Month: January 2004

Oh there’s been much talk about Atom being XML, and being dealt with as XML, and if RSS is dealt with as XML, or as a collection of tags tied up with strings…

My thought, if anyone cares, is pretty much the same as Tim Bray’s thoughts on Atom:

An Atom feed is going to be defined as an XML document, which means that if it’s not well-formed then it’s not Atom.

I say this because I’ve been working with RSS for the last 4 or 5 years, and I’ve too often dealt with RSS as a bunch of text between tags rather than as XML. Regular expressions have been used rather than nice XML toolkits. Liberal feed parsers were probably a good idea for RSS at the time, as RSS was often not XML, well, poorly formed and broken XML perhaps, but not quite XML. I look forward to getting an Atom feed and using an XML library to parse it and do as I wish. I think that’s only going to happen if we ensure that Atom is XML, and I think we do that by creating good tools to create Atom feeds with.

Recently I had to create a syndication feed for a site using ASP, and while I would have preferred an Atom feed, I wasn’t confident enough that the code we had would always produce well formed XML, so we ended up creating an RSS feed instead for now. I mean, sure, it’ll have errors and not validate sometimes, but that’s just how RSS is. I want more from Atom, and once the tools are there to easily create a valid Atom feed every time, then that’s what we’ll do.

Yes, continue I must on this iPod quest…

I was telling the female about the new iPod minis, saying that they were smaller, but had less space for music, after I used the word ‘gigs’ and was reprimanded, I told her that the iPod mini might hold 1000 songs while the regular iPod might hold 4000 songs, to which she thought I was nuts for thinking that was some big deal, explaining that she doesn’t even have that much music anyway. (I had to guess on the numbers, she caught me off guard.) Of course I would have responded that I do have that much audio, and would like to have a large pocket firewire drive, but instead I gave up. The iPod mini will find it’s niche. (A side note to this would be that she might be used to loading up a device before use, as she does with the Rio, but again, I didn’t feel like pursuing the issue.)

Now, what if Apple had gone the other way? No, not made them bigger, but kept the same size of the old iPod, and added features. A Network connection? The Rio Karma has an ethernet port, which sounds very interesting, perhaps Apple could have incorporated wifi into the iPod. I suppose you could do this with a Rio Karma by adding a wireless ethernet bridge, of course it would be nice to have it all in one little package. Don’t you think the geeks out there would like a 40 gig wifi-enabled hard drive and digital audio player? Of course you’d have to figure out battery charging, or replaceable batteries, or an AC adapter, but those are minor issues… Again, maybe the technology just isn’t there yet for Apple to do it right. Evidence to this would be the following on the RioWorld forums: Re:Ethernet – have you gotten it to work?

Rio responded to my support e-mail stating there is a known issue with ethernet compatability and they are looking into it, whatever that means!!!!!!

Whatever that means, indeed. It seems to mean it “sort of” works, and as we know, Apple isn’t into things that “sort of” work. You’ll find other messages in the forum regarding how to repair old players on your own, with tips like: "have you tried bending the battery contacts outward slightly?" and such.

Archos (and others) also seem to be doing a bit more with portable players, like making them recorders as well. The Ondio 128 FM Recorder records directly into MP3 from a built-in FM radio, and does voice recording as well. What if voice recording and/or FM tuning had been added to the iPod? Besides perhaps angering 3rd party add-on manufacturers, I think people might welcome these things.

So what’s the point? Only that we’ve just begun, and these devices, whether they play audio, record it, or do a dozen other things, are quite interesting, and will hopefully only get more interesting in time…

Stay tuned!

There’s a whole bunch of back-and-forth going on in respect to the thoughts and opinions on the iPod mini. Some say it’s smaller (in physical size and disk space) so it’s not worth the price, other say it’s smaller (in physical size) and is worth the price.

Look at Apple’s Powerbook line. There’s a 12″, a 15″, and a 17″ PowerBook. Ask people which one they have, or would like to have, and you’ll get varying responses. And guess what? They come with different size hard drives, 40, 60, 80 gig, respectively. Oh sure, you can get a 12″ and put an 80 gig drive in it, which is something you can’t do with an iPod. Yet…

Digital audio players are a fairly new technology, and Apple is definitely helping define where they might be headed, but it’s no surprise than an Apple product might have a premium price. These things will all play out in time. If $249 for 4 gig is not appealing, then what is? $200 for 2 gig? $100 for 1 gig? And at what physical size? Personally, if I could get an iPod for “around” $100 that held “about” 1 gig, and was “roughly” the size of the original iPod, that would be ideal to me. What is a good price/size/capacity ratio will be different for different people. Apple can’t build/sell what would be ideal to everyone, no company can. (At least at an affordable price.) And yes, I’d pay a bit more for an Apple product because I trust the name, respect a well designed UI, and would expect it to work properly with what I currently use.

(In the meantime, I’ll just enjoy my Car MP3 Player.)

iPod? Feh! I’ve got an inon-dash Digital Audio Player. It’s detachable too! It connects to the car stero through a sophisticated wire-connection to a cassette-style adapter interface. It also connect to my Mac using a USB cable and runs on a single AA battery.

The Digital Music Revolution is here!

(Note: In the photo it may look like the mounting device is really just 3 screw and a rubber band, but in reality it is 3 screws and 2 rubberbands.)

Yeah, ok, so I missed Macworld. I mean, I didn’t go, but then again, I never go. So when I say I missed it, I mean something else, like “huh, what happened, did I miss it?”

I know, there are new things, sure. A smaller iPod. Smaller in size, in every way, except price comparatively. Ok, I bought an old Rio 500 a few months back for around $60 bucks, and if they had come out with an iPod around $100, or even $150 I could have considered chucking it into the nearest junk drawer, but $249? Um, ok yeah, sure. Perhaps Apple will lower the price on it and everyone can say “Wow, Apple r00lz!” or something, but I sort of doubt it.

GarageBand actually looks very freaking cool, and this from someone who used to play and record music and even owned a 4-track recorder years ago. I’ve used various music/sound apps on the Mac over the past 10 years or so, but just looking at what GarageBand does, and the price for it (basically $49 plus some other junk along with it) GarageBand kicks the asses of previous efforts in the price range. My music-making friend(s) might be excited.

As for the iLife thingy, ok, I’m pretty much willing to spend $49 to make iPhoto go faster. Really. It’s a very nice application, but man oh man does it crawl. It feels like my G4 is running iPhoto for Windows via Virtual PC it’s so slow… Free would be better but really, from what I hear Apple does have to make some money, and I can trick myself into saying that I’m supporting open-source by buying it since Apple is a good open-source citizen…

Ok, for real now, if you want good coverage of what happened, look elsewhere, perhaps Ars Technica’s A Jade keynote: Macworld Expo 2004:

Twenty years after bringing desktop publishing to the masses, giving everyone the power to create really bad brochures and church bulletins, Apple has done it again. Garage Band makes it possible for even the most computer illiterate and tone deaf individual to make horrible music through drag and drop simplicity and brightly colored icons…

Oh, and one last thing…

The “one last thing” was the guy in front of me farting and then it was over.

Ok, one more last thing. Apple still makes an operating system and hardware that sucks less than anything else out there. How’s that for a compliment?