BuyMusic Problems

alternateorg on July 30, 2003

It’s the user, stupid. For those of you who haven’t used the iTunes Music Store, let’s just say that Apple’s user experience far exceeds that described above. She had to click every single song she downloaded.. including ones purchased as albums. On iTMS, they just download automatically. It works transparently. You can even go and play other music in your Library.. don’t worry about finding your new tracks when they’re done: they’re automatically downlaoded to and sorted in the filesystem by your iTunes preferences, and also automatically added to a Smart Playlist called “Purchased Music.” Also, she talks about multiple types of licenses, including a “secondary license” that doesn’t allow her to burn her new music to a CD, which her husband’s computer was limited to because it was a secondary machine, and her primary machine crashed when using the Roxio plugin that’s apparently required to burn BM’s purchased musoc. iTMS has no such alternative licensing; every song has the same priveliges on every authenticated machine, Despite BuyMusic’s purported $0.79/song, most of them are $0.99, with a bunch as high as $1.29. Oh and don’t forget the identical commercials. Sounds like we have another Microsoft on our hands, in terms of copying Apple.

Read this awful message hidden inside a privacy policy: “we may disclose, sell, trade, or rent your Personally Identifiable Information to others without your consent”

Fuck that. Glad I own a Mac.

Panic, Adobe, Quark, Microsoft, Macromedia, Omni and 300,000 other developers are moving to Linux. Haven't you heard?

alternateorg on June 26, 2003

From MS-owned Slate: Linux’s new popularity may hurt Apple more than Microsoft.

Apple still has software applications not available on Linux—such as Quark for publishing, or Photoshop for graphics—but if Salkever’s analyst buddies step forth and pronounce Linux the No. 2 platform, software companies will re-evaluate their commitments.

Right. Macromedia is going to write Flash MX for KDE/Qt. Adobe’s going to write a GNOME version of Photoshop Elements. Every developer devoted to Apple’s platform is going to automagically change development platforms, processors, coding languages and sales channels, just because Linux may be announced as the #2 desktop OS by some lame assfuck who doesn’t know shit about shit, or more importantly, shit about Apple or Linux.

The one thing he neglects to mention (actually there are many things… which distribution of Linux? Which GUI? tcsh or bash? Sawfish or WindowMaker? How many grandmothers out there run Linux as opposed to Macs?) is that software developers can make money by writing software for Apple’s platform. Perhaps not as much as they would (theoretically) for Windows, but don’t forget that the amount of competitors a developer faces within the Windows world is exponentially larger to that of the Macintosh.

Write apps for Linux and decide to charge for them? Desktop apps, no less? Good fucking luck. Did we not just watch VA/Linux and all the other Linux guys go under or combine or get purchased because it’s very difficult to sell software that’s written for a free platform?

So what do you think? If BusinessWreck (er.. Week) decides to announce Linux as the #2 desktop install, are you going to switch?

UPDATE: John Gruber responds, as well. Now of course, his response is very carefully thought-out, and doesn’t contain gratuitous use of the word ‘fuck.’ But the point is basically the same.

More iTunes Misconceptions

alternateorg on June 2, 2003

From Lockergnome Bytes:



Apple’s decision to close a loophole in it’s Rendezvous feature last week may ultimately doom the service. With the decision to restrict Rendezvous they will more than likely have to close any loophole that hackers may find. The feature had obviously helped sell records. For everyones information apparently hackers have found a way to trick the software to share again, so we will see if Apple makes further changes or do away with it all together

Pay close attention to the line: “The feature had obviously helped sell records.” How the fuck could Rendezvous music streaming – something that takes place over an internal network, machines on the same subnet – sell music, when the sharing-over-IP function was what Apple cut out of iTunes 4.0.1, PLUS the fact that even then, you couldn’t share purchased AAC files, but your regular-old, no-DRM-encoded MP3 files?

If anyone should get it, it’s these guys. I’m just trying to battle the waves of incoherent innacuracy these days.

Jobless

alternateorg on May 12, 2003

So, like 5.8% of Denver, I am now unemployed. Anyone who needs a graphic designer, web programmer or network administrator please drop me a line. My resume is available for your perusal, right here.

iTunes Music Store

alternateorg on April 28, 2003

Most of Alternate’s readers know this already, but some may not:

1, Apple’s new music store available in iTunes 4. 1-Click downloading/purchasing of songs for $.99 each or albums for $9.99. AAC-encoding and 30-second streaming previews. Available today.

2. New slimmer iPods with new control buttons available in 10Gb, 15Gb and 30Gb configurations, 0.62″ thick. Shipping May 2.

More details are available at the Apple website.

Flash + Data = ?

alternateorg on April 24, 2003

Macromedia links Flash apps to data.

My thoughts as I’m reading this: Sounds good, sounds good, sounds about right, hrm,, no direct MySQL support, sounds good, sounds good, ColdFusion? People still use that? Sounds good, sounds good… $999 price tag for Flash Remoting? Good luck, Macromedia.

Just as they always do, Macromedia comes really close to getting something.. then just leaves you feeling screwed. To use PHP/MySQL, you still have to go through the still-required extra steps of taking MySQL data into XML, and writing your own ActionScript parser just so you can get nifty vector animations along with your dynamic data in the same compiled binary file.

Macromedia’s latest efforts would have you (if you feel like paying a ton of money instead) buy a ColdFusion license for at least $1299, or as much as $4999 (depending on the level of quality you need), buy a MSSQL Server license for at least $4999/processor, buy Windows 2000 server for $1199 to run the entire thing on….PLUS the $999 for Flash Remoting.

On the other hand (back to PHP), you could just write some XML-parsing code in ActionScript and some MySQL-XML translating code in PHP. Run it on Linux. Licensing fees? Nada. Massive development environment? Nope. Expensive production environment? Perhaps, but still not on-par with the Windows/ColdFusion world.

Or you could just use XHTML, forego the animation and buzzwords and get your files down to like 4k instead of 400k. Skip the XML step and get dyanamic data in its native form into your native code.

Why was I excited about Flash again? Oh, right. Because it takes 3x as long for me to produce so I get paid 3x the amount. Right.

Too many Windows

alternateorg on April 21, 2003

Microsoft at has 9.5 million different versions of Windows.

By current count, Microsoft offers about a half-dozen different versions each of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows CE .Net. Microsoft also considers Windows 2000 still to be a “current” product. Including the 64-bit editions, Microsoft also offers about six different Windows 2000 versions, bringing the total to about 24.

I’m still waiting for Windows RG, the one that’s supposed to work.

Also, previously forgotten until now, I was at the movie theater here, where pre-purchased tickets over the internet are redeemed at little stations placed in the lobby. When I went to use my credit card to have the machine print out my tickets, I was greeted with a nice little Windows CE logo combined with some insipid tagline on how great my life was going to be now that Windows CE was in it. Under which was an also-informative message that Windows CE had encountered a general protection fault error and needed maintenance. Of course, this meant I had to speak with an actual person, after waiting in line with actual people, which is never a pleasant experience.