Wasted Brilliance

Messing with iTunes 8

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Apple's iTunes is one piece of software that I absolutely despise. It's slow, it's bloated, it's feature bare (for what I like to do anyway) and altogether it adds up to a package I simply cannot stand to use.

That said, I still keep it installed for the simple fact it is a necessary evil in order to properly use two of my favorite devices, my iPod Classic and iPhone. So of course when iTunes 8 hit, I had to get it up and running to see if they fixed any of my gripes.

Of course they didn't.

Instead they put in more bloat and more features that arguably don't make the already abysmal experience any better for me.

New feature number one: The Genius Sidebar. I can see this being useful for the people that actually buy music through the iTunes store. It shows the top albums from the current artist, a list of songs from the artist that don't exist in your library, and a list of related artists. Just one problem: It doesn't work. The Top Albums are completely arbitrary, the Related Artists are only loosely related on a genre level (which I hate to begin with) and the Missing Tracks section doesn't function at all. When I select a Less Than Jake song, it lists five songs that I'm supposedly missing, but they're right there in my library.

New feature number two: Genius Playlists. Besides the scariness of Apple having full access to my playlists and media library, I gave this a shot to see if it worked at all. The information gathering process took forty-five minutes or so to pull from my entire iTunes library (Which in itself isn't even my full library, only the stuff that I can easily get album covers for. I'm pretty anal when it comes to everything on my iPod having cover art.). I don't know exactly how their algorithm works, but it seemed slightly better than the randomness of party shuffle. At least it didn't throw in a bunch of metal when I picked out a Radiohead song.

New feature number three: Grid View. This, I can appreciate. Cover flow is nice eye candy, but rather sub-optimal for actually finding stuff. List view is great, but it can get boring. Why am I even getting cover art if it doesn't use it? So grid view is a pretty good thing to me.

(This image is rather more impressive at full size.)

My conclusion? Much like the App Store's iTunes controller before it, a good app isn't going to make me use iTunes because the majority of it is still suck. I could see myself using the Genius playlister, I like the grid approach, and I still love controller, but I'm not switching. Until they fix the pre-existing baseline issues, I'm sticking with my Foobar2k.

Ultra Mobile Browsing on FriendFeed

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

FriendFeed is a great way to draw information from the depths of the internet. The aggregation features coupled with discovery tools through recommendation make it a model for a key feature in the future of social media. And while that's great, what helps it really shine is its interface. Even with the new advanced grouping tools and picture posting capability of the beta they've managed to keep it clean, sparse and friendly, and to me that means a lot.

My recent acquisition of a Eee PC 901 has left me with a greater appreciation for people who understand design aesthetics for service based sites. Google's Reader is a shining example of this. The layout is fluid, stretching accross the page, the interface is an unobtrusive few lines accross the top, and you are presented with numerous options for display of the content. I prefer to use the "list view" which collapses all items to a headline + snippet, and allows me to page through them one at a time and focus my attention on a single article at once. This brings me to the other great thing about Google Reader usability: the hotkeys. Like most applications, once you've acclimated yourself to the hotkeys, it's hard to get the same utility otherwise. A Photoshop master will work with one hand on the mouse/stylus, and one on the keyboard. And anyone who plays StarCraft purely with the mouse is fodder. In particular, reader gives keys for paging through items, backwards and forwards, marking/unmarking as read, opening links in a new window, refreshing the item list, and toggling the sidebar. On your standard desktop, these features may not seem like much. You have enough screen space to generally ignore the sidebar, items and refresh are just a click away. But on something like the Eee, screen real estate is at a premium and the trackpad is kind of a pita.


FriendFeed with Firefox full screen disabled.	FriendFeed with Firefox full screen enabled.

Here you can see the amazing difference that Firefox's full screen mode makes in browsing a site like FriendFeed. A big thank you to the Firefox guys for including it, and to the IE people who set that precedent originally. (Speaking of which, I need to find a way to make F11 toggle full screen in gVim.) In spite of the reduced size everything remains clean and readable, and flows properly.

Hotkeys, on the other hand, are something I find myself missing a great deal. F5 gives me refresh, but that's the extent of the commands at my fingertips (even then, I prefer to use Google Reader's "r" hotkey to refresh the items pane alone, rather than the whole page. Thank you AJAX). At the very least, I'd like keys for navigation between my feed, my main feed, and room feed. Perhaps even configurable keys to apply to specific rooms or friend groupings now that the beta has introduced that feature. I think as well I could find some use in a "paging" hotkey, to cycle through items in the current tream. The tab key in Firefox cycles through links, which makes it inefficient for this job. An item cycle (akin to Reader's "j" key") could give focus to items as you go down the page, allowing for further hotkeys for toggling "like", invoking the "hide" window, opening the comment input, or opening the item permalink in a new window/tab. The list could go on.

While I find FriendFeed more than usable on my precious little mobile thanks to their keen fashion sense, I can't help but think I'd get more out of it with even a few basic hotkeys available. Their focus is obviously on content discovery and channeling the firehose into something usable on a personal basis, but hopefully someday they'll come around to making my life a little easier when it comes to using the service.

Labels: design, friendfeed, portable computing, social media

What's In My Bag, 2008 Edition

Monday, August 25, 2008

I don't get out all that often, but when I do I like to be prepared. In the interest of seeing how my item carrying habits evolve over time, I have taken inventory of the items I carry with me on a regular basis, complete with photos. Eventually, I'll compare this listing with inventory I take in the future and see what's changed, what's stayed, and what it all means to me.

The bag itself that I use is a Tom Bihn "Empire Builder" and it is rugged. The craftsmanship alone makes the cost worth it. It's slightly bigger than I originally thought, so it gets heavy at times, but that was probably because I was lugging around three gigantic hardcover textbooks every weekday. If I were buying now, I'd probably go with their newer "Zephyr" line. Attached inside is a "Brain Cell" protector sized for my specific laptop. This is great too, because at times I have detached the inner case and stuffed it into a backpack for more mobility.

Bag Contents

I believe I inherited a gene from my grandfather on my father's side. It's the one that causes me to lug around as much crap as I possible can on the off chance that some day it might be useful. Or maybe it's just a guy thing. So here's the inventory of stuff that resides forever in my bag:

.5mm Pentel side advance mechanical pencils (sadly, I'm down to three)
Cables
- iPod USB cable and outlet adapter
- 6 foot length of cat-5
- USB cable, A to Mini A
Logitech Quickcam Deluxe Notebook
Mini Stapler, uses full size staples
Safety Scissors
Mini Mag Flashlight
Cat-5 Barrel Connectors
TI-83 Graphic Calculator
Deck of Playing Cards
Altoids tin containing mechanical pencil replacement parts
Altoids tin containing micro USB cable, Micro SD adapter, USB Bluetooth dongle
Altoids tin containing actual Altoids
Altoids gum tin containing spare ear bud headphones
O'Reilly books, pocket reference series
Sealed tea bags

I also carry around a sketchbook and college ruled composition notebook. Never know when you're going to need to write something down or sketch it out.
I think I'd like to find myself a pocket sized copy of the constitution (with amendments), and carry that around like one of my heroes, Dennis Kucinich. That man can seriously pack it away.

Devices

I am also a huge deviceophile. I love little portable things that do stuff. Especially if they do it wirelessly.

In Conclusion
I hope you've enjoyed this little peek into my bag. Although, this is just the bag I carry around with me daily. I have another bag packed with computer networking essentials I use for house calls and LAN parties, but that "Magic Bag of LAN Awesomeness" perhaps deserves its own inventory post.

Labels: devices, personal, travel

In my younger and more Sharpie infatuated days

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

In light of the recent influx of manga avatars, I finally dug up and found the parody self portrait I drew quite a while ago. The inspiration is Masamune Shirow's self portrait found in the original Ghost in the Shell manga. This kind of makes me want to do an update, maybe I will.

Clicky for bigger size.

Labels: art, manga, personal

Bandwagons are Fun

Saturday, August 16, 2008

The new manga-style avatar creator, http://www.faceyourmanga.com/ is making the rounds now, so of course, I had to give it a shot. These things are always so much fun. I just wish they had a better selection of hats. I prefer a porkpie or fedora.

Labels: art, manga, personal

The CRPG Question of the Day

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

I'm a huge console era RPG fan. Secret of Mana, EarthBound, Lunar, Chrono Trigger and of course the ever popular Final Fantasy series. The list goes on.

Not to bog this post down too much with details, but it has long been my dream to develop my own entry in the genre. A cinematic epic entrenched firmly in the gameplay standards of tile based maps, turn based combat, and sweeping storylines of good vs evil. While nothing much that's too impressive has actually resulted from this fanboy dream, it has provided me plenty of opportunity to hone my programmer and artist skills in a myriad of fashions over the years. And now, at this strange point in my life, I'm making another run at it.

Again during this process I find myself attempting to apply my current level of technological knowledge, and my other infatuations online by bringing my quest to the social media circle. Specifically in this case, by including my use of the popular aggregation and conversation site FriendFeed.

Yesterday I posted a tweet (expressly to have it imported to friendfeed) asking "A question for any Console RPG fans out there: How important is being able to name the playable characters to you?" and I got a lot of great responses, as well as a lot of interesting new people to follow who share my passion for console roleplaying games in some way. Today again I posted "Console RPG question of the day: What's your preferred party size? Chrono Trigger used three. EarthBound, BoF and most FFs used four. But FF4 had you use up to five." and again received a good many responses, including one for an idea that would be awesome to implement in a more focused game built specifically for the premise.

Since I think this idea definitely has some steam, I've decided to pose a new question to the FriendFeed crowd concerning CRPGs every day at about 11 to 12noon (US Pacific), to which I'll follow up throughout the day and onward. I think the responses are insightful, and all around good fun, and will undoubtedly help me make decisions regarding my own game as it is developed. After a few weeks of this (depending on how long I can keep coming up with good questions, and how long interest remains) I hope to do a new blog post outlining things I've learned over the course of the whole thing and how they've influenced my design process.

Hope to see you all in the CRPG Question of the Day comments!

The Question List:

Labels: gaming, rpgs, social media

New Wasted Beginning

Monday, August 11, 2008

I've lost access to my original hosting arrangement, so I believe it's time for some change. As much as I enjoyed writing my own blogging platform for the experience, and the extra options it afforded me, I've decided to switch to a more established platform. This means I get access to all those nifty layout and upload tools that make posting smooth and easy.

Hopefully I should be able to port my existing layout over, since I love it so much, and then work on implementing the Disqus comments. I don't know what I'm going to do about my precious widgets though. My old hosting allowed me to run cron jobs of perl scripts which let me import my Google Reader share, my Last.fm recently played listing, and my recent Twitter stream. I'll have to resort to javascript widgets, or figure something else out.