Blog

I have long been a fan of Amazon.com. Not sure I remember when I made my first purchase from Amazon, but I recall doing a good portion of my Christmas shopping there in the late 90’s. Over the years I have bought many things there from books to electronics. When I heard that Amazon was launching a new online music store I was cautiously optimistic, but not expecting much. My low expectations were not because I didn’t have high expectations from Amazon, but rather it seems that many tried their hand at the digital music business, but few have succeeded.

Why have so many failed in the digital music business? In part I think the music industry is to blame for the failure of many of the failed efforts. High prices and restrictive digital rights management (DRM) have certainly not helped the digital music industry. Campaigns and lawsuits from the RIAA that treat consumers like criminals certainly don’t help either.

Apple’s online music store, iTunes, has been one of the few success stories in the digital music realm. The success of the iTunes music store is in large part due to the iPod. Apple created an easy to use ecosystem with the combination of iTunes and iPod. Apple also managed to work deals with the music industry that were favorable to the consumer. iTunes allowed consumers to buy individual tracks for .99 cents. As the iPod gained up to 80% of the market for digital music players, iTunes continued to prosper.

Today I decided to try Amazon.com’s new Mp3 download service to see what t was all about. It sounded good – DRM free music that would work with my iPod. So I downloaded three songs and here is what I found to be the advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

• Music is in the Mp3 format and will work on most digital music players
• DRM free music – play your music when you want where you want
• Easy to preview tracks
• Nice web interface for viewing and purchasing tracks
• Works well with iTunes

Disadvantages:

• Very limited selection (only 2 major labels)
• Search worked poorly in my test
• User experience, while good is not as good as iTunes
• A lot of filler content (karaoke and tribute bands)

Overall I like the Amazon Mp3 store, but I don’t see it becoming my primary source for online music. When I want to buy a single song I continue to look on iTunes first, it is quick, easy and convenient. I also belong to eMusic, which I use for music discovery and I trade CDs on Lala. I will certainly look at Amazon’s Mp3 store when I want to buy complete albums. If I can buy an album at a higher bit rate and DRM free I will certainly opt to do so – and Amazon seems to be a good choice. I would love to see both iTunes and AmazonMp3 get more DRM free music from all the music labels.

One thing that bothers me about Amazon’s new service is that is really in part an effort for Universal Music to undermine iTunes. While Universal has agreed to sell DRM free music on Amazon they are not offering their DRM free music on iTunes. Why? In part perhaps because Univeral wants more control over music distribution and are not happy with their agreement with iTunes. Again the music industry doesn’t get it…

Prior to switching from Windows based PCs to OS X on the Mac I was under the impression that there wasn’t as much software available for the Mac platform. However, I can honestly say since I moved to the Mac I have purchased more software than all of my years on Windows. Why? A number of reasons, but I think one of the overwhelming reason has been that there is a lot of great software written for the Mac, it seems like I am always discovering great new programs for the Mac.

One of my recent discoveries was a program called ArtText from BeLight Software. ArtText is a simple yet powerful application that allows you to do all sorts of interesting things with text and graphics. With ArtText you can create logos, banners, buttons, icons and more. In ArtText you have materials such as glass, plastic and metal that have various properties and you apply the material (or the texture) to your text and vector images. The result? You end up with highly stylized text and graphics. Want a fancy web 2.0 badge? Use ArtText’s built in glass material to make a cool badge. Need to make a simple text logo? ArtText has plenty of options – you can even create your own materials. I would recommend you download a trial version and give it a spin.

Looking for a quick way to make beautiful images for the web? Well if you have a Mac Picturesque from Acqualia software might be for you. Winner of the best Mac OS X student product for the 2007 Apple Design Awards, Picturesque was written entirely in Cocoa by Zac Cohan and Nik Youdale.

Picturesque is a very simple and intuitive image enhancing application that does a few things and does them well. With Picturesque you can simply drag and drop images into the staging area and with a few clicks of the mouse easily apply a number of polished effect including: reflection, glow, shadow, rounded corners, stroke, fade and resize.  I’ve been using it for a few weeks now for the graphics for this blog and have found it to be very useful.

Take a look at this very short video to get a feel for what you can do with Picturesque. Download a demo from the Acqualia web site, decide to buy it – good news it is only $19.50 – nice price for a solid product.

Ever since I moved to the Mac platform I have been a big fan of OmniGroup’s software. My first experience was with OmniOutliner, which is a very versatile outlining and idea organization application. When I was looking for a Visio type application for the Mac I found OmniGraffle, which is great for developing all sorts of charts and diagrams. I have tried OmniWeb and would love to try OmniPlan at some point when my business grows to the point it would be helpful. Overall I find OmniGroup’s software to be intuitive, useful and user centered.

Recently I was looking for a good GTD (Getting Things Done) productivity application for my Mac. I had heard that Merlin Mann was working with OmniGroup on OmniFocus so I headed over to the OmniGroup web site to see what I could find. I found that the application was still under development and a release date hasn’t been given. There is an interesting video demo by Ethan Schoonover and a link for a mailing list, which I signed up for in hopes of getting on the beta testers list.

Shortly after signing up for the mailing list I got an e-mail from the OmniGroup giving me the opportunity to alpha test OmniFocus. While I am not usually to eager for alpha testing I looked at the Omni forums and it sounded like the product was fairly stable. Of course at the end of the day it is an alpha test, and there is a big warning at the top of the page that reads:

“This release is still under development. Your feedback will help us improve the software, and we apologize if it crashes or misbehaves.”

At this point I have only taken a little time to look at the application, but so far so good. It looks like it might be a promising product in the personal productivity space and I look forward to trying it out. I’ll try to post my thoughts on it once I have had a chance to really get to know it better.

I own several iPods. My first was a 40GB iPod Photo my wife bought me for Christmas 3 years ago. Since then we have added an iPod Shuffle, a pink Mini for my wife and a 1GB Nano. I love my iPods! I’ve always been somewhat of a gadget guy and my iPod is one of my favorites. In fact it is one of the few things that I use almost daily. It was my iPod that led me to buy my first Mac computer – and now we own three.

It is amazing how Apple has revolutionized the music business with the iPod. Since Apple introduced the video iPod almost two years ago there has been a lot of speculation as to what the next generation iPod would be – last week we found out. Since I first saw the iPhone I thought wouldn’t it be great to have a phoneless iPhone? That is what Apple has essentially done with iPod Touch.

I am really excited about this iPod I think it will really be a game changer. The user interface is absolutely beautiful, one I am sure will be copied by many in the years to come (Zune Touch anyone). I was really happy to see Apple include WiFi and Safari for me this was a critical factor in my decision to order one.

It should be interesting to see how the iPhone/iPod develop as a platform. While Apple doesn’t currently have an API for developers I imagine that it is only a matter of time before they open one up for developers, perhaps WWDC 2008? With the iPod Touch and the iPhone running a version of OSX it should be interesting to see how they evolve. I would suspect that we might see some new functionality for both of the devices when the new version of OSX, Leopard, ships in October.

Anyway I’ll be sure to give it a quick review when I get it at the end of this month.

GrandCentral is a new phone service that has been getting a lot of buzz lately. The idea is simple one phone number for life. Let’s think about it, most of us today have many phone numbers we might be reached at throughout the day, perhaps a home number in the morning, your office number during the day, your cell phone during your commute, your vacation home on the weekends (we can dream can’t we) – you get the idea. The idea behind GrandCentral is to link all your phone numbers together with a single phone number. You have a GrandCentral number which you give to your contacts and that number can be set up to ring any or all of your other phones. So if someone needs to reach you they only need one number, not a list saying when you will be where. Simple but brilliant!

Take it one step further and you can consolodate your voicemail as well, rather than four different voicemail systems you can have everything go to one very robust full featured voicemail system through GrandCentral. While the one phone number and single voicemail combination is the most compelling reason to try GrandCentral, it is only the tip of the iceberg. GrandCentral has many great features such as ListenIn a feature that lets you screen your calls, you can actually listen to voicemail as it is recorded and pick up the line if your choose. Other cool features include call screening, SPAM filtering (for your calls – no more telemarketers), e-mail notifications and WebCall buttons. The feature set looks very impressive.

GrandCentral was acquired by Google in July, who obviously sees the tremendous potential, and it is currently in private beta. I managed to get an invite and I am very excited to try out the system. I think the concept holds a lot of promise. The major phone companies should be watching GrandCentral, it really is what phone service should be. During the beta all of the features are free, but I would imagine it will move to a subscription model at some point. Anyway it looks very interesting – I’ll keep you posted as I try the service. I do have a few invites, if you are interested in one please post a short response to this blog entry telling readers why you are interested in GrandCentral (you will need to make an account – sorry but blog spam drives me nuts).

In the technology business you really need to be learning new things all the time or be left behind. This means always having a few books that you are working on as well a reading the blogs daily. I try to attend a few training classes or college courses each year and catch the occasional conference. Of course technical training can be very expensive and time consuming, but I recently came across an interesting alternative that is very cost effective and easily work with any schedule. Lynda.com is an online training solution that has been around since 1995 and they offer a great selection of online video training. They have a basic subscription for $25/month that allows you access to their complete library. I just signed up for a 7 day trial, but I will likely purchase an annual plan if I continue to be impressed.

The training is done with a series of high quality Quicktime movies. Right now I am watching a Podcasting training module conducted by Scott Bourne, which is excellent. They seem to have a nice selection. Some of the courses I plan to take include: Ruby on Rails Essential Training, CSS for Designers, Working with Color, Javascript Essentials and Web Redesign. Many of the courses are taught by industry leaders and my impression thus far is very positive. It is definitely worth checking out! I found a free 14 day trial which can give you a good feel for what it is all about.