Choice is more often a feeling than an action

Duncan Riley is copping some criticism on Techcrunch over his opinion that OS X Leopard's widgets are newsworthy enough to report on.

I think it's an interesting feature of Leopard, but not really significant to the widget sector (is it a sector yet? ;-) covered by TC.

Unlike most other widget platforms, OS X's widgets are hidden in a Widget app that you need to open first, reducing the number of views/user. They aren't cross-platform, and Leopard's market share is only a slice of the total OS X installed base. I don't know what share of the total OS market OS X enjoys, but it must be small. Growing faster than other OSes, likely, but from a very low base.

Microsoft, with it stated aim of being the Internet OS - and its long-developed habit of copying Apple's interfaces - may eventually copy this 'create your own widget from the browser' feature, but at MSFT's current rate of innovation, count on seeing that some time >2020, by which time it'll be Mozilla-based browsers, not IE, that will have dominant market share.

The other thing to consider is what percentage of users will make their own widget given the opportunity to do so. My experience working on personalisable homepages for portals suggests that while everyone ticks "yes" when you ask them whether they want their own personalisable homepage, when the product goes live, most of those yes-tickers will never take the time to personalise their homepage. My observations suggest that ease-of-use has no bearing on that result - it doesn't matter if it's one button on the toolbar away.

Personalisation is like fast-food - knowing that the fast-food franchise lets you choose your own fillings gets you in the door rather than the competitor's door. But 98% of us choose the off-the-shelf burger after we walk in and view the menu because it's quicker, easier, and we figure whoever decided that pickles and ketchup go together must know what they're doing. Mistakenly...

We think we want choice, but what we really want is the feeling that we could choose if we wanted to.

My iTunes favourites: now scrolling near you

Apple has launched three new widgets that let you show website/blog visitors what you've purchased, what you've reviewed, and how you've rated tracks in iTunes. Only really makes sense if you get most of your new music from iTunes, but that's looking more and more like everybody these days, and certainly includes me.

Check it:

Activating an iPhone in Australia, and first impressions

Can't believe it's taken me so long to commit this to the blog, but here's my iPhone story...

Good friend Ben Keighran very kindly stood in line several times at Apple Stores across the Bay Area to finally snag me an 8Gb iPhone at the end of July. For the man in the midst of securing a Series A finance round from a big Valley VC firm, setting up offices in the US for the first time and recruiting an exec team, this was no small time penalty for him, and I thank you again, Ben!

Then Wyatt Zoi, a relative of a Bluepulse staffer, very kindly agreed to schlep the iPhone home to Sydney for me a week later. Wyatt and I had never met before, so we agreed that I'd meet him at the arrivals gate with a sign with an iPhone on it, so he could recognise me.

So there I was, at 8am on a Sunday morning, only one day back in Sydney myself after trekking in the Himalayas, and half-dead from the 'flu. But I had a big colour laminated sign with an iPhone on it, and for every arriving traveller who assumed I was insane, there were two who looked at me and grinned, figuring out for themselves why I was there and what the sign was about.


Waiting at the airport with my custom iPhone sign so Wyatt could recognise me.

Wyatt, bearer of the iPreciousss, grinning at my lunacy.

Transferring the iPreciousss from Wyatt to me. Fortunately, he was immune to its power, and I didn't have to gnaw it from his cold, dead fingers like you'd have to do to take it off me at this point.


I have the iPreciousss! See how its magical powers are making the reflective panels on my backpack glow with a spectral silver light? (OK, that could be the flash I guess).



At home at last. The box is so small! How does Steve cram so much geeky goodness into such a tiny box?


The unpack experience is a whole new level of geeky deliciousness. It looks so fantastic in the box it's a shame to take it out. I felt like Arthur pulling the sword from the stone.

Sadly, I had heaps to do when I got home - friends coming around for a party, food to prepare, garden to prep, beer to chill - so I really didn't get to play with the iPhone until 48 hours later, which nearly killed me.


It already had some charge when unpacked, but I had to leave it here for the rest of the day while I entertained friends. Curse them!

Getting the iPhone activated in Australia wasn't too bad, once I found iActivator, a gui app that puts it all together and even gives you an interface so you don't need to use command line. Step-by-step instructions and a download here.

However, I found I kept getting an error message on the final activation step. So if you try this at home kids, make sure you (1) use Activity Monitor to quit iTunes Helper as well as iTunes before you begin; and (2) make sure you launch iTunes again before doing the activation step in iActivator. Then it should work like a charm.


Update: thanks to Steve Fenech over at the Daily Telegraph for the heads-up on iNdependence, another new GUI activator app. Haven't tried it yet, but worth a try.


iPhone? Nah, but awesome as the first PDA/Video iPod
It's an extraordinary device. The presentation when I took it out of the box made me feel like I was stealing something from the cold, dead hands of an alien astronaut from the remains of his ship, or removing the sword from the stone that would make me King of all England!

So many things have been well thought through in the industrial design. I love the resolution and brightness of the screen most of all, and the way the necessary external buttons are tactile, but really low profile so they don't distract from the beautiful shape at all. I love that there's absolutely no gap or difference in height between the chrome metal casing and the glass, god knows what the failure rate must be at that point of assembly.

The touch interface and supplied apps obviously have some more evolution to do but hell, this is version 1.0 people! I can't believe how polished it all is for version 1.0.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if I can get this iPhone to work with my .au SIM card at some stage, but if I can't, I'll be happy to have this as my main iPod until the .au iPhone is released.

Since it's not 3G and I can't run my own Java apps on it, use a cut-down fast mobile-specific browser like Opera Mini or even install a custom ringtone, it's not much of a phone, and so I've decided I don't actually miss that functionality a whole lot. And the camera in my SE K800i phone craps all over the iPhone's camera.

But as an iPod, I'm totally comfortable with what it cost to buy - it pwns the rest of the iPod family. I can't believe Apple wouldn't make this the interface for all future video iPods.

If I was Apple was rebrand and restructure iTunes. It's way more "iSync" now than "iSync" is, and obviously "Tunes" doesn't really reflect everything it now manages. The interface stiller flects playlist management, and that's only part of it now.

I'd rebuild iTunes from scratch, since some of the core may still be third-party stuff they acquired to get iTunes built in a hurry. It's still mentioned in the copyright notices for the product so I'm guessing it's still in there.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if I can get this iPhone to work with my .au SIM card at some stage, but if I can't, I'll be happy to have this as my main iPod until the .au iPhone is released.

Tell me, have you played with any third-party apps yet? Has anyone you know tried to reskin theirs? (like, why? but still, some people have!)

Hello? Are you still there?

You are? Well, it would be my fault entirely if you weren't still here. Like the n00biest of bloggers I drifted off to go exploring the Indian side of the Himalayas for three weeks without telling the blogosphere that I was going away, or when I'd be back. More professional bloggers would have been posting 'daily links' type posts from internet cafes in tiny mountain villages, but I was having too much fun with a Leica V-Lux, D-Lux, C-Lux and even an M8 (hah! bet you were expecting a 'B-Lux' next) while pro bloggers were hunched over crawling analogue interweb connections - sucked in!

I kept an analogue journal of the trip which I'll transcribe to the blog shortly, and I'm still uploading hundreds of 10mb JPGs to the Flickr account, so stay tuned for my best shots.

While I was gone, some practical jokers tried to set themselves on fire and crash their car into an airport terminal. But it was Glasgow airport, and it takes more than a flaming jeep to do any real damage to anything Glaswegian. You can head-butt my uncle Jim repeatedly until you knock yourself unconscious and he'll use your limp body to wipe the floor of the pub clean of your blood (he and the rest of my mum's family are Glaswegian.)

Apple launched the iPhone - the Product I Must Acquire Before I Die From Not Having One but according to Ben and Luke I need to sign up for a three year phone plan with AT&T with a US credit card and a US social security number to get one. And then find a way to get it to work in Australia.

In fact, screw using it as a phone! I need a new iPod urgently, since I accidentally left my Nano in the passenger door storage of the Raja of Shimla's personal Suzuki Vitara (long story, but there was a taxi strike and our guide managed to persuade them to lend us the Raja's driver and his 4WD to drive us eight hours to Sarahan...)

If I could use an iPhone just as an iPod, for iPhoto storage, and as an iCal/Addressbook/iSync-driven PIM, that would make me happy enough for the time-being.

In fact, maybe that's how Apple should address international markets where it has trouble securing an exclusive telco deal - sell an unsubsidized handset as an iPod/iPhoto/PIM device with the phone components disabled until Apple can show potential telco suitors that it can grow local sales without the help of the telco.

Or maybe I'm still crazy from altitude sickness? What do you think?

My AppleTV reviewette on Meebo.com

[16:17] goonker: how's your apple tv treating you? i don't recall any gushing blog posts

[16:17] bigyahu: yeah i've been a little busy and it was a little unclear for a while whether i loved it or not. decision is in: i love it
[16:18] bigyahu: initial disappointment was: you can only sync one mac with the appletv's HD. you can stream from up to five other macs, but streaming sucks
[16:18] bigyahu: - got to have those macs open and running itunes..
[16:19] bigyahu: - got to have dot n wifi which for me would require buying new basestation and 2x new macs
[16:19] bigyahu: can't see why it couldnt let you assign some appletv storage to one itunes account and the rest to another. i can visualise the nice little slider
[16:20] bigyahu: had some initial hiccups with syncing from my mac, cause not really clear[16:20] bigyahu: but thats settled down now
[16:21] bigyahu: had some MAJOR issues with hookup, because it needs DVi or HDMI and the TV in our house is connected to the cabinet via component, because the cabinet is further away from the TV than the max. DVi or HDMI cable length 18mths ago when the house was built
[16:21] bigyahu: no accessible wallspace to run new cable
[16:22] bigyahu: so installer guy wanted to run a new ducted cable on the outside wall of the house all the way around three walls
[16:22] bigyahu: would have sucked visually!!!
[16:24] bigyahu: managed to talk him out of it and he put the appletv in another cupboard underneath the TV. so now i have one a/v component not in the main cabinet with all the rest of my stuff, which means the appleTV's on a different input source (all the other devices input to the TV on the AV source for simplicity)
[16:24] bigyahu: and it needed a separate IR receiver added, so on the TV now there are three little red blinky-blinky reactions every time i use the programmable remote

[16:24] goonker: wow, sounds like a complicated toy

[16:25] bigyahu: yeah, as always, it's easier if it's a greenfields install!

[16:26] goonker: is there much content avail for appletv? or do you encode your own?

[16:27] bigyahu: both
[16:28] bigyahu: got one of those usb tv twin digital tuner doodads that records free to air programs using the icetv.com.au EPG
[16:29] bigyahu: the software that comes with the doodad gives you the option to automatically encode for video ipod and/or appletv
[16:29] bigyahu: so, if only the icetv EPG was accurate and reliable, i think it would be time to chuck out the Sony HD recorder

I may be Apple Australia's most expensive customer

I may be Apple Australia's most expensive customer
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Since they insist on delivering products you buy from the Apple Store via courier only, and insist on that courier delivering it to you in person and getting your signature, and since the courier company can't be more specific about when they're going to arrive than "Wednesday" and is unable to ring you when they're on the way.

Courier company tells me that Apple pays them for another delivery charge every time they try to re-deliver it, and so far this is the fourth time they've tried to deliver my new AppleTV when I'm not home.

By my rough calculations, if this happened another 4-5 times, the cost of the delivery would be up around Apple's cost price on the AppleTV.

All that needs to change is for Apple Australia to offer additional delivery options; (1) no signature required; (2) no presence required; (3) pickup from nearest Australia Post branch. Offer these with the option of delivery insurance, and you've got yourself a convenient service.

Instead, what you've got is a time-wasting, costly and inconvenient service for me, for the courier company, and for Apple.

Does "DRM" stand for "Didn't Really Mean it"?

The "Truth Serum Doping Scandal" continues to spread through the online music industry unabated. When will the FBI act? Check these apparent coincidences:

Feb 6th: Steve Jobs at Apple comes out with a communique saying Apple "would drop DRM in a heartbeat" if the major labels would let them.

Feb 12th: Dave Goldberg, head of Yahoo! Music, predicts in USA Today that Yahoo! Music's music catalogue would be DRM-free by the end of this year.

Feb 13th: Yahoo! confirms that Goldberg and his wingman Bob Roback, have resigned effective immediately.

Don't tell me that series of events weren't related!

Not when the same USA Today story quoted sources within EMI saying they were in talks to licence their entire music library DRM-free in return for upfront licence fees from online retailers including iTunes Store.

Of course, Goldberg was probably telling the truth, in many respects, Jobs probably was too, as were the sources USA Today spoke to. But that doesn't mean you just go out and speak to a journalist about it! You wait for the deals to be done, the contracts to be filed, the spin strategy to be agreed upon, the announcement date to be finalised: it all needs to look like a triumphant step forward for the industry and a win for the consumer, not an unexpected breach in the wall through which everyone in the industry is rushing to be the first to squeeze through!

People: check your morning coffee! If you work in the online music industry, beware! Someone's been spiking drinks with truth serum and Goldberg and Roback will not be the last casualties!

Jobs admits: DRM doesn't work for music

Either someone's been slipping truth serum into Steve Job's herbal tea, or he's hugely frustrated at being caught between the record labels and the European courts over their moves to bust open Apple's FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. Possibly both. Why else would the great man of mystery come out with a lengthy essay on the Apple website titled "Thoughts on Music" detailing what he sees as three possible scenarios for the future of online music?

To paraphrase, according to Jobs;

1. The major labels won't license music to Apple unless it is sold with DRM protection.

2. DRM doesn't work very well and won't work at all if Apple is forced to licence its DRM technology to other vendors.

2. The music industry is the primary source of pirated music, not online stores, since a CD carries no DRM and CD sales still dwarf online music sales.

3. It's unfair of the major labels to require Apple to include DRM protection, and Apple should be allowed to sell music unprotected.

I couldn't agree more with Jobs. In fact, the major labels are experimenting with selling unprotected music on other sites, such as Yahoo!, already. Even the dinosaurs of the music industry might be able to see that the time to wind DRM back is coming.

But in addition to the three alternatives Jobs offers for the future of online music, I'd like to offer a fourth:

Apple should consider the leverage it now enjoys in online music sales. What would happen if Apple decided to drop the major labels' catalogues from iTunes altogether until they agree to let Apple sell their content DRM-free? I think Apple underestimates the loyalty of iPod and iTunes owners. I think the majority of customers would side with Apple in a battle with the labels over banning DRM-protected music. And with Apple's help, independent music would flourish in the interim, with consumers encouraged to try and buy music from outside the major labels' marketing aura.

Apple could free the music industry from the dead brake hand of the major labels, turning the industry on its head and setting artists, consumers and Apple free for an open, flexible future where it's the quality of the music, not the amount spent promoting it, that determines its success.

Ah, I can dream, can't I?...







Technorati Tags: apple, DRM, fairplay, steve jobs

"You are coming to a sad realisation, cancel or allow?"

Until today I've maintained my silence on Apple's 'Mac and PC' TV ad campaigns, figuring anyone who reads my blog is capable of finding them on their own. They've been making me chuckle all along, and while I doubt they do much to convert existing Windows users, as an Apple customer they've reinforced my decision to go Mac and reminded me of why I should think twice about ever going back to Windows.

The latest series, highlighting the challenges of upgrading a PC to Vista, are just as funny, but my vote for the best-ever so far is the ad titled 'Security', featuring an annoying bodyguard representing Vista's security features. It's certainly a realistic portrayal of Microsoft's style of security - keep peppering the user with jargon-laden decision points they don't understand the cause or ramifications of, until the user is driven to switch off security altogether.

Microsoft's problem with security, Vista, Windows and software in general is that it really doesn't understand regular people. By 'regular' I mean people who don't work in IT or have technology as a hobby; people who lack the jargon vocabulary and the commitment to figure out what Microsoft's software is trying to tell them.Microsoft's Redmond campus is a giant technology black hole that attracts like-minded technologists who design and build software primarily for themselves and people like them. If you're not a geek when you start at Microsoft, the culture will eventually get to you.

A good friend of mine working for the company says, in his experience, that Microsoft is great at producing large, hugely complex, challenging software products that take many years to architect and require massive and lengthy licensing fees to recoup on. But when it comes to understanding regular, ordinary people, Microsoft just doesn't get it. Certainly history suggests that Microsoft products typically have a large footprint, a lot of features, and they cost a lot (unless they're free, when Microsoft wants to collapse a market it wants to dominate in.)

Anyway, watch the ad (requires QuickTime). The last line is priceless; "You are coming to a sad realisation: cancel or allow?"


Technorati Tags: apple, vista, mac, TVC

Calling it an iPhone sells it short - it's a new class of device

Good lordy, why does the ground-breaking news always seem to break while I'm away on vacation? Am I taking too many vacations? This time I'm on a ski holiday in Canada when Apple unveils the iPhone, and after skimming the specs and early news reaction, I'm left with the impression that calling it an "iPhone" sells the device way short of its actual capacity. It's only an "iPhone" in the sense that a laptop is an "iTypewriter."



For this is not just the "iPod with mobile phone capabilities" device we were all hoping for - it's something much more powerful and more flexible than anybody (outside the product team and the dealmakers) expected. It's capable of so much more than just being a phone that I don't really know how to describe it in 50 words or less, except to say that this device delivers a huge blow (Oliver calls it a "mortal blow") to other manufacturers in the portable entertainment and handheld computing market, whatever it should be called. In terms of capability and integration it appears to be so far ahead of all the other devices in those categories that it's as if Steve Jobs travelled back in time from 2020 to announce it today.



It's got so many cool features, and so many bloggers are going to cover those, and I really need to get off my laptop and go skiing this afternoon. So I won't cover the obvious stuff. But here's the shortlist of elements that really caught my eye this morning:

• It runs OS X, which means a unix kernel, and a secure, dependable, stable environment, and great efficiency when it comes to battery life and processor power, if Apple's laptops are any indication. Remains to be seen how much, if any, the widget versions of the calendar, addressbook, photo etc vary from their desktop equivalents.
  
  
• Could it (or a future version) also run small OS X apps that are not widgets? There's no information on the chipset and RAM capacity, even in the tech specs. Someone like Endgadget will no doubt break those details in the next few days. Could you run Parallels Desktop on it and run Windows Mobile on that? No reason to do so except to demonstrate to people why the iPhone is so superior to a Windows Mobile gadget. But there are many other apps that would be helpful, particularly instant messenger and VOIP apps (since the iPhone has quad-band GSM and EDGE and WiFi.)
• The phone features integrated tools from Yahoo! and Google, including search and maps. But there's no mention of an instant messaging client from Yahoo!, Google or Apple, and no mention of VOIP. Is that a concession to Cingular, which has the exclusive rights to sell the device initially, and future carrier deals? Because I don't see how that's going to prevent people from running their own VOIP app on the iPhone unless there are undisclosed barriers to doing that we have yet to discover in hands-on use.
• The device syncs with PCs and Macs, but there's no mention of any cooperation with MSN on this device, and I can well imagine that the gulf between Apple and Microsoft will have deepened with the launch of this device. Microsoft has sunk a lot of cash into trying to build an early lead in mobile communications devices, and it looks to me like Apple has just leapfrogged Microsoft by five years of product maturity with its very first product in the segment.
• The two-finger touch screen user interface is truly ground-breaking, especially when tied to the accelerometer. I love the way you zoom in and out by drawing your thumb and forefinger together and apart. I also like the way the object onscreen 'bounces' when you try to drag it past the borders of the screen - nice silent way to indicate there's nothing more hidden 'below the fold'.
  
  
• Finally, and least importantly, does it come with an unscratchable crystal face like an expensive watch? Because this thing is all screen, and it's a touch-screen too, so I'm going to get muffin residue all over it regularly, which I'll want to wipe off with whatever is readily at hand - not with a fancy soft cloth. And I do NOT want to buy a third-party clear acrylic shell for this thing of beauty like I had to do with my iPod Nano.
  
  

initially in the US only this July

Rip. Play. Infect?

First McDonalds ships an mp3 player carrying a Windows virus, now some units of Apple's iPod have been infected with a virus loaded on by an OEM doing the manufacture of the little white music machine.

So do we now add our portable music players to the long list of things we have to be wary about plugging into our computers? Unless you're a Mac owner, the answer is yes.

No matter how Apple tries to spin the story into a security issue for Microsoft, it's still Apple's OEM chain that is primarily at fault.

Still, the scariest thing for me is that the virus was included in the pristine, shrink-wrapped, new iPod during manufacture. Something about the psychology of viruses means I never consider brand new hardware as a potential source of viruses. A scuzzy, scarred and nearly-full iPod from one of my many phreaky friends? Sure, I'd think twice about that.

But a brand-new iPod fresh out of the shrinkwrap? That's as close to virginal and pure as a device can be! Handed down from on high! It just doesn't feel right to consider it a home to viruses. Which means all the more risk of bazillions of iPod users on Windows getting mass infections.

I believe the Apple community when it almost universally contends that OS X is virtually impregnable. But it's not my Mac I worry about.

Instead, I worry about what Apple might be forced to do to the iPod and iTunes to protect the bazillions of dumb-ass Windows users out there. Things like hard or soft copy-protection, stupid interruptions along the lines of "are you sure you want to sync your iPod now?" which you'd be forced to accept liability for, and further delays in getting more music labels and more artists selling their music on iTunes Store.

Ick. It all smells of additional cruft to me.