JamLab - Combined
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iPhone Tech Talk Redux (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
So apparently this little chestnut is going to be in the iPhone HIG:
? Don't default to the iPhone optimized version of your site.
Thank goodness everyone, including Apple, stopped paying attention to the HIG long ago.
When covering the iPhone HIG John Gelenyse held up Facebook as a excellent example of a iPhone optimized website. Of course it was designed by the inimitable Joe Hewitt so it is really good. But when I went to check out the site I entered facebook.com on my iPhone. I assumed that they would just render the correct page according to the user agent of my browser or one of the multitude of ways of detecting that I was using a iPhone. Instead the regular FaceBook page moseyed onto my screen (mosey is as fast as a page can move with EDGE, Wifi saunters).
So where is the link to the iPhone version of Facebook? Nowhere to be found. Do users have to be Kreskin and just know its iphone.facebook.com and not facebook.com/iphone or http://mobile.facebook.com/? Or do they assume the average college kid reads their press releases?
John's argument was that users should be able to use the full site since the iPhone version lacks functionality. My response is that someone trapped on EDGE would want the optimized version of the site and the ability to click over to the full version if they need to. Not the other way around.
iDay Wrap-up (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
So I put my 6 hours in line today for the iPhone, you may have heard of it. It was a good time, I was with some nice Apple Alums now at Pixar. As usual I deftly put my foot in my mouth with the press, but I retain my title as the last angry man.
Once I got home I was able to activate my iPhone relatively painlessly. I did have to refresh a lot. Then I was informed that I would have to wait for my activation but I was notified shortly via email as promised. There is a problem where AT&T wants to give me a 305 number instead of a 510 since Gretchen has a 305 number that she wants to keep. But I do have to say the Apple way of getting a phone is the right way.
The iPhone is everything I expected, its really, truly, great. But I have this nagging feeling of "OK... What now?" and the only prescription is... third party apps.
Apple TV Schnanigans (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
The 1.1 update came out for the Apple TV today. Just for kicks I ran it to see if it would kill ssh and ATVFiles. Unsurprisingly it did. Its odd they chose to play the game this way. Because ssh doesn't effect the functioning of the Apple TV in any way, and ATVFiles is a plugin.
It will take the community about 48 hours to create their own updater that doesn't bork hacks. Everyone else will just pull out their drives and hack them again (as I plan to tonight). I think its Apple's way of saying "This is our box, move along now children.".
On a positive note I've found that iScrobbler lets me Scrobble from my Apple TV since it picks up the recently played tracks. Rock on.
The 5% Nation (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
I had this nagging feeling that something about the Safari market share numbers was odd. Then it hit me...
So I did what any geek would do and made a t-shirt...
Now anyone can buy them at Spread Shirt (Thanks Wolf). Isn't the Internet grand?
WWDC 2007 (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
Like so many others at the conference I thought I should take the time to detail my perspective of this week.
Keynote - Steve Jobs is still sporting the 992s, I think my feet have been bound long enough that they are comfortable now. But I am really loving the limited edition 990s.
The content of the keynote however has lead me to coin the phrase "unnouncement".
Stump - Still funny after 15 years, they are doing better than The Simpsons. This year I plan to campaign for my status as a Steve Jobs footwear expert. Fred and Mark, you guys need me onstage to field those questions!
iPhone - I eagerly await the wave of lame "Made for iPhone" sites.
Leopard - Stacks, remember Tab Menus in OS 9? They are back baby!
Why yes, please make my dock 10 px taller. Also when it is on the side of the screen shouldn't it look like little shelves. Mike suggested that when the icons bounce they should shake the icon above them.
Either someone is going to write a app that draws a 16 px tall white window behind the menu bar, or its not going to ship with illegible translucency.
Digital Democracy (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
I've been spending a lot of time crunching numbers, from music sales to online statistics, my goal is to understand where the music industry is heading. Today I was struck by the following two sets of numbers from the 2006 Nielson Soundscan(PowerPoint).
The top 100 CDs sold in 2006 accounted for nearly half of total sales. But the top 100 albums sold online only accounted for 17% of total album sales.
This contradicts the conventional wisdom that a few "hit" artists will rake in the majority of a record labels income. Currently labels throw the bulk of their marketing resources behind just a couple artists per year. But these numbers show that this is a losing strategy, since digital distribution will overtake CD sales sooner rather than later.
Music recommenders are playing an important role in changing buying behavior online. From the basic recommender such as internet radio and "Listeners also bought" to complex systems like Last.fm and Pandora. Consumers are now presented with music that they will most likely enjoy. These recommendations are based on the music, not the marketing of the artist. Plus this is happening online the consumer can now purchase a song the instant they decide they like it.
The instant gratification of purchasing music online is a changing buying habits, but there is something more important to consumers. Price. Instead of purchasing an entire album for $15 when they have only heard one song the consumer can now just purchase that one track they like for 99¢. The same price as impulse items in checkout lanes. Because of this digital music distribution has widened the field of artists for consumers to choose from.
All of this has made marketing campaigns to make a artist seem "cool" to consumers less effective. Since there are fewer contact points between the introduction of a artist and the purchase of their music, customer acquisition costs have fallen through the floor. Artists can create a fan-base online as long as they can still blow them away live.
So I'm happy because more people can make a living making music, and there will be more good music to listen to.
When Old Cats Go to Die (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
Shhhh, I'm writing this post quietly so my Mac doesn't hear me. I wanted to tell you about something I've noticed happening the last few years. Every time Apple is about to release a major OS update the current version starts acting a little... funky. Its little stuff like the progress bar drawing incorrectly at startup, random slowdowns, and odd network problems.
I wonder if Tiger knows about Leopard, it reads all the same RSS feeds as I do, it came with me to WWDC last year, it sees Leopard installed on that firewire drive. Maybe Tiger just plans on phoning it in until October when it knows that I will be archiving and installing. I know it knows what will happen because it did the same thing to Panther not that long ago. Rawr.
EMI DRM NO MO' (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
So the higher bit-rate and the stripping of the DRM are cool, but the EMI-Apple announcement today was about something far more interesting? shoes. Steve is wearing 992s!
I can see his meeting with Nike?
Nike: ?Thanks for inviting us to meet with you today Steve.?
SJ: ?Your Nike+ models suck?
Nike: ??oh?
SJ: ?Yeah, they look like swoopy nightmares and are uncomfortable. I?ve got my boys at New Balance just chomping at the bit to get on this.?
Nike: ?Well, the Air Jordons were cool.?
SJ: ?True, tell you what turn all your shoes over to me and I?ll consider keeping you around. But I won?t wear the damn things.?
Nike: ?OK, thank you Steve.?
SJ: ?Great, now get out. I have the Levi?s people coming in here for a iPhone-pants integration meeting.?
I have to say I?m with Steve on this one. But I do miss my 991s, if I had known that they were going to be discontinued I would have hoarded them like a precious nut.
Amazonian Tivo Review (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
As a proud owner of a Tivo Series 3 I felt it was my duty to join the Tivo Beta program. So I have been lucky enough to test out Amazon Unbox with my Tivo for the past few weeks. Now that the program is public I?m no longer afraid to discuss it.
It took less than a minute to pair my Tivo with my Amazon account. After doing so I could browse the Unbox store and buy any movie or TV show with one click. The selection is quite good, its interesting how little overlap there is between Unbox and iTunes. I assume that is because each has different studios lined up.
My first purchase was a episode of Studio 60, it started downloading about 15 minutes after I clicked Buy Now. There was no software to install, and I was able to use a Mac and Safari. There is a little blue LED on the front of the Tivo when it is downloading which is a really nice touch. The bad news is that the download takes about twice as long as iTunes. But when it is done it shows up in the Amazon Unbox folder in your Now Playing list.
The picture quality is good, we watched it on a 22? 720P LCD and it was very sharp. There is a little bit of motion blur, it looks like the same amount of blurring that you get with a WMV 9 file. I assume they are using WMV containers for their DRM. Its definitely not bad enough to stop me from using the service in the future.
After Studio 60 I rented Little Miss Sunshine. By renting I mean that the file downloads to your Tivo and you have 30 days to play it. Once you start playing it you can watch it as many times as you want within 24 hours. Its almost exactly the same thing as getting a All Day Ticket on DirecTV. A really nice feature is that if you start playing the movie and it doesn?t have enough time to play all the way through before the timer runs out the Tivo will warn you.
Besides the Tivo I have a Mac Mini hooked up to the same TV and I use Front Row to play movies often. The advantage with the Mac Mini is that the movies on it are also on my iPod. So I can start watching a movie and finish it anywhere. Its even smart enough to know at what point in the movie I am at and transfer it between devices. I think the user experience with both systems is very similar, and both great.
Once I have my Apple TV I will write up a comparison between it and the Amazon/Tivo setup. But I would have to say that with the Amazon/Tivo, Pay Per View/OnDemand, iTunes, and Bittorrent I really don?t see myself buying a DVD/HD DVD/BluRay ever again.
Way to go Dallas! (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
My candle light vigils finally paid off, now Apple can go back to working on shipping the apple TV and the iPhone. The Hunt for Red October is in the iTunes Store! I was going to mention it earlier, but since it has been playing on repeat constantly since then its been hard to focus.
On the subject of light (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
I was going to title this post ?On the lighter side?? but I would hate myself. Gretchen and I have been discussing compact florescent lights a lot lately. Apparently because of the proposed legislation in California its been all over NPR. Today two things happened that made me think about it again, first Australia is actually enacting a law that will ban incandescent bulbs, and second my Herman Miller Leaf Lamp arrived.
The differences between the two pieces of legislation are interesting, Australia?s increases the energy efficiency standards while California?s bans the sale of incandescents outright. It makes the California proposal look like more of a knee-jerk reaction. Phillips, one of the largest manufacturers of florescent lighting, has been lobbying for this change and their efforts are paying off. The sad thing is that since it is the CFL lobby that is pushing this change the deficiencies of CFLs aren?t coming to the forefront.
Florescent lights contain mercury, its a very small amount but it does make disposal difficult. I think that before we start forcing CFLs on consumers they need to be educated on their safe disposal first. Increasing the amount of mercury in landfills and therefor the water table is equally ruinous to the environment as carbon emissions.
The other issues with CFLs are more of a problem with humans, buzzing, lag time and light color:
• Buzzing is actually a serious problem with people who are susceptible to migraines. You might not hear the buzzing, but depending on the frequency it can cause headaches.
• Lag time is bad because it encourages users to leave their lights on instead of turning them off when they leave the room. If the light is left on all day it could cancel out the benefits of lower electrical usage.
• Light color, the HD CFL, and CCFL bulbs that will be available soon produce a much more natural light. It is true that light in the lower ranges is closer to natural sunlight, but there is a reason we wear sunglasses outdoors. Its not just the intensity of the light but the color that forces our pupils to contract. Extended time under harsh light can lead to headaches and will eventually effect your vision.
• Dimming is problematic for CFLs as well, when a incandescent bulb is dimmed the light color becomes warmer. When a CFL bulb is dimmed the light color remains the same which makes the room look muted or under-saturated which is also hard on the eyes.
LED Lamps So it just happens that today my leaf light arrived. I couldn?t wait to power it up, I think its the coolest thing to happen to desktop lighting since the Anglepoise. It uses a bank of LEDs, half bluish white, half warm white, to produce light. It draws about 9 watts in use and should last about 50,000 hours or about 5 years of constant use. I can adjust the warmth and intensity of the light using its touch sensitive base. It puts out a little less light than a 70 watt bulb, but the throw is very focused. Because of the lack of mercury, its recyclability, and longevity there will not be a disposal problem with it.
The future of LED lighting looks bright (lord help me), just like CFLs were when they became available they are expensive. But because they are safely disposable, dimmable, longer lasting, AND more efficient I think they are much closer to a real answer. You can buy a 70 W equivalent bulb for $80 here. I have some on order and I will report on them as soon as they arrive.
Derivative Works (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
Fox News is so down about being parodied by the Daily Show, that they decided to parody the parody. I really dig recursion, but this is a travesty. The laugh track grates, and just saying something in a deadpan manner doesn't make it sarcasm.
There she blows (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
OK, so after spending far too much time trying to get EC2 up and running the way we would like, we have let go and switched to TextDrive Accelerators. We are still keeping all the work that Stephen put into EC2 in place in hopes of using it for redundancy in the future. But it really feels like we are searching for that white whale.
The monthly cost at TextDrive is almost double, but it includes bandwidth so that lowers the total cost significantly. But it wasn?t money that drove our decision, we left EC2 because we were using it in a way that Amazon didn?t intend. EC2 isn?t designed to compete with containerized hosting, its designed to compete with Sun?s Grid. That seems really odd to me because even Sun hasn?t proven the demand for such a service. Also Amazon confuses the issue by making bandwidth cheap and providing local storage. Its like they placed EC2 between grid computing and containers, and by doing so they served neither market well.
Persistent storage is something that I took for granted with servers in the past. But after seeing all the code that Stephen put together to have our EC2 instances pull their disk contents from S3 at boot I will never underestimate its importance again. Its still in Beta, and the people at AWS are responsive and listening to their testers so I hope the service addresses the persistent storage issue in the future. Until then I will listen to Stephen grumble about the differences between Solaris and GNU.
Great ice cream, or the greatest ice cream? (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
I can't tell you how excited I am about this...
I've been rocking that flavor in the Häagen-Dazs for awhile now. Interestingly I have it at night while watching the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Now I can match my TV!
Extreme Dude! (JamLab - Kyle Killion)
So while I was at the Lincoln Road Apple Store today I saw that they had the new AirPort Extreme Base Stations. Huh, my order that was placed within minutes of the online store coming back up and they won't ship for 2 weeks. Thanks Apple.
Well anyway, I was really excited about AirPort Disks so I picked one up. I upgraded my MacBook Pro with the n updater and we were off to the races. The first thing I noticed is that the AirPort Admin Utility and the AirPort Setup Assistant are no longer used. So I wouldn't expect to see them at all in Leopard. They have been replaced with the AirPort Utility and AirPort Disk Utility.
Most things are the same, the AirPort Utility just mashes up the Setup Assistant and the Admin Utility. The new stuff is the ability to use a/n, b/g/n, n 5 GHz, or n 2.4 GHz. You can't a/b/g/n but hey if you need that your life is too complex.
Now for the good part, I hooked up my LaCie 2 TB Biggest Disk but it didn't show up. I went into the AirPort Utility and it said there was a problem with the disk. When I hook it up to my MacBook Pro and run Disk Utility it works fine, but with the AirPort nothing. I assume its because the volume is too large, so I hooked up a 200 GB WiebeTech and it worked perfectly. I checked to see what protocol it was using and to my surprise it was CIFS. I guess it makes it easier for Windows users to use a Microsoft protocol. Because it uses CIFS, directory listings are speedy (unlike AFP), and file transfers are fast (unlike WebDAV). I'm getting about 1-2 MBps which is decent.
Overall I like the new base station, I'm glad I can avoid all the 2.4 GHz interference in my area, and once I get it to work with a 2 TB disk I will really enjoy it.
Hip Hop Gets Open Source? (JamLab - Stephen Caudill)
Something's happening in Hip Hop. No, I'm not talking about T.I.'s latest album (I'd sooner pluck out my own tympanic membrane). I mean, I think there's a shift in mindset happening in the Hip Hop genre right now. It seems like, at least some hip hop producers, are starting to get some of the ideas surrounding Open Source.
Today, Stones Throw Records released Chrome Children Vol. 2, for free (for the next thirty days anyway). This follows a similar limited duration free download of the Talib Kweli / Madlib collaboration, Liberation, also on Stones Throw. Obviously, since they're both limited duration downloads and they're not publishing under any sort of OSS license or even Creative Commons which might encourage you, the listener, to further hack the track, it's not really like Open Source. It's more like the RedHat Enterprise business model: "here's some free stuff, now pay us for the premium services". Still, this is a huge sway in mindset from where the industry was just a few years ago.
I think it's great that a few artists are starting to realize that "giving it away" isn't necessarily giving up your margins. Classically, the record label is the one that makes the lion's share of the money on the album sales and artists made most of their money touring and selling merchandise. But the world is changing and it leaves me wondering what the real benefit of the label is...
The label's current place is to supply a few things: production, promotion and distribution. If you can distribute directly over the internet and offer free downloads, it creates its own interest, in essence getting free (and potentially viral) promotion that record companies can't buy. That only leaves one component that they're supplying: production. Given the quality of the digital production equipment available today, I really don't think that is as huge a barrier as it used to be.
This is huge to me, because the paradigm is shifted so that getting out there, in this way, requires talent. If you don't have talent, but have a gimmick, go to a label, try to sell it, maybe get a deal and get published and I won't listen to you anyway. If you do have talent, drop a dope album for free over the internet and sell your related merchandise, make the same margins as you would if the label were in place, but do it without their interference and get the ears of people that care (like moi) that might not have otherwise heard of you...
Spotted! (JamLab - Stephen Caudill)
Bear witness (say, that?s a double entendre, given the rumors of Kyle?s bear hunting trip that are flying around), oh ye of little Kyle, in incanus? photostream:
Note the lovely placement of the rose. I?m pretty sure Kyle brought that one with him.
When I'm On Da Mic (JamLab - Stephen Caudill)
?I rock da mic.. riiiightt??
?For all my dogs? Holdin? down C4?.?
Something about that picture just gave me a snoop-dog kinda feel :) So Kyle?s up at C4 for the weekend. Ostensibly solidifying our plans to take over the world. Haven?t seen him pop up in the photo stream yet though, so maybe he?s actually gone to Canada to hunt Grizzly? or Kodiak? whatever big freakin? bear they have up there. If he is in fact at C4, I?ll see if I can prod him into posting some of his notes on the sessions here.
See you at WWDC (JamLab - JamLab)
We are very excited that Buzz has given JamLab the opportunity to be one of the sponsors of his Annual WWDC Party. The festivites are also sponsored by NewsGator and Satisfaction Unlimited. It is without a doubt the best gathering during WWDC, don't miss it!
JamLab will also be at the Student Career Fair, if you are a student developer with a passion for music stop by and say "Hi" to Kyle.
Private Beta (JamLab - JamLab)
We're in Private Beta... Right. This. Second.
Actually, we have been for awhile now and things are going smashingly! We're expanding our capacity and adding new features every day.
If you're a musician and want to collaborate with your co-conspirators online; If you're looking to publicize your hard work to the world; If you want to meet new people to hook up and Jam with or if you're just curious about how our technology is helping musicians break down barriers, come over and let us know and we'll get you in on the fun as soon as possible.
We'll be making more announcements over the next few weeks to let you know more about what JamLab is and where we're taking it. We can't wait to see you at the Jam!
What is JamLab? (JamLab - JamLab)
JamLab is a new way for musicans to collaborate. So, what exactly does that mean? Well, the cat?s still in the bag, but at this point, we can tell you this: it?s part web application and part desktop application and they work together (collaborating, if you will? an ongoing theme that will emerge) to make your creative process easier. We?ll launch with a service that helps musicians find other musicians that they want to collaborate with. We?ll also introduce an entirely new concept that we will simply call JamVersion. You?ll have to stay tuned for details.