Where is MobileMe for iTunes?

Is it just me or doesn't it seem like there should be a MobileMe for iTunes?

It seems ridiculous to have all these downloads in various places that come from iTunes and/or other places and not have them automatically backed up and available from anywhere. If a system is authorized, I should be able to play back my iTunes songs and other material from anywhere.

I thought of this today as I was monkeying with the new iTunes U and some podcasts on my laptop. I later was sitting at my desktop PC and I wanted to look at something and guess what, it isn't on my PC, it's on my laptop in iTunes. Now granted, it probably wouldn't have been backed up by now but I should have a mirror image of my iTunes data available from all my PC's.

The best part is that since iTunes already has a great deal of the data stored on their servers that you probably have in your personal iTunes database, it doesn't technically need to be backed up. It should just be there. Of course, they already have this ability but don't allow you to use it. If you download a DRM'd piece of music from iTunes and lose it, you can't download it again for free. This never made sense to me.

Here is how I think the MobileMe for iTunes should work:

• Each PC, every day during the day has its iTunes data sync'd with a database on the Internet. This includes all files and all playlists. Since a lot a data exists on Apple's servers already in the same form it is on your PC (they already have a lot of the songs you have and so do other customers), it takes no time to do the backup.
  
• When you select a file to playback, it'll check your system, if it isn't there, it verifies the account is authorized and then downloads the file in the background perhaps streaming it while playback begins.
  
• This data is sync'd with your other devices too such as your Apply TV, iPhone, iPod Touch, etc. Perhaps you have the option to designate some playlists as priorities.

Of course, this wouldn't be free, it could be charged for or be an add-on to MobileMe.

Personally, I'm tired of having iTunes stuff spread all over. I don't have a centrally located shared disk that is on all the time right now. I want access to this stuff I've put into iTunes and/or bought through iTunes available everywhere I am even if I'm not home. I wan't the "internet cloud" to serve me.

I'm sure this is a pie-in-the-sky dream since the DRM issues and studios probably won't allow it. If that's the case, it is one more ding against the ridiculous copy protection that is DRM.

Hopefully, one day this dream of mine will become a reality.

Dell inflicted with ADHD, loses focus

Is it just me or is Dell having trouble focusing? I mean isn't this crazy?

First they buy EqualLogic for an ungodly sum of money (great move for them I'm sure). So, after this big purchase, let's do the next logical thing, let's start trying to create a line of MP3 players? Uh, what? I suppose now if you buy two MP3 players and link them together they'll join together as a RAID 1 (or zero) stripped set of MP3 Players. Perhaps they'll sell a nice little multi-port dock to go with it.

Apple has iTunes to drive sales of the iPod and of course, it now is pervasive and involved in the entire line of products Apple makes. Dell has, well, they have, wait...I'm thinking...nothing! Yeah, nothing. Could they have picked a harder market to break into? I think if you are the brunt of a bunch of jokes about a product announcement, that's probably a good indication it is a bad idea. If this were April 1st, I'd have thought it was an April Fool's joke.

Owning stock in Dell has got to be the roller coaster ride of the decade. Good luck with that Michael!

Apple - A higher standard

I'm not necessarily an Apple fanboy but I do appreciate what the company is doing and has done up to this point. The quality and attention to detail in most of their products is second to none. They screw up too. Every company does it at some point.

It continues to amaze me though how much the media and people in general just love to hate Apple. Apple is scrutinized to a level of detail that no other company ever has. Any product they release is just hammered when the smallest of flaws show or the one feature is missing. I've been guilty of it myself unfortunately too.

The reason why is that people love to hate what they can't achieve or what they can't have. It is a fact that has been proven over and over again in tests conducted all over. If you had a choice between:

a) getting $1,000,000 but to get it you had to give $10,000,000 to the other guy or
b) getting $750,000 and the other guy gets $750,000

Most people will take the $750K. They simply can't bare the thought of someone getting more. Of course, this is grossly oversimplified but this type of problem exhibits itself over and over again at work, in our government, and at home.

The criticism of Apple over the imperfections of the latest iPhone and the launch of the MobileMe service are just manifestations of this in a more complicated form. The iPhone, despite having 100's of things done right, is criticized for the one thing it does wrong. Usually, this criticism is by a Blackberry user who can't get an iPhone or finds out his company won't support it I'm sure. Of course, there are the multitudes of reviewers who need to sensationalize everything and bad Apple products get a lot of hits.

Same goes for MobileMe although this is a bit more complicated. The media just loves to jump all over Apple whenever it gets a chance. The amount of press Google or MSN (Live...yeah, crappy name), or Yahoo gets when something goes wrong is no where near what Apple sees. Apple should and could have done a better job with this, especially communicating with users. They are hardly the evil jokers that everyone has made them out to be however. Somewhere, something went wrong. They've got it fixed now. Let it go.

I know all this has been gone over before and rehashed ad naseum but I couldn't help myself. Some of the ridiculous complaints I hear just make me want to scream.

Sorry Blackberry users, I've used the Blackberry and now the iPhone. There are some functions out there that I can do on a Blackberry that I certainly don't have on the iPhone (yet) but anyone who uses both and thinks the interface on the Blackberry is superior has their head so far up their rears that their vision has to be tinted a dark shade of brown. The future is and will be the touchscreen interface as implemented by Apple. Anything else now is either a wannabe or is missing the boat entirely (see the new Blackberry competitor to the iPhone as an example of missing the boat).

So if you want what Apple has, go get it. If not, stop telling me what Apple is doing wrong and start telling me what your company/product/gadget is doing right.

Smell the armpit - 8-8-08

Come on world, smell the armpit!

Are we all glad the Summer Olympics are being held in one of the finest places on earth this year? Beijing

I'm sure this is much better than Toronto or Paris.

And I always thought cans of air and the plot in Spaceballs was a joke. Someone stands to make a fortune on this idea now.

I think when you start handing out breathing masks to athletes and visitors, this is a clue that there is trouble ahead.

In keeping with the theme, the IOC is now planning to have the Winter Olympics in 2020 held on top of a heaping pile of bat dung in the middle of a garbage dump.

World likes Action Only - I hope they are wrong

In an interview today on Talk of the Nation, A. O. Scott, the movie critic, says that big budget movies can only pander to the action movie goers. I hope they are wrong. He thinks deeper stories have no place in big budget movies because they can't make the money back worldwide. Most of his interview appears to be the result of an article he published in the NY Times about the Super Hero Genre being at the end of its rope.

I can only hope Tony Scott is wrong. Is the world wide movie going audience really that stupid? Are we really so much smarter than everyone else? Personally, I think it is insulting to think that other movie watchers in the rest of the world can't appreciate a good story. I think his opinion actually represents the type of thinking that has gotten us in so much hot water in the past with the rest of the world.

What do you think?

More of Game Developers NOT Getting It

I know I'm beating a dead horse here but I just had to post something. I watched a video teaser from Sony's E3 announcements earlier and it is just so sad. I mean it has to be the most depressing video ever. Why is that?

Because it consisted of mostly rehashed material. It was loaded (probably 1/2 to 2/3's) with FPS shooters of some sort. A few ridiculous driving games were in there too and pathetically few games were of any interest whatsoever. I love games and video games in particular. I should be excited to see what is new and forthcoming and I'm not.

All I can say is thank goodness Nintendo is there with the Wii. If not for them, this would be the most depressing time in recent video game history. At least someone out there gets it.

Just to illustrate how the "others" aren't getting it, I downloaded a Wall-E demo for the PS3. Wall-E is a kids game. It is targeted towards kids. No self respecting teenager and probably no adult will ever play Wall-E the video game unless their younger sibling or their kids have it. They most definitely won't buy it for themselves.

However, every single button on the dang PS3 controller has some use or function. For crying out loud, it is a kids video game. How am I supposed to explain to a 5 or 6 year old how each and every button is supposed to work. This is a game that should have the joystick and one MAYBE two buttons used at most. Nothing more.

The game was so frustrating, my 8 year old said it was bad. He got stuck in 5 minutes of playing and it probably was just because he couldn't figure out the right combination of buttons to press.

I'm betting the Wii version is a lot simpler to play.

As mentioned on my friends blog, the Wii is successful for the same reasons the Atari 2600 was popular way back when. The control schemes are easy to understand and the games appeal to a wide audience. Until the other consoles figure this out, they are doomed to be runners up in this battle for video game dominance. I'm being polite when I say runner up too!

iPhone 3G email setup and rough edges

I finally had a chance to play with an iPhone 3G. Unfortunately, it wasn't mine it was my managers. She's giving it a test run for our company since her Blackberry died which she hated anyway.

I won't tell anyone anything by saying it is fantastic. Blackberry has to be crapping their pants now if they weren't already. The ads that Blackberry has running are laughable at best. Can you imagine watching a video or browsing the web on the stupidly small screens they have even if they are the same resolution as the iPhone's?

Activesync setup for Exchange with this thing was a bust and an exercise in frustration. However, I think this is an Exchange 2003 issue and not the iPhone at all. I eventually had to back down and use the IMAP email function to retrieve email and forgo the automatic sync of calendar and contacts and use the iTunes sync to accomplish this. Unfortunately, this is where a glaring issue reared its ugly head.

Syncing your calendar and contacts with Outlook using iTunes simply doesn't work. Looking around on the forums at Apple, I'm not the only one. It appears the update to the 2.0 firmware and iTunes 7.7 broke something. The system, when you initiate a sync, literally sits there sync'ing for 20-30 minutes. When done, the best you get is the contacts and no calendar. On top of that, I had bookmarks set to sync and bookmarks weren't there either.

Depite the numerous posts I see no official response from Apple which is disappointing. Some acknowledgement of the problem and that it is being worked on would be nice. I could be wrong but there is a pattern of Apple not admitting to flaws. For instance, whenever I get asked to update iTunes, I can never seem to find a change log or release notes that describes precisely what is and isn't fixed or changed between the new version and the old.

Finally, I'll just add my two cents on how I setup SMTP sending for the iPhone since numerous articles don't seem to address this scenerio or are just frankly more complicate than necessary.

Scenerio:

You have an Exchange server behind a firewall. You don't allow SMTP communications from the outside to it directly. All SMTP traffic has to pass through a spam filter of some sort. The SPAM filter can't be used as an SMTP server for outside email when the from address equals your own domain name.

Problem:

You can't send SMTP to yourself or anyone else using your spam filter because all email addresses with your domain are INSIDE the network and so sending from the outside with an internal address is presumed to be spam.

Exchange SMTP services (windows SMTP actually) doesn't allow you to restrict traffic to an IP address and allow all other IP's only if authenticated. If you restrict by IP, you have to specify all IP's that can send through it (not possible for the random IP's assigned to the iPhone obviously). If you require authentication, all SMTP senders need to authenticate and most spam filters (at least mine anyway) cannot authenticate to send. It just opens a port and starts spitting out email.

Solution:

• Keep the internal Exchange server restricted and available only to the spam filter like you have now.
  
  
• Create a new SMTP server service on your exchange server and designate the port it uses as something other than port 25. Preferably something up high and it should be above port 1024.
  
  
• Change the authentication settings for the SMTP service to allow only authenticated users to send email. You'll have to choose whether to require encryption or not.
  
  
• Modify your firewall to allow sending to this new port on your exchange server.
  
  
• On the iPhone, go into the email settings for the IMAP account and at the bottom there is a place to change the outgoing server settings.
  
  
• Once selected, you'll see at least two accounts there (usually, there may be more). One is your SMTP account you setup and the other is AT&T's SMTP server. Normally, you could use AT&T's when on the EDGE network but the spam blocker prevents this. (incidentally, allowing multiple sending SMTP services is brilliant, it just doesn't work this time)
  
  
• Modify you SMTP account settings to point to your exchange server but near the very bottom of the screen you do this, change the port settings from port 25 to the port you selected when you setup the new SMTP service on your server.
  
  
• Try it and if all is well, it should work.

Hopefully this is helpful. Good luck!

It's good to be home again

This weekend, I came home. Home to the Mac that I left years and years ago. I'm now the proud owner of a MacBook Pro. OK, well, technically, it is my wife's MacBook Pro but she lets me use it.

It is a technically superior product in many ways to my Lenovo Thinkpad which actually cost me more money at the time I purchased it. The trackpad on the Mac is probably the single best thing about the MacBook Pro. Apple really has perfected the device and it works better than any trackpad I've ever used. Did I mention I hate trackpads!! For me to rave about it is saying more than most will probably ever know. The two finger and three finger gestures are fantastic.

The funniest thing is that from the moment the unit was turned on, it was easier to access the files on a shared PC on my home network than it ever was on a Windows PC. How ironic! Windows could really learn a thing or two.

Now, the bad part is that I'm still not sure what will be best for actually working with it. My wife needs office compatibility and unfortunately needs to use Publisher (ick) for some work she does. Hopefully, with the exception of Publisher, Open Office will be sufficient.

The good news is that she likes the mail application that comes with it. Unfortunately, the first time she opened it up herself, it crashed (not sure why yet) which was a bit of a let down. No one ever said the Mac was crash proof I guess. It is a darn shame the mail app won't import a PST file from Outlook directly.

My only complaint is the wireless antennae built into the thing seems poor. Where my laptop and other devices pick up the wireless in my house just fine, the MacBook Pro has problems. I know it is the MacBook Pro design too because my father-in-law has the same issues with his MacBook Pro. Perhaps this problem will go away when I upgrade to 802.11n sometime in the near future.

It'll take a while to make the transition but hopefully this is the first of many Mac OS machines to reside in my household. While I'll never be able to banish Windows completely (not yet anyway), I don't intend to support Windows personally ever again.

It sure is good to be home.

WALL-E is unsure

I was prepared to offer a stellar review of WALL-E after seeing it this past holiday weekend. Unfortunately for WALL-E, I can't do that. The problem with it is that it is forgettable.

I'm not going to spend a great deal of time on this because I think that most people who want to see it will and they can all judge it for themselves. But in a nutshell, it is a wonderfully well animated feature length film that does not appear to know what it wants to accomplish nor is it memorable. It is one of the first Pixar films that I've actually been disappointed in.

The sad part is I don't think this is Pixar's fault to some degree. I think it is just the fact that this film is caught in the evolution of the animated picture from strictly kid and family fair to a full blown medium for serious topics. Pixar just tried to straddle the line and in my opinion, they didn't succeed.

When I finished the movie, I tried to understand why I didn't like it. My kids seemed to enjoy it a great deal and that probably is all that should matter. Frankly, that is all that really matters to me too.

Had this been a work of pure science fiction and been in written form, it would have been ridiculous with all the antics in the middle of it. You can't take a subject matter like this and mix it up with slapstick comedy. At least, for me, it doesn't work. I'm sure there are many others who thought it all worked just fine and that's great. Just don't expect me to rate this high on my list too.

One final point, the mixing of live actors with the animation just struck me as the most horribly misguided thing Pixar could have ever tried. How do full blown actors go from their "live" existence to the caricatures of their future selves in ballooned up animated form? The progression just doesn't work. They should have stuck to the animated versions of people in every instance.

I think the real big problem with this show is what most people came away with that I spoke to. The animated short before WALL-E just blew people away. It upstaged the movie in almost every way possible and was hysterical. Having it at the beginning of the film was perhaps the worst decision Pixar could have ever made because WALL-E just could not live up to the bar that had been set right from the very start.

Netflix comes to its senses

It looks like Netflix came to their senses and abandoned their plans to remove the profiles feature. It seems like they actually do care and listen to their customers. It is a shame that had to create such a blunder in the first place but at least they are willing to admit their mistake.

I thought it only fair to mention this since I chastised them to begin with.

Now if we could only have saved Studio 60 and Journeyman as easily.