useless! :)
I know I should be using all five stars on how much I like something relative to the other music I own but sometimes the brain doesn’t quite work so logically.
But please don’t remove those underused 1 and 2 star ratings because if the star rating system was reduced to three stars, I am quite sure that I would only use two of them :)
So tell me, who has 1 and 2 star rated music in their iTunes?
P.S. Talking of music, this is a great post by chartreuse about music that is beautifully presented and the content of which, I could not agree with more.
The most worrying of these from my perspective is the first link, not so much for the exploit itself because I think over the course of previous threads we have agreed that they can and will happen. No, the thing that worries me is the fact that security fixes are not being disclosed by Apple in their release notes.
This issue was silently fixed by Apple in update 10.4.6.
Feel free to check the release notes for Mac OS 10.4.6 yourself, and raise your hand if it seems immediately obvious why a vendor fixing a security issue known internally in a point release without informing their users that it even exists in the previous version is a really bad idea both in the short term for users and in the long term for Apple as a company. I mean, bajesus.
The “Viruses” ad, which touts the Mac’s immunity to Windows viruses, is extremely ill-considered. The ad is technically accurate. Macs running Mac OS X can’t catch “Windows viruses,” by definition. It’s also true that there have been many harmful Windows viruses loose on the net over the past few years, but no significant Mac OS X viruses. Relief from viruses is a legitimate benefit of the Mac, but Apple shouldn’t make it an explicit selling point.
It’s like an airline advertising that it has fewer fatal crashes than its competitors. This just isn’t done—and for good reasons. Putting aside the moral and ethical aspects, which arguably don’t apply to Apple, there are important practical considerations as well. The new “Viruses” TV ad pulls back a slingshot and holds it to Apple’s face. The backlash is inevitable.
