The Rose d’Or (or Golden Rose) is a highly prestigious television award, given annually since 1961 at the Festival Rose d’Or in spring each year. Since 2004, the festival has been held in Lucerne, Switzerland. Before the festival was held in Montreux, Switzerland, thus the Golden Rose of Montreux.

(from Wikipedia entry on Rose d’Or)

The festival also has seminars and presentations on different subjects. This year monday is internet day, tuesday mobile day, and wednesday covers “How to create and produce world class entertainment televison?” and “Scripted formats: A new era”.

My presentation

I will also post from other interesting presentations at Rose d’Or. Come back here for updates later this week.

Feel free to contact me in Lucerne. I’ve made a Rose d’Or group at Facebook. And guess what: No one else has joined. Heh. Now how could that be? TV-people don’t use social sites like Facebook?

Pictures

I’ve put up pictures of the other speakers at Flickr. I will post about their actual presentations too, as soon as I have typed everything and sorted my pictures. Some very interesting days.

In English, that would be something like “NRK’s new “sandbox” for all technology, gadgets, new media and other important things in life.” Have a look or subscribe to the NRKbeta feed.

I’m the daily editor, so if it sucks, I’m the one to blame. Feel free to tell me if it does (also if it doesn’t I might add…) We’ve just started so expect things to speed up the next weeks, it’s a little slow and thin at the moment. But hey, it’s a beta!

The two things I like the most:

Focus
Let’s you focus on a special project or folder of projects. Hides everything else you have entered in the app, so you cab concentrate on the task in front of you. Like a zoom lens on a camera. Very cool feature.

Project folders
You’ll be able to make folders of projects, grouping together projects. Put all your “home” projects in one folder, “work” in another, “you” in a third etc. It lets you organize your projects much better than just a long list of projects. It also helps you see the bigger picture. A silly example: Your “work” folder has 800 projects and your “home” and “you” folders 4…

Combine these two features, and you have a very strong tool to help you do what’s mos important right now. I have two major areas of responsibility at work now, and with the project folders and focus, I can hide the other half while I’m working on one of them.

Get me the beta, and I’ll start using this from day 1.

Screenshot: Joost video – Ministry of Sound music videos

The Joost FAQ says…

TV, the way you like it…

…Hundreds of shows from your favourite channels
…Full-screen, high-quality pictures and sound
…No fixed schedules – watch what you like, when you like, as often as you want

Well. Not yet, at least. I don’t think the quality is good enough yet, and the content are much like the channels you put at 30-99 on your TV remote. In other words: Not your favourites. Yet.

MTV is in with some content, so is some European broadcasters like DR (Danish Television). Ministry of Sound is a new channel this time, with the right content for young males (Let me guess: Football and girls will rate high on the Joost popular lists the next weeks…)

Screenshot: Joost video – Italy vs. Norway

I guess the big content producers are waiting too se how this goes. But even if I think there’s lots of room for improvement, Joost is going to be huge. When enough people join, the big names will too. The quality will go up, both for content and technical quality. Broadcasters and content makers should pay attention now, get their feet wet and try this out from the start.

If you want an invite, check out my little competition. Have fun, and see you on Joost.

• Graphs that show your progress over time, either with the same route, or how far you manage to run in (example) 60 minutes.
• Map integration. Let me put my runs on a map like on Nike+
• Route playlist planning. Don’t know if that would be useful, but I thought it would be cool if I could put up a map for my run, grab data from previous runs of the same route, mark different sections of the run with a marker (like part 1, part 2 etc), and then drag in songs from iTunes to fit the different parts. Like power songs in the hills, slower stuff when it’s flat etc.
• Some way to integrate the running with iCal. Bitch me if I’m lazy!

If you have any ideas, put them here or in the thread at Flickr. Ditto if you have any good suggestion for other Mac software that uses the data the Nike + iPod collects.

Yoo get a Google map showing the location (and you can zoom out on the map to see other trusted places nearby). There’s a “People who liked this also liked…” function. You can add pictures and tags, put up your own review or send an invitation to friend to go to the restaurant with you.

It all works very nicely. The design is clean and simple, and speed is ok (I hope it scales with more users!)

The site mostly UK yet, but you can add other cities and even countries easily. One thing that doesn’t work outside UK, is the map function. You can enter the address of the restaurant, but TrustedPlaces only shows a UK Google map. I talked to Sue, one of the people behind TrustedPlaces about this:

…although the map function isn’t working correctly as yet for some locations outside the UK, people can still join up and load reviews and we will ensure that they are mapped correctly in the very near future.

Check out new features and other tidbits at the TrustedPlaces blog. One of the things you can read about is how TrustedPlaces members have started bumping into each other in bars.

If you know me, I’m Oyvind at TrustedPlaces. Feel free to invite me as your friend!

When the nice meal is finished, you’ve visited the trendy bar recommended, and you come back to hotel, do remember to hide a secret in the hotel room (yes, you can wait until the next day).

O’Reilly also has this video that shows how much cooler multitouch has become in just a year. Go back to my original multitouch post and have a look at the video there. Now, Multitouch is a whole wall.

(Click through too se the video)

But – and this is an important but – there’s still no real OS behind it. When will we see a real operating system using this? The iPhone already has multitouch on it, but that’s only a small screen. And on a closed system: You can’t develop your own apps using multitouch on the iPhone (yet). My guess: Within a year.

Revolutionary

As I was sorting lots of old photos on a table today, this image of me doing the same thing digitally on a wall came to mind. Fast-forward a year or three. Huge LCD-screens are now at a price level where people not driving Ferrari can afford them. So you got your 100″ LCD-screen. Multitouch is now integrated in the OS, and you bring up the photos from the last month in Aperture 2008. All the pictures are in a pile in the middle. You start dragging them into piles according to themes you see. Change them around. See new combinations. Move again. Zoom in on a picture to see details. Zoom out again. All while standing in front of this gorgeous screen and using the best tool ever existed on earth: The hands of a human.

I think Steve Jobs was absolutely right when he compared multitouch to the mouse and the click-wheel at his keynote in January, 2007:

We have been very lucky to have brought a few revolutionary user interfaces to the market – the mouse, the click wheel, and now Multi-Touch.

And just as with the iPod, we don’t see the huge changes this will make. I think multitouch will change the way we use computers, a revolution.

Try this: If you know kids that use a computer, watch them find their way around on it, play games etc. They are fast. It’s second nature for them.

Now watch the same kids playing; Lego, toys, dolls, puzzles, drawings – whatever their favourite is. If they like to draw, and do it a lot, watch how fast they move their hands, change the angle, move the paper, grab a new pen or crayon, put it back and pick a new one. It’s like they don’t watch their hands at all: It just moves around. Precise and fast. Watch kids who build with Lego – look how fast they find tiny pieces, pick them up, turn them in the right position, position them and make something.

Your hands are 100x superior to your computer mouse. Or tablet, trackpad etc.

Of course, you still will be able to write your name lots nicer with a pen than with your finger. And you still will need special input devices for special tasks: Like a shuttlewheel for video editing, a tablet for illustration.

But for lots of the things we now use a mouse on the computer, using your finger is much better. I move around the screen much faster on the Powerbook, than on the MacPro, because of the trackpad. And the trackpad is only one finger! Or actually two, as two fingers scrolls the screen. The thing I miss the most when I’m working on the MacPro, is the two-finger scrolling on the trackpad. Very intuitive and time-saving.

Which apps?

I want Final Cut Pro with multitouch: Zoom in and out on the timeline. Move clips around on the timeline. Trim or expand with two fingers. Mix the sound with 10 fingers, right on the screen. Manipulate videos in 3D space. Colorcorrect.

Aperture with multitouch: Make stacks of pictures on a virtual table. Sort. Mix. Change. Zoom in and out. Retouch or colorcorrect. Drag pictures into albums. Move them around. A lot. And really fast.

Soundtrack Pro with multitouch: Expand loops. Timestretch and pitch change. Mixing again. Tapping the rhythm to change tempo. Same thing with Logic. Tap different drums. Play a piano right on the screen for easy note entry without your keyboard with you. With real chords.

And Finder with multitouch! Move files around. Stack them and sort them. Zooming and panning on a huge desktop.

Suddenly the worlds most advanced OS, Mac OS X, seem so old-fashioned and restrained…

Update: Multitouch Logic

Infinite Loop at Ars Technica is on to similar thoughts:

Basically the rumor is this: There will be no Logic 8. The successor to Logic 7 will have a new name. The unnamed application will be 10.5 only and will work with a new line of touch sensitive Apple displays. Also, it will be an OMG PROTOOLS KILLER!@!!

I’d love to throw out ProTools. Talk about overrated!

Like the fact that 90% of all music sold is infact without DRM. It’s called CDs.

And that there are three options for Apple when it comes to DRM: Continue as today (with DRM in iTunes), license FairPlay (not an option, says Jobs) or third: Get rid of the whole DRM thing:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.

Impressive. It will be very interesting to see if any music industry leaders react to this. Do they even put their thoughts online like this? Also interesting to see Steve Jobs doing it. It has been a rather strict Apple policy to not “blog”.

Note to Eirik: Steve is on your side.

Update: Gruber

And as always, John Gruber has an excellent analysis:

In other words, the music industry wants a magical DRM format that gives them — not Apple, not Microsoft — complete control over all digital music. And a unicorn and a rainbow.

2) The iTunes store has sold two billion tracks or so, has a system that works, and has their frontend (iTunes) installed on the majority of computers sold the last couple of years…

Add these together, and you have the perfect portable book reader. Here’s what Booksquare thinks:

We’ve noted in posts past that that an unheralded feature of the iTunes store is the ability to serve up PDF files. Go back and read that sentence again because one key element of the iPhone is its tight integration with iTunes (in retrospect, woefully misnamed). See, if you can browse the web and use iTunes, you can, theoretically, download PDF files. Not a heralded feature, but we have faith in Steve Jobs and his design team.

In other words, you can read lengthy texts. Articles. Short stories. Novellas. Books. Compendiums. On your cell phone/miniature computer/portable media player/killer device.

Setting aside the comfort issues, the iPhone could either kill the nascent e-reader business or take it to new levels. We’ve been saying just about forever that the problem with dedicated e-reader is the fact that the consumer isn’t seeking a device that does only one thing. With its “smart” orientation features, the iPhone could usher in the mass market e-book era.

E-reader to new levels

I have bought quite a few books for my (now retired) Palm Pilot. eReader.com has over 17 000 titles, but reading books on the sharp, but way too small screen on my Sony-Ericsson K800i doesn’t cut it. The Palm had a bigger screen. A lousy screen, but a bigger.

The books are DRM’ed, which of course is a nuisance. But I can live with it. If i WANT to, I get the texts out of the books, but I seldom do.

Tie text and audio together = killer app

Booksquare’s idea is brilliant. If I could buy books for the iPhone in the iTunes store, I would. What if Apple made an app for the iPhone that let you have the same book in both text and audio together? They already sell thousands of audiobooks in iTunes, and if I – for a slightly higher price – could get both audio and text at the same time, that would be a killer. The text could follow the audio when I listen to it, and if I read the text, and later were in my car, the audio version would know where I left reading the text. Let me have a way to set bookmarks with my voice when I listen to the audio version, and let people copy smaller passages and send them by e-mail or by bluetooth. That will help spread the word, and good books will sell more.

The next thing Apple should do with Google: Get all those Google-scanned books into the iTunes store. Let me use Spotlight to search all my books, and give me the most amazing e-reader ever made.

Then Matt Mullenweg wanted some advice on which dress his girlfriend should wear in an upcoming wedding:

(original Flickr posts here and here.) And the winner was the dress on the left. The jury is still out on Matt’s tie…

This is the new web: Communicating with others, and letting you decide. Just as Time Magazine have figured out too too:

In 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.

The “help me decide” tag

What if we tag all posts like this “helpmedecide” – in one word and no spaces? Tag your posts for Technorati (tag: helpmedecide), your bookmarks for Del.icio.us (tag: helpmedecide) and your pictures for Flickr (tag: helpmedecide) (and similar services).

I’ve created a Flickr group for this. So if you want the world to help you decide, just take pictures of the different choices you have, and make a new thread in the Flickr group. Buying a house? A car? A dress? Can’t decide on the christmas presents? We’ll help you decide!

And feel free to post links to posts and pics in the comments. I’ll promise to vote!

Automatic syncing of household digital content. Any device on the network that buys a song, TV show, or movie from the iTS will inform the server of its purchase; a specialized iTunes iServ app will make a copy of all content purchased on authorized household systems. This copy will serve as both an archive, as well as a source for streaming or copying the file to other authorized devices.

Exactly. I said:

It is used as a central for all media of the different Macs in the house. It stores backups of all pics in iPhoto, all music in iTunes and everybodys documents in general. When someone enters new music on their Mac, it’s sent to the family Xserve so others can use it, both in iTunes and on their iPods.

Just this evening I have been IMing Eirik for a long time about solutions for sharing thousands of pictures between several computers. This is a quite common scenario in modern families. You have parents and kids who all have photos that belong to several groups:

• The ones all in the family would like to have on their Macs all the time, both on portable and not portable machines.
• The ones that you just want to keep for yourself.
• The ones that you want to share with just one other.

And so on.

As far as I know, there are no solutions that does this. Add backup that works flawlessly and syncing between machines, and you have a huge project that I really hope half of Cupertino is working on (the other half, please keep working on FCP 6 please). Add music, video and recorded tv, and you need a very clever system to keep this clean and simple.

What features would you like to see in the Xserve Home? Or iServ?

Which reminded me of something I thought about this summer while driving around Norway with my family. Our TomTom ONE told us exactly where to go at all times, with great precision. My partner is an excellent map reader, but with the GPS onboard she could enjoy the scenery and the summer.

Every time we approached a turn, the GPS told us which way to go.

Now, what if it could tell us about the places we approched? What if it worked like this: For every geographical place in Wikipedia, there was a condensed text-version, that took – let’s say 30 seconds to read. When you’re planning a route, your GPS searches Wikipedia for entries that are along the route, and downloads these condensed versions to the unit. Either if connected to a computer before going, or via a mobile phone when driving. A text-to-speech unit in the GPS unit then reads up these texts, like if a guide was sitting there next to you. Or, if bandwidth weren’t an issue, Wikipedia hosts 30-second mp3s with this information.

Would this be possible? Of course. Maybe not today, or next month. But as GPS-units get better processors and if Wikipedia adds the right tags, it would be very easy to do.

When the internet really starts to shift the flow of money in the media industry we are up for some groundbreaking change…

I’m not sure that the flow of money needs to change before the groundbreaking change. Two things have happened the last days that gives a hint of the change to come:

Evidence #1: iTV

Apple does something very un-Apple: Talking about a product before you can actually buy it. The name will change, but it is a box that takes videos and music from your computer and plays them on your tv screen (and plays the sound on your tv or stereo). MacWorld explains:

Enter the iTV, which connects to your television and stereo and provides the remote-control-driven interface of Front Row without the keyboard-and-mouse issues of a full-fledged computer. Once it’s hooked up, the iTV connects to the network in your house and displays, right on your TV, a menu of options, all geared toward letting you play back digital content—stored on a computer in your house or somewhere out on the Internet—while sitting in your living room. That content includes movies, TV shows, and music downloaded from the iTunes store; other audio and video content you’ve loaded into iTunes; movie trailers from Apple.com; and perhaps other kinds of stuff that Apple hasn’t talked about yet.

So the videos don’t have to be stored on your computer. They can be streams from websites. And this is where your head is supposed to go “bing!!!”. This means that you’ll have thousands, maybe millions of channels available from day one. In no time there will be channels for every single interest, hobby, subject or event imaginable. The adult industry will of course be running ahead of all the others, but then you’ll have video streams with knitting, kittens, collecting stones, hybrid cars, wool socks and klingon language classes. And as always when the revolution comes: The ones who starts first will get the best seats. So which traditional tv-companies will get this first? And deliver their quality content via the web? Formatted for this kind of “television”? And compete? I’m not sure if they will understand it at all in the beginning. They’ll just notice that their younger audience is disappearing.

(TV by Horrortaxi)

There are reports that Apple and Google already are negotiating about putting Google Video on the iTV from day one. Which means that when you turn on the iTV in your living room, you’ll have everything on Google Video available on your tv-screen with a remote. Think about it.

Now think if everything on YouTube were in there too. And every video all your friends puts on their sites. Ok, some of them make really lame videos, but who cares: It’s your friends and you’ll be watching it for fun. And calling them, chatting with them online while watching it. Who needs tv?

Evidence #2: The Yahoo! Current Network

Today Yahoo! launched the The Yahoo! Current Network, four broadband video channels, called Buzz, Action, Driver and Traveler. It works like this: People (like you) submit videos you’ve made to Current, according to their guidelines. They put them up on their site, and viewers on the web vote. The ones who win are aired on tv (in the US) and on the braodband channels on Yahoo! If your video is aired, you get paid. Which of course will raise the quality bar a lot. Read more about how it works at the Current TV FAQ.

I call it a BIG HINT when a huge company like Yahoo! starts projects like this – and pay people to submit quality content.

I don’t think a happy amateur in Iceland will make something like Sopranos or LOST in his bedroom. But if YouTube already uses 5% of the bandwidth on the net, imagine what will happen when you can watch all these videos on your TV, relaxing in the sofa.

But it’s only crap?

Thomas Hawk has this comment in the above mentioned TechCrunch article:

People will not want to watch low quality non HDTV at $10-$15 a movie on their new $300 iDongle when you can get a Netflix subscription for the price of less than two movie downloads a month.

Nor will people want to watch low res crappy Google Video content on their new $4,000 plasma (on the video iPod, laptop, handheld device, PC, etc. yes. Just not on their plasmas).

Even with Google Video on the iDongle, it will still flop.

I think you’re wrong Thomas. At first you will be right, then you will be totally wrong. Who will watch low-quality videos of old men telling about their lives without even looking into the camera? Or young men dancing at student shows and famous locations? Millions. And millions. And every day new ones will find it. And everyday new content is uploaded.

In a few years quality will have improved a lot: Faster lines, bigger disks, better compression. I also think one of the reasons YouTube became so popular is because of the low quality: Everyone can watch the videos on their crap PCs. People will love watching the same stuff on their TVs. Play HD-quality games one second, watching pixelated crappy homemade videos the next.

And if you do, do you think it’s important that “normal” media – meaning radio, tv, newspapers and magazines – covers gaming? Why?

What are your reasons for playing games? And what reasons are there for media to cover caming?

Use the comments below!

Lots of my friends and contacts use sites sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us or LiveJournal. They have blogs, Amazon wishlists, and Upcoming pages. All this is possible to enter in the Addressbook app in Mac OS X 10.4. As of this version (or was it 10.3?), you can assign as many webpages to a user as you like.

…

Now, checking all my friends and contacts blogs, new pictures, fresh bookmarks etc. takes time. And what better are computers for, than doing the boring stuff that you don’t want to do yourself? What I would like is to add a RSS button to all of these links.

Today HardMac has posted lots of screenshots from the coming 10.5 Leopard. On page 4 you can read this:

Leopard integrates a RSS engine which can be utilised by every application (dedicated API). Thus mail has also become an RSS reader.

This is interesting. What is stopping Apple from adding RSS inside the Address Book too? Have a look at it and tell me what you think. I would love to have this functionality. Since I wrote the original article it seems like everyone has got a blog, a Flickr account, a photocast, podcast or videocast. Having all this info tied to persons makes sense to me. If Apple doesn’t make this, maybe someone else could make it? As a plugin for the Address Book?

This is what our kids will be using.

Look at the way he zooms in and out of the map application. Now remove the map and insert your sound editing app of choice. ProTools. Final Cut Pro. Soundtrack Pro. Audicity.

Now, zoom in and out by moving your fingers outwards on the screen, cut out a piece by pinching it and lifting your hand. Wow. My Wacom tablet almost got 50 years older just by thinking about this.

I especially liked Nathan Ziarek’s ideas on how to share music between members of a family. Infact, Apple should take this even further, and make an Xserve for families.

It could work like this: A special Xserve with special Apple software is installed somewhere safe in your house, a place cold and where no one can hear it. It is used as a central for all media of the different Macs in the house. It stores backups of all pics in iPhoto, all music in iTunes and everybodys documents in general. When someone enters new music on their Mac, it’s sent to the family Xserve so others can use it, both in iTunes and on their iPods.

The family Xserve should also have a tv-tuner and an EPG, making it possible for all users in the house to plan recordings even if they where “off-site” with their Macbooks.

Several tries at making the computer understand the simple salutation “Dear Mom” was read by Microsoft software as “Dear Aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.” Attempts to correct or undo or delete the error only deepened the mess.

And Chris Messina has made his suggestion for a t-shirt already:

Original at Flickr

Here’s a video showing the actual event:

Poor guy. Must be horrible demoing things when they go as bad as that.

English only?

Fun, but including voice recognition in the operating system is interesting. The biggest problem with it is – languages. Ok, so maybe Microsoft can manage to get Vista to understand “Dear mom” as… “Dear mom”. But how about “Kjære mamma”? There are several thousand languages in the world, and most of them are so small that they never even get their own version of Vista or OSX. Only 24 languages have their own version of Windows XP Pro (and 33 more as socalled “Multilingual User Interface Pack Languages”). I doubt that voice recognition will work any but the English version when Vista is launching sometime in 2007 (2008?)

And what about dialects? It will be a long, long time before computers understand all the different ways to speak English…

…if people look at it and their initial reaction is “Oh, it’s an iPod rip-off,” that’s a pretty crummy first impression. Does anyone at Microsoft realize that rip-offs aren’t considered cool?

A: MY SOURCES SAY NO.

Q: Then again, Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” By that standard the people on the Zune team must be a bunch of Michelangelos, eh?

A: CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN.

Excellent analysis as always from John Gruber.

Although the comparison is a bit unfair (DVD recorders are much cheaper, and also typically sold almost everywhere. Even my grocery store at the corner sell them…), it proves a point: Media Centers are not for most people.

I got a Media Center four months ago. I love it. And hate it.

Media Center – things I like

The concept. The fact that we’re now able to record and time-shift programs. The kids can watch their favourite shows when they want, and don’t have to stop playing or eating to watch tv. And we can sleep when we should and still see those late-night movies later if we want.

Clean. I like the interface. The Media Center interface is the nicest thing Microsoft has made. It looks a zillion times better than Windows, and people I show it to, figure it out immediately.

The guide. The program guide is a great feature. After it’s set up (see the hate-list below too), it gives me quick view of everything on tv the next days.

Always something great to watch. If I’m bored and tired, I don’t have to watch “Walker Texas Ranger” reruns, but can choose between a bunch of Simpsons episodes, 30+ movies recorded that last months and interesting documentaries that always are aired when I’m sleeping or at work (why is primetime so filled with crap?)

Quiet. Thanks to Eirik, I got a Media Center with no fans. And so should you if you want one. It’s ok listening to the fan of the Xbox when you are running around shooting green monsters, beacuse – well, you can’t hear the fans. But when watching a quiet movie, it’s very annoying listening to the fans spinning and spinning. The only thing coming from the Media Center is the ticking of the harddisk. I can live with that.

Then – the things I don’t like…

Media Center – can be (much) better

Stability. I have to restart the Media Center every second day. It’s very unstable. It freezes, doesn’t display colors (goes to black and white for no reason), plays audio but not video, and the opposite, loose the connection to the net, and slows down to the point when even arrowing up and down feels like syrup. “It’s probably not set up right”. Yes, I hear you. Maybe it is. But it’s set up by clever people, and why should I have to tweak and tweak to make it work? I have this philosophy: Things should just work. The Media Center does not. I feel like I’m running a bad beta.

The guide. It sucks. Yes, it’s on the love-list too. But it could be so much better. Lot’s of channels are missing, like MTV. And when the stations change their schedule, it takes ages before the guide updates. One of the major networks in Norway were on strike some time ago, and the guide on the Media Center were totally wrong. Adding stations to the guide is way to difficult. And there’s no info about where it comes from, and no feedback button to complain.

Programming. In the guide, every program is set up as a separate program. So if there are five short movies in the childrens program one afternoon, I have to add all five of them to record everything. That’s fair enough. So I have added a timebased recording: Record whatever is aired between 1800 and 1840 on NRK1 every weekday. Works perfectly. BUT – when I look at the guide, the Media Center doesn’t show me this. It only shows programs that are added one by one (with a red circle). So it looks like I’m not recording these programs. Lame. At least there should be a red line at the top or something.

Same program 15 times. After returning from Japan, I added a keyword search in the Media Center: “Record everything that has “Japan” in the title or description. Nice feature. So now I have 15 recordings of the match between Bhutan and Montserrat in 2002. Heh. Somehow the Media Center doesn’t understand that I don’t want the same program 15 times, even if National Geographic airs it at different times every time.

Photos. I sent most of our digital pictures into the Media Center. It’s nice being able to watch pictures from the couch, with friends of family. But it’s like iPhoto 1998: No smart folders, which means that I can’t make an album that takes all pictures containing “Japan” in album, and a five star rating. Oh, no rating either. And the rotation doesn’t work. All good digital cameras have a feature that mark the EXIF data with information about whcih way the camera was held when the picture was taken. This works perfectly on the Mac, but the Media Center doesn’t understand it. And it takes 6 clicks (!!!) to rotate a picture (feel free to enlighten me in the comments if I’m just stupid). No way if I’m going to manually rotate 4000 pictures…

Videos. Why isn’t there a way to move a recorded movie from recorded content to movies? Maybe there is? I have some good movies recorded from tv, that I want to keep – forever. So it would be natural to put them in the Movies category. Also: Why isn’t it possible to set a new starting point and end point to a recording? If I record a great movie, and there’s 12 minutes of advertising in front of it, it should be possible to tell the Media Center that every time I watch that movie it should start at 12:08, not 0:00.

OK, that’s my list. Again: Feel free to comment if I have missed out on some great feature or key combination.

My main point is: Media Center is a great product that is too hard to use, and has too many errors. I’m sure the Media Center in Vista will be much better. But until then, I would not recommend people buying a Media Center unless there are at least one person around that is geeky enough to google for solutions, and tweaking the system when it behaves badly.

But – if you are that kind of person, go ahead. You’ll love it. And you could probably just drop the googling and go right to Eirik’s HTPC pages, especially these tree articles:

Recommended HTPC hardware
HTPC Frontend roundup
The media center software list

The Enquirer article sums it up nicely:

The technology is good, if a bit too confusing for the general consumer to get so excited about they’ll actually part with their cash.

True.

Update: Krunker.com has lots of screenshots from the preview of Media Center in Vista. Looks nice, and even better than Media Center in XP. But the preview version chrashed a lot:

MCE frequently crashed on me when I alt-tabbed back into Windows Vista. I would also lose the video at times if I switched between applications. However, I expect Microsoft to iron out these issues before the final release of Vista which is right around the corner.

We’ll see. I have a feeling that Media Center needs to impress a LOT to make normal people buy PCs for their living rooms…

This past weekend, I realized that about 20 percent of it comes from email newsletters and companies I’ve done business with in the past. Half of it, I don’t recall opting into—even legitimate companies. Most of it is a complete waste of my time.

So do I, but luckily I started doing something several years ago that saves me hours and hours: I have lots of e-mail adresses.

The first one is my e-mail at work. I use it for work and nothing else. No private e-mails. So when I open Outlook in the morning, almost all mail in there will be things related to work. And only work. NEVER use your work e-mail for mailing lists, even if it’s work related. You will get spam.

Then I have an e-mail for private mail. That’s the one I use when sending to friends and family, when adding my name to e-mail lists for my kids activities etc. Be clever when you make an adress like this: Use a big service like Gmail or Yahoo Mail. They have great spam filters, and tons of storage. Don’t use the e-mail your ISP offers you when you sign up. I have numerous friends that have their e-mail adress at small ISPs in their town. With only 10 MB of storage and strange webmail interfaces. Not recommended. Pick one of the big boys.

Number three is for registration of software, newsletters, mailing lists etc.. This is the one that gets all the crap. And tons of spam. So I check it once a week. I have mine at Yahoo Mail, but Gmail is just as good. The spam filters take the worst ones out, and the rest I just sort by sender, hit “select all” and deselect the two or three I actually NEED to read. Then delete the rest with a click of a button. Today I had 512 e-mails at that adress – in a week. And that’s after the spam filter had removed 288. Imagine having all that crap at your work e-mail… Four of these were things I actually read: An offer to download four songs from the Simple Minds tour, a sale at an online DVD store and two product updates from a tech company.

So that’s your three basic ones: One for work, one for private stuff and one for all registration and mailing lists. And do host the latter two at someone that has great spam filters like Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

Then consider if you need some more: I have a special e-mail adress only used for contact with my host Dreamhost, and sites I’m an affiliate to, like Amazon. I also have e-mails for some special projects and finally some e-mails specially for some people that are really important to me.

All these can be checked from the mail app I use, Apple’s Mail. The exception is Yahoo Mail that charges you if you want to use POP mail, but since I use the Yahoo adress for all the “non-important” mail, it doesn’t make sense to download 500 e-mails to my computer, just to delete 497. Webmail is much better for that purpose: A huge list, sort it, select all, deselect a few, hit delete.

Not too long ago, I was very much engaged with many communities. I attended events on design and information architecture and web stuff. Now, I find myself on the periphery of a lot of groups, but none of them feel like a home for me.

Jason says:

I’ve been feeling the same way for quite awhile now and like Peter, I’m not quite sure what to do about it.

It’s strange when someone puts words on something you have been thinking – without knowing it. If you see what I mean…

Drinking.

Both cork’d and Winelog let you register the wines you drink (or store), get recommendations and share your drinking habits with trusted friends. And total strangers.

Both look nice and web 2.0. And I’m sure quite a few will start logging their Cabernet Sauvignons and Tempranillos.

I wonder what’s next? The sexlog? “Check off what parts you…” Hm. Maybe not.

Niall Kennedy wonders who’s going to read all this, when your shoes, your shoes, iPod and car has it’s own feed.

The availability of this new data will cause us to rethink what we want to share with the world, and where we want to access this personal information. Our gadgets are talking, but who should be listening?

Anyone listening? Or are we all going to suffer from infoglut…

This is the revolution

I think this is the start of a revolution in the way people measure what their bodies do. Yes, there are already heart rate meters, pedometers etc. on the market. But the iPod is a cultural icon, something that everybody has. In my country Norway, I can easily count 20 iPods on the bus in the morning. Apple has sold millions and millions. This is the start of something big.

But – I can see a future where I want to use the data from different training devices together. To merge the data from a GPS, from a heart rate monitor, from an iPod+Nike. And maybe take it further: To use the devices that collect data (iPod+Nike, GPS, heart rate monitor) to control other devices: Game consoles, PCs and Macs.

And finally: All this data should be in a format that is easy to move: From the devices that collect them, to devices that are controlled by them, and to devices and applications that store them.

Three phases if you like: Collection. Use. Storing.

Collection

The new Nike+iPod Sport Kit is an example of a device that collects data. Itconsists of two parts, a sensor for the shoes and a receiver for the Nano. The sensor with will measure your steps and report them back to the Nano. Information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on the Nano and displayed on the screen. You also get real-time audio feedback like “your average pace is 7:10″, “Three kilometers to go” and “You completed in 24 minutes and 4 seconds.” Brilliant! This will of course make running much more fun, and the audio feedback will work much better than having to watch the screen when running.

You can make special playlists for your workouts, and if you press the center button while running, the Nano plays your special “power song”, for that extra sprint or the steep hill.

Again, Apple proves that the secret is in the details. It’s simple and amazing at the same time. And it certainly is right in the face of everyone writing about “iPod killers” on their sites every day.

Heart rate

The Nike+iPod Sport Kit does not contain a heart rate monitor. Apple used Lance Armstrong on the iPod+Nike press conference. I know that Lance, like most other top athletes, use a heart rate monitor when training. There are several brands out there, but Finnish Polar is a market leader, with products for lots of different sports: Running, cycling, outdoor, weight management etc.

If I have data on time, distance, pace and calories burned, I would also like to know my heart rate. It makes training much more efficient and you don’t run too hard (like many of us tend to do when we finally drag ourselves away from the computer). Now, Nike already has a whole range of heart rate monitors.

“Nike+iPod creates a better running experience. We see many more such Nike+ innovations in the future.”

Nike CEO Mark Parker at the iPod+Nike press conference. I’ll eat this webpage if there isn’t a iPod-ready heart rate monitor from Nike within a year.

Steps vs GPS

The sensor inside +Nike shoes senses when you make a step. I would think that it simply sends “a step count” back to the Nano. This is how most pedometers work: You program your step length, and the pedometer just counts how many steps you take. If you take shorter or longer steps, it will be inaccurate.

But with a GPS, you can take as funny steps as you like. The GPS will know precisely how far you have run, no matter the length of your steps.

The Garmin Forerunner 305 (buy from Amazon) is one of the best solutions out there. It is (quite) small, has a heart rate monitor and a GPS right on your arm. I hope Apple picks more partners for their Nano sports line, and Garmin and Polar should be the next ones after Nike.

Or?

Different devices, different data

Wouldn’t it be so much better if all these devices talked to each other? Buy a Nano from Apple, a pair of shoes from Nike, a heart rate monitor and GPS from Garmin, or a heart rate monitor from Polar. And they all sing together.

And when you go to a gym that uses the Technogym Wellness System, your gadgets pick up the data from the machines at the gym. And when you leave, your Nano knows how much you lifted, pulled, pushed and ran. And your heart rate.

You come home, and sync your iPod. Since the data is in a common format for training, you decide yourself which site you want to load up your data to: Nike, Garmin, Polar (all these have webbased services for training data for their gadgets). Or any other site that uses the common format for training.

From real world to virtual world

The final step is to merge this with the wonderful world of gaming. Since all machines now use a common format, it’s no problem for the Xbox 360, the PS3 or the Wii to make use of your gadgets or your data. You can bring out your dance mat and start dancing. The Xbox or the iPod keeps track of your exercise. Grab the Wii controller and start playing tennis in your living room. The iPod still keeps track of your movements. And when you meet your tennis instructor the next day, you can log on to the site you use for your data and have a look at your progress together.

And when it’s raining cats and dogs, and even an iPod full of your favourite tunes can’t pull you out of the warmth of your apartment, you step up on the treadmill, turn on your Xbox or PS3, and start running in the streets of Sydney from PGR, the hills surrounding Hogwart, or the upper decks of Titanic. All rendered in beautiful 3D on your new 42″ LCD screen in front of you.

While running, two of your friends come online too, and you race each other until Ross in Melbourne wins, but you manage to squeeze ahead of Kevin from Buffalo.

A new dataformat for training data

I’m quite sure Apple (or Nike, Garmin, Polar, Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo) will never make an open standard training data unless they really have to. So we better start making it ourselves. And start pushing them to open things up when we have a dataformat that is useful, versatile and ready to be implemented.

How do we do it? Anyone?

Previously on Brilliantdays.com

Computerized gyms
Running and training online
More Africa in your computer
Use your body to control the computer

Available from may 2005. I wonder how long the batteries run? Or is it rechargeable? And how much rain does it stand? And wouldn’t it be cool to have it in other colors? How about a silver and black one…?

If you read brilliantdays.com from a news reader, you may have to click through to this article, to see the video. Or use this URL:

“The Paradox of choice”.

The speech is by Barry Schwartz, and is about what Schwartz says is a significant problem in people’s life in general: Too much choice.

You have more choice than ever – which is a good thing. Or is it? Schwartz looks at some of our assumptions about choice, and it’s a real eye-opener. Highly recommended!

He talks about phone services, health care, physical appearance, romance and how to choose your salad dressing, education, workplace and lifepartner. How everything now is your choice, and if you’re unattractive it’s your fault. How you’re always on.

And how too much choice sometimes paralyse you: You can’t choose.

What to learn?

If you give customers too much choice, they don’t choose. One of the examples Schwartz uses is retirement funds. As I understand it, American employers have to save money themselves to finance their pensions (unlike other Western countries like Norway, where I live). So employers give their employees a choice of funds to put money in. But the more funds employees can choose from, the fewer will actually choose anything. For every ten more funds to choose from, 2% fewer will pick a fund.

So if you want to have your employees start saving for their pension, give them few choices.

I would guess the same applies to webpages: If the average surfer are given too much choice when coming to your site, they will simply leave. Not making any choice.

Simplify! Take away choices. Or hide them where powerusers still find them. Which make the average surfer happy – and being able to choose. And the powerusers will find what they want.

Why choice make people miserable

Four reasons, accoring to Schwartz:

1. Regret and anticipated regret
No choice is perfect. If you choose between two products, there’s a high chance you picked the right one. If there are 200, it’s very likely you picked the wrong one. Anticipated regret is that you are so sure to regret, that you don’t pick.

2. Opportunity costs
You make a choice, and find out that other choices was better in terms of costs: The other car had better mileage, the other computer had more storage etc.

3. Escalation of expectations
When you choose between loooots of products, your expactations are so much higher. If your jeans store has 80 pairs of jeans, you expect the one you chose to be perfect. But even high class products fail your expectations if your expectations are “perfect”. So you end up feeling miserable with what normally would be a good choice.

4. Self blame
When you pick the wrong product when there is only two choices, it’s the world’s fault. But when you choose between 200 products, it’s your fault. That’s what people feel, according to Schwartz. This self blame makes people feel sad.

Best or good enough?

So you try to find the perfect restaurant, perfect car, perfect phone, perfect pc, perfect girlfriend or boyfriend. In a world of unlimited choice, how do you know if you got the best? You have to examine all the possibilities. But that’s not possible. There’s unlimited choice. So you pick a selection and pick the best of those. Then it turns out that you didn’t find the perfect. But if you only had searched a little bit longer or better, you might have found it…

On the other hand: If you’re looking for something that’s good enough, you look at the choice in front of you, and think: “Is this good enough for me?”. If it is, you choose it, and you don’t look back.

This might be some of the most important things I’ve heard for a long time.. Picking what’s perfect and what’s good enough. I notice that “good enough” has a bad sound in my brain. What about you? Why? Good enough means something that holds up to your standards, so why should picking what’s good enough have a bad smell to it?

Getting your things done

Why do you feel that you don’t have enough time? Because of all the things you have to do? Why do people feel time pressure? Most people believe that it is the pressure of all the things we have to do, the mile-long todo-list.

Two groups of people were told to make lists: Group one made a list of all the things they HAD to do, all the chores etc. The other group: A list of the things they would LIKE to do. A much smaller list.

Guess which group felt the most time pressure?

The one with the LIKE to do list. All the things I would like to do, and have to make difficult choices about.

Cartoons – and the book

BTW, he refers to cartoons he shows, but these are not in the video, probably because of copyright.

Barry Schwartz has written a book about this too, The Paradox of Choice : Why More Is Less.

Then my Powerbook chrashed. And I couldn’t find the file containing all my books and games in the backups. Doh. The thought of having to enter everything over (even if it was fast with the barcode scanning with iSight), made me forget about the whole thing.

Until yesterday. I have bought and read lots of books lately and figured I should make a list of books in Delicious Library, rate them, and also make a “Books to read”-list for the books that I didn’t read immediately.

No smart lists

The first thing I noticed was that I can’t make smart lists in Delicious Library. “Every” app out there can make smart lists now – lists based on criteria you enter. Like a list of all books rated 5 stars. Or all books in pocket. Or all books in Norwegian. Or all books NOT marked “read”. This is my number one feature wish. I would like to make lists for all kinds of things: The books on subjects like Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Cooking or Creativity, the Novels or the non-fiction, Kids books, Norwegian or English books, travel guides, books I have lent away and books I have borrowed from others.

A shelf is the Delicious Library term for lists. You can add as many shelves as you like, but you can’t change the order of them: They go in the order you make them. How stupid is that? Also, you can not make folders, and put several shelves inside a folder. Yes, I know you wouldn’t put your normal bookshelves in a folder, but let’s not take the shelves system too far. I think it would be really nice if I could make folders. I could make a folder for “New media” books, and put the shelves for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Motion, Illustrator, blogging etc. in there. And a folder for novels with Norwegian, English in there.

More about shelves: I would like an easy way to change their looks. I would like to be able to have custom sizes for the books in different shelves. Now – if you set books to big size in one shelf, they go big in all shelves.

I also would like to have different backgrounds and shelves graphics for different shelves.

It really should be drag and drop: Drag a graphic to the background, and it becomes the background. Maybe with dialog asking if you want to change the background just for this shelf or all shelves. And ditto with the shelves backgrounds.

Tags

My feature wish number 2: Tags. I would like to tag my books, with names for projects I do, with subjects, with anything. Like I tag all my bookmarks at Del.icio.us and my photos and Flickr. With smart lists and tags, it would be very easy to make advanced lists, and find books that belong together for projects.

The tags field should be auto-complete, so that when I start typing, it fills out the first tag that matches. Just like tags do on Del.icio.us on the web. Auto-complete should be a feature on most fields. Or an option. Like in the language field: 99% of my books are Norwegian or English. So when I type N it should autocomplete “Norwegian”. Ditto with format, genres, publisher and author (like in iTunes).

Entering data

Now you might ask: Why? Isn’t all data downloaded from Amazon? Yes, with most English books. But many of my books are not in English. Or strange ones not found on Amazon. So I have to enter the data myself. Auto-complete is needed!

Also: If Delicious Library doesn’t find anything on Amazon, it should give me the option to use Google. Just do a Google search for the title in qoutes and the author name. With most my Norwegian books, I find the publishers page with a picture and all the data I need on the top spot on Google.

What if Delicious Library could “scrape” the data of the page? Just use a “get data from Safari” button. Delicious Library would then use everything it finds on the frontmost page in Safari, and try to fit that into the proper fields. How? If the web page says “Pages: 221″ then 221 would go to the number of pages field and so on. And if there were a preference pane where I could tell Delicious Library the words for author, published, pages etc. in my language, it could even understand Norwegian (or Spanish, German, French…) webpages.

When entering barcodes with iSight, if Delicious Library can’t find the book on Amazon, why not search Google? It would find most books just as easily as on Amazon. Then I could pick the right link, and use the “scrape” function above to enter the data.

Quotes

I would like to be able to enter qoutes inside Delicious Library, have a quotes pane. Where I can add a quotes with their corresponding a page number. After some time Delicious Library could be used as a research tool. With smart lists, I could make a smart lists that searched qoutes for keywords.

Lame rating

The ratings need to be fixed. Now you can rate any item from 0 to 5 stars. Let users decide how many stars. Where I live, most reviews are rated from 1 to 6, so I would like 6 stars being the topscore. Others might like 10.

More wishes

Highlighting When you click on a new shelf, Delicios Library always highlights the first book in that shelf:

Maybe that’s smart? But I don’t like it. It would be nice if there was a preference to turn that off.

Currency I would to set currencies when entering prices. And set my default currency in the prefs. So when I type 229 in purchase price, Delicious Library adds NOK behind. Or $ before if you’re paying in US Dollars.

Date purchased Delicious Library always enters today’s date when entering a new book. I never enter books the day I buy them, I take a whole bunch when I have time. I entered 50 books tonight with my iSight (I love that feature – amazingly cool!), and had to go back and delete the “purchase date” on all 50.

Date published Most publishers don’t put the exact date they publish a book online. Just the year. If I type 2006 into the release date field, Delicious Libray adds today’s date to that, making it “monday 1st of May, 2006″. Which is wrong. Ditto if I type 2003, it becomes 1st of May 2003. Also wrong. Software like Reunion and OmniOutliner Pro has date fields that are more intelligent. If you type a year, it stays like that. If you type “5.1.2006″ it becomes “1st of May 2006″ (or 5th of January if your date format is European in the Mac OS X control panel). “Today” becomes “1st of May 2006″ and “yesterday” 30th of April 2006″ and so on.

iTunes I would like a way to import everything I have in iTunes into Delicios Library. All my albums or just a playlist. I could make a playlist that had only the music I have imported myself from CDs. I tell Delicious Library about this playlist, and it makes albums, downloads cover art etc.

Publishing

There are software that can put your Delicious Library online. But it doesn’t add any affiliate codes. This should be a feature in Delicious Library. I’m sure Delicious Monster make quite a lot of money when people use the similar pane in Delicious Library, and buy books and movies from Amazon with Delicious Monster affiliate codes attached. Which is ok. But when and if I publish my own library, I want it to have my own Amazon affiliate code. Can we please have a great export feature in version 2.0?

Colin D. Devroe has a theory…

I’d love to publish my library as an HTML file on my Web site. This way my Internet friends can look at my library, and I could send them a DVD to view if they’d want. I think the main reason why Delicious Monster has not put this functionality in, is because they earn a kick back if you buy anything through Library on Amazon. If they were to try to do the same thing through the publish HTML file, people like me would go in and edit all the links to earn the dough. Perhaps this isn’t a reason, but that’s my guess.

Love it

I like Delicous Library a lot. It’s one of the coolest programs I have bought. And a good way to spot a great program is that it gives you lots of new ideas. Delicious Monster is working on a new version. With online social elements, and a faster database.

There are some other good suggestions for 2.0 features in this thread at Delicious Monster’s blog…

I’m not sure if there’s an online database that you guys to take advantage us for comic books, but I would love to see that feature in the next release.

Link to other more obscure databases (other than Amazon)…

What are your experiences with Delicious Library? Anything you miss?

The site should be bulit up around usergenerated content like blogs and videos, hoping to become the public service version of MySpace.com. BBC also plan to their entire programme catalogue online.

Ashley Highfield, BBC director of new media and technology says the new site will allow users to “create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you”, according to Guardian Unlimited.

At any time you will be able to download any programme from the eight BBC channels and watch it on your PC and, we hope, move it across to your TV set or down to your mobile phone to watch it when you want.

Either the BBC plans a new clever DRM model, or they simply drop the whole DRM thing and let their users do what they want with their programs. If the latter is true, it will be a whole new way of thinking from a major broadcasting company. And a way of thinking that will challenge other public service channels and also commercial channels.

See what other quality sites say about this at TailRank.

Search

BBC today also unveiled a search engine with everything they made: Their own words: “Info about every single BBC programme, ever. It’s a vast catalogue, but it’s not comprehensive. A guarantee of accuracy. We’re very proud of it, but we know there are mistakes.”

Creative future

Now, imagine if all DRM and copyright rules were dropped for one month. All over the world.

Just copying others work and selling it would still be illegal. But making your own versions… Editing it. Adding. Subtracting. Changing. Mix. Fix.

What would happen?

The world would see the most creative month in the history of the world.

Yes, lots of money would be “lost” for the people holding copyrights.
Yes, it would be impossible to change the rules back after a month. Because the results would be mindboggling.
Yes, it would the legal mess the size of Jupiter.

But if I’m elected “One ruler of all humans and planets orbiting the sun”, I would gather the wisest women, men and dolphins on the planet and have them think how this can be done – letting creative people still make lots of money. And at the same time let you and me explore and find new ways to use all the signals surrounding us.

(if you read this in a feed reader, you won’t see the embedded Google video. Click through to my page to see it)

Or head over to the projects home page, where you can read about it and download the video.

Jeff Han

One of the persons behind this is Jeff Han, here at Etech06.

(Credit: James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media)

Jeff has an amazing list of cool projects behind him.

Use your body

What I like the most about the video, is that you use your body to control it. Watch when he/she zooms on the map by using both hands – stretching it out. And pulling it back in again. So much better for you than using one finger scrolling a little wheel on a mouse. See my Use your body to control the computer and More “Africa” in your computer posts for more about this.

He asks me if I *really* want him to call the police. Again, I answer nicely, yes. At this point he goes back inside. I go around to shoot the other side of the building and his boss comes out and he’s pissed. You’re not allowed to photograph this building he says. “Says who,” I say. “Says me, I’m the owner,” he says, you’re on my property.”

I like Thomas. Not only does he take great pictures but he’s also clever. And standing up to this “post 9-11″ scare stupidness is important. So because of 9-11 people should not be allowed to take photographs of buildings? Of course not.

But. What the hell? Post 9/11? What’s that supposed to mean? Let’s see, ok, so I’ve got photos of a building. Yep, there’s the door, yep, guess what, it’s got glass windows. Wouldn’t want those top secret photos of the building’s revolving doors to get out there now. Just imagine the strategic advantage that that door shot would give a terrorist! He could, well, he’d know how to get into the building for pete’s sake.

It’s just stupid. I’m tired of dealing with security at almost every single building that I shoot. News Flash! Photographing architecture is NOT a crime. It’s not illegal!

Read the whole post at Thomashawk.com.

Flickr group

And Thomas: I made a a new Flickr group for pictures like that. Not pictures about getting the finger in general. But pictures that got you in trouble beacuse someone “invented” new rules “post 9-11″.

Update:

Your rights

I’ve tried to collect some links to photography laws around the world here.

Put this link into iTunes or your podcasting app of choice. Or use the button in the left sidebar.

I set it up today, and I can’t figure out why not all the latest posts are there. I’ll check back in a few days and see if it is fixed.

What do you think? The computer generated voice was much better than I expected, and it is a great feature for people who can’t read webpages for different reasons.

The Wellness System is made up of hardware, software, and cutting-edge technologies linked to exercise equipment. It enables health and fitness facilities to deliver a rich wellness experience to their members. A comprehensive, modular network, the Wellness System works with exercise equipment.

Using a special TGS key, you “log on” to the equipment you use at the gym. The Wellness System then keeps track of what you do, burned calories, how much you run, how much you lift or pull, and your progress. You can also check your progress online.

Only halfway there

As far as I know the first time you can see your progress in hard numbers, and not just what you think your progress is (and DO people fool themselves? Yes, they do.)

There are however some shortcomings:

It can store “only” 365 workout sessions. I guess that means several years of workouts for most of us, but for athletes it will soon be too little.

Is there a way to measure your pulse? I couldn’t find that on the Technogym site.

You can’t take your data with you. And you can’t use the data from the gym with the data from outside the gym. Let me explain: You run, bicycle and lift in the gym. And your data is stored in the Wellness System. Then you run and bicycle outdoors, and maybe you store your data on a Garmin Forerunner.

How do you combine the data? You can’t. There aren’t any standards. And most of the people busy making new cool standards for the online world are so busy using their computers that they wouldn’t care less if you can’t take your Wellness System data, your Forerunner data and mix them at home. Or online.

We need EMIL

A year ago, I wrote “Running and training online”:

I’m always frustrated with the lack of open standards in the computer world. So to keep up competition, we make a standard for the data that the training machines collect when we train. I call it EMIL – Exercise Machine Interchange Language. It sounds like “e mill” (electronic mill) when you say it. And it’s my little homage to Astrid Lindgren’s wonderful character Emil.

So how about it, Marc? Phil? (who had supercool “/run” but still makes cool stuff at “Make:”. Or Robert?: Your boss seem to understand that we need microformats. We need a format for training! Get people out of their chairs! Hightech training for everyone!

And finally: The view

The next version of Windows is called “Vista”:

vista

1) A distant view or prospect, especially one seen through some opening
2) A site offering such a view

(from Wiktionary)

I want something to look at when running the mill. Ok, at SATS where I workout, they have placed the step machines right in front of the running mills. But everywhere else. I would like to bicycle through Italian wineyards or downtown Sydney. I want to run the streets of Tokyo or the hills around Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Or the landscapes in Halo.

How?

Make a system that takes data from the bicycle or the mill, feed it into my Xbox (or a PS3) and give me the view. Track how fast I go, my pulse, put it online. Let me race my friends all over the world. Give me EMIL support in all chat clients: “Status: Oyvind is bicycling – race him now”. Click and your system give you the same track I see, real time and online. And it works whether I’m at the gym or at the spinning bike at home.

How cool would that be!

Summary

There are three pieces missing:

Data collection
Technogym has started to adress this, by taking data from all machines in gyms, and saving them to a personal profile. Garmin also does it with their Forerunner line, where you store both pulse, elevation, speed, GPS data etc. on the Forerunner.

There are several other areas where this could be done:

• A very light device to put on your arm while playing tennis
• A device for golfers that takes GPS data, how you swing etc. (I would guess this exists already? Anyone?)
• A device for skiers, both Nordic and Alpine. A GPS with customized software would cover most of what you need. I think lots of people would like to see their speed in the slopes, which could be done with GPS. Not too accurate, I guess but good enough. If there was a standard, the Alpine devices could talk to systems in the slopes, feeding them other metadata about the slopes (green, blue, red, black etc.)
• Swimming. Are there heart rate monitors that are waterproof?

Can you think of other useful areas?

A standard for the data
There should be an easy way to move data between devices and systems. It’s lame that my Polar heart rate monitor store it’s data in a different format than Garmin’s heart rate monitors. They should be compatible with each other.

There should be a way to put all the data from Technogym’s Wellness System on a USB stick.

Someone should sit down and define all the data possible to connect: GPS positions, heart rate, how much you lift or push, how far you run/bicycle/ski and so on. And then define a data format for it. Like MIDI for training machines and monitoring.

Using data to control other devices
And finally: When the data is in a format that all kinds of machines and gadgets can understand, it should be possible to use it to control other devices. Example: When I run on a mill, that data should be possible to send to any PC/Mac/Xbox/PS to control things. Anything. It should be built right into the OS. Yes, OS X and Windows Vista should have supoort for this. So that if I want to “disconnect” the return key on my keyboard, and the only way to get a “return” is to hit a punching ball next to my display, I should be able to do it.

And when I’m running on a tread mill, in a gym or at home, I should be able to control any game I have. Or much better: The game developers should make special versions of the games, with “only” the landscapes and buildings, letting users run or bicycle them.

Update
There is a device for alpine, showing vertical speed etc.

Update
I’ve written Training microformat after Apple and Nike presented iPod+Nike in May 2006.

The picture in Dagbladet shows Eirik’s nice living room, but I’m still a bit worried. I have to call him and tell him that there’s a man standing in his closet. According to Hollywood there’s only two options: Wife’s lover or axe murderer. Or maybe its the goatse man…

There are over 100 pictures tagged “macstickers” at Flickr at the moment.

Do you put stickers on your laptop, Mac or PC? I don’t. And if you do, which stickers do you have?

“What’s pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It’s imprisoning.”

Africa is still far away…

And now it’s 2006. Still no Africa in your computer. Maybe even worse than before. People sit still for hours and hours, using four fingers and their eyes locked at 45 cms. Bad bad.

So StepUI from Microsoft is a step (pun intended) in the right direction.

There are lots of dance pads and alternative input devices out there. But the OS need to be able to use them in an effective way, or nobody will use them. I hope Microsoft and Apple will implement these things, and not just make fun projects of them.

EMIL!!!!!!

Also have a look at what I call EMIL – Exercise Machine Interchange Language, a new standard for storing data from exercise machines (treadmills etc.) and moving them between different machines and online storage.

vCard

So I got an idea. And if it already exists, feel free to tell me in the comments below! Here’s the idea: My Mac has an Adress book with my contacts, and my own adress data. I can export any person as a vCard and e-mail that to someone. When the person who receives my vCard clicks on it, it will open the default contact manager and put my data in there.

This works on any modern OS, Macs and PCs. Most modern laptops also have 802.11. Or WiFi. Or Airport. Many names.

Broadcast it!

I would like to have a meny item under the Airport icon in OS X. It should read: “Broadcast vCard”.

What it does is to listen for other’s sending me their vCards, and also sending out mine. When it finds them, the OS show me a list of who else did this around me, and let me check off which ones I allow to get my card. The others in the room do the same. This is to prevent anyone else around to get all our vCards without our permission. Like this:

It’s crude, but you get the picture. What do you think? Would this be useful? Would it be hard to put this on OS X or XP/Vista?

Update
Now this is “almost” possible. See Bonsoir, here’s my vCard.

I’m sure people will switch to much bigger displays in the years to come. A 17″ display is just way too small to work effeciently on. Of course, it depends, if you just are going to write and do nothing with the text but write from a to z, 17″ is ok. But as soon as you need to start editing and making structural changes, you need a bigger display.

When editing in Final Cut Pro, I use both a 17″ Powerbook, and G5s with 22″ and “23″ displays. The 17″ Powerbook is much better than the 15″, but if you are working a lot with keyframing of effects and motions, it’s way too small. The 22″ is wide enough, but not tall enough. 23″ is better, but after working on a 30″ at a demo… (I want!)

Bigger = faster

With a bigger display you look at your work more the way you look at your desk. It took me some time to get used to it, but then something happens. You start you use tools faster and better, you can put things you need to have around open next to what you’re doing. You don’t have to scroll as much, and can use your eyes and your amazing brain to find information fast by scanning over text and visual information.

If you want some more background and research, first head over to the display pages at Apple.com, and mouse over the the 20″, 23″ and 30″ displays (the numbers) at the page. You get a very clear visual on how much bigger the 30″ is. What I especially liked was that it’s so much higher. The 23″ is wide enough for most things, but not tall enough. When I edit in Final Cut Pro, I need a tall monitor, because I need to see as many tracks as possible. This would be the same all software working with tracks and timelines: Flash, After Effects, DVD Studio Pro, Logic, ProTools etc.

At the same page, Apple has put up a pdf report on how much more productive you become with a 30″ display. They want to sell bigger displays, but I totally agree with the results.

Significantly improve productivity

37signals had an interesting article about bigger screens in October 2005.

One veteran researcher claimed he has “never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user’s productivity.” On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly – and some as much as 44 percent more quickly.

Microsoft has an article on the same subject, also talking about how much better it is to have two displays instead of one:

Give someone a second monitor, let them use it for while, and then try to take it away. It just isn’t going to happen. They’ll never go back to a mono display. Researchers in the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment group (VIBE), found that increasing a computer user’s display space made it easier for them to complete their tasks.

Women think wider

The Microsoft article also says that woman need bigger displays to be able to work better, because of the way their brains work differently than men:

So we need to support females with big displays, with wider fields of views when they’re doing intense navigation tasks. They’ve been at a disadvantage in any 3D system, but just give them a wider field of vision and smooth graphics, and they’re good to go.”

Bigger TVs -> bigger computer displays

People now are buying 42″ and 52″ LCD and plasma TVs for their living room. And most of these TVs can be used with your computer too. So what does happen when you go back to the 17″ in the office after using your Media Center with a 42″ all weekend? You feel like someone put on blinds. Not a good feeling.

If I were to buy a new display for my computer, I would buy nothing less than 23″. And not a portable with less than 17″ (unless you need to hide it away in a tiny bag, or just need it to dump your pictures when traveling).

Update 1: Eric Mack

Eric Mack points back to this post. Thanks, Eric!

Update 2: Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble has a long post about how to improve Microsoft. One of his points is to buy every employee of Microsoft a new fast computer and dual monitors:

I’ve seen the productivity benefits that dual monitors can bring. Every employee who has them says having two monitors is transformational. Especially coders who can have one screen for typing code and another for designing UIs. Or, even if they are just an algorithm kind of person, the second one keeps their email showing so they don’t need to switch over when a new email shows up.

Heck, I’d go further. If we want to reach the Second Life generation we need three screens. One to run Second Life (and other kinds of social apps), one to run Visual Studio, and one to run Outlook. Or something like this. Go and watch the researchers at Microsoft Research who are working on multiple screen interfaces. They told me that industry researchers are seeing somewhere between a five to 15% productivity gain when someone goes from one monitor to two.

This make sense to me. Even if I totally understand Merlin Mann in his articles about attention, mindfullnes and always on, I often need to pay attention to several things at once. And having a third display just for IM and social apps is a good idea!

Walk outside and take a look around. People on the same city streets are loaded down. They are laden with books, newspapers, Gatorade jugs, personal stereos, knapsacks, briefcases and canvas totes with high-heel shoes inside. They have iPods strapped to upper arms, fanny packs buckled around waists and house keys Velcroed to shoelaces.

Perhaps it’s because we are multitaskers. Or because we’re insecure. Maybe we are becoming more independent. Whatever the reasons, we are more and more burdened by our belongings.

From Washington Post.

Reams of stories have been written about children being injured by heavy backpacks. Now they tow large suitcases on wheels. They look like so many little flight attendants.

LOL.

Update Zach tells me that it’s Jeremy Keith that made the buzzword bingo, and there’s an interactive version at Jeremy’s site. Thanks, Zach!

The original idea probably comes from a Dilbert strip, this one. Which of course is a good excuse to mention that Scott Adams blog is much funnier that the cartoons he makes.

Look at Podcasting. Does it really matter where a band starts now? Not really. Indie music finally gets a steroid boost with the Podcast network. Humanisation has provided tools for human nature to co-opt the internet.

He then lists some good reasons why companies should start blogging:

1. Because the internet is humanising, and blogs help humanise a company.
2. Because the blogosphere helps keep your finger on the pulse of the industry, and being a part of that sphere adds credibility.
3. Because consumers are smarter today. E.g. – We’re sick of corporate speak. We can see right through it.
4. Because it means you can communicate with your communities unfiltered, and it promotes instant feedback.
5. Because it builds a network.
6. Google.
7. Because you become the expert.

In an e-mail interview, Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and the co-founder of Broadcast.com, said he has been impressed with Synergy but was “only surprised that it took this long” for a service like this to emerge.

True. Why did it? The concept of tagging things is amazingly simple and still very effective. Now coaches in NBA teams can search any tag and combinations of tags and get video of their team up on their screen. Find “3-point lastminute leftside” or whatever.

Tagging tv

Now let us take this a step further. What if you could search for anything a broadcaster (like NBC in the USA, or BBC in the UK) broadcasts? Search for “laughter” and you get every good joke that made people laugh, in a talk show, a movie, a sports programme etc. Search for “shot”, “goal”, “kiss”, “man”, “woman”, “joke”, “sad” and so on.

Is it possible? Is there a business in this? Why would someone want to do this? Sales? Reuse of material in new programmes? I just find it fascinating, and I would like your comments on what this could be used for.

Tagging movies

What if videos had a system where people could tag them? Ok, let’s say that IMDB.com (Internet Movie Database) made a system where every scene in a movie were listed under the movie. And the movie companies let them do this. They were not to whow the actual movie, just a picture illustrating the scene. Then people could add tags to that scene. “Carchase”, “man”, “sun”, “orange”, “horse”, “Kim Basinger” etc. I’m pretty sure that lots of people would tag their favourite movies in no time.

What could we use these tags for later? Sales? Rentals? Dating? Any ideas?

This database then could be used for rentals, and soon internet downloads. Amazon.com has added tagging of the products they sell, but you can only add tags to the whole product. Would it be useful if you could tag chapters in books?

Tags are – in my opinion – the most clever concept that has been introduced on the net the last years. It gives you and me a fast and easy way to organize bit amounts of data.

And:

Now it’s time for software developers to start adding tags inside their apps. And my first candidate is NetNewsWire. I would like to be able to add tags for each feed I subscribe to. Some examples:

43Folders: gtd, gettingthingsdone, productivity, mac, osx

Adam Curry: podcasting, technology, personal

Apple Hot News: mac, software, apps, osx

Boingboing: weird, security, blogging, future, gadgets, geek, hacks

Now the MacNews Pro newsreader let you do that: Add tags to each feed:

Brilliant! Think about how cool this is. Not if you subscribe to 7 feeds. But if you subscribe to lots of them, this will help you set up smart folders, folders that show you all feeds that are tagged with a certain word (or several if you like).

Apart from this cool feature, MacNews Pro is a good looking application, with everything you expect from a modern newsreader. There were quite a few things that didn’t work on the demo I’m trying, but I think it’s something related to my own Mac. I couldn’t add new feeds. That is – I could add some adresses, others not.

I’ll work with it for a while, and see if it is any competition for NetNewsWire.

With the access Apple will no doubt get to Disney (Research)’s vast library of movies and TV shows, iTunes is about to get a huge boost toward becoming the front end for our digital TV and movie experience too.

“What happens when you can beam shows from your computer or iPod wirelessly to your TV?” he asks. “You have a Tivo (and a music player) that you can take anywhere.” IPods and TVs don’t have that ability yet but they will soon, he believes. “iTunes will be the software that runs your living room.”

Fred Vogelstein of Fortune thinks Steve Jobs already owns your living room:

Skeptical? Talk to Jeff Zucker, the new CEO of NBC/Universal. In an interview with Newsweek he said that iTunes had generated $2.5 million in download revenues just in the last three months. He also said it was helping him decide what to air. Because of the unexpected popularity of one show, “The Office,” on iTunes, TV viewership shot up and it won a coveted Thursday night prime time slot.

I wonder how long it takes before Scoble comments on this…

So MemoryMiner uses your OS X adress book, and you simply drag the persons on a picture from a sidebar (or search box) to the picture. Clicking on that person later will show you all pictures with that person.

MemoryMiner also calculates the age of persons if you have added their birthday in adress book. And then displays pictures with people as babys, kids, teens etc. It may sound a bit too much now, but if you started using a digital camera 5 years ago, you will already have several stages of your kids. And people scanning their old family photos will absolutely love this.

Places

MemoryMiner also let you add a place to each photo. If you add a real adress to the place, MemoryMiner will find it via web services, and show the maps with the pictures.

You can then make all kinds of cool searches. Find “uncle Lars”, switch to maps and see all the places in the world he has been taken photos of on a webmap (MapQuest). Cool!

The third part is that you can connect pictures with other documents, both text, video, sound and URLs. Drag any file to any picture, and they are linked together. Way cool.

Head over to MemoryMiner and have a look. Actually that’s the only think you can do right now, as the program is still in beta. But do have a look at the nice video showing how to use the app.

A wow app

There are so many things I could see myself using this for. And so many questions I have: How do MemoryMiner store the data? What kind of web services does it use? How do you define people’s relationship to you? What if MemoryMiner could use a genealogy file (like GEDCOM) to figure out who is related to who? And where they lived? Or even use software like Reunion to keep track of people. I want to test it!

PS. If you’re working at MemoryMiner and happen to read this: Let me join the beta program. I would like to put a full review here asap.

Live broadcasts of gaming on national tv will be huge in 2006..

Yes, tv channels will air live games, with the top gamers of the world playing. With commentators, experts, statistics and interviews.

There are so many reasons for this:

1) Some of the best customers for advertisers play games: Males in the age 15-45, and lately also lots of woman in the same age. Which will make advertisers wanting to have their advertising around these shows.

2) The quality of the games are so good that “normal” people could watch this and enjoy. I can understand that my dad in the early 80s couldn’t figure out which of the tiny pixelated figures on the screen were us, and which were the bad guys.

But now: HD and glorious surround sound. Xbox 360, highend PCs, PS3 and games like Project Gotham Racing 3 makes this very close to the real world (not quite but close).

Add to that: Amazing replays and camera views you never get in “real life”.

3) The way the games are built fit with the way sports are made today: You have tons of statistics, you have people playing games for a living, and thus becoming very good at it.

There are of course some hurdles too: The geek factor, the quality and the development of new tools to make gaming better for tv.

1) The geek factor. The production I’m watching now is quite geeky. They use looots of special words only known to gamers, and try too little to inform normal people about the concepts of the game. The three guys in the studio are the ones you would playing games everywhere: Guys in t-shirts, not too fit, and 2 of 3 had glasses. Heh! But they knew what they were talking about!

2) The quality. This was lowcost production. Two static cameras and the game. If one produced it like an NBA final or a Champions League final it would something else of course. Lots of cameras, replays of crucial points in the game, experts on all strategy commenting moves (bringing in people from tha army and the air force commenting the game in Battlefield 2 would be cool), live cameras on the gamers gaces as they play, lots of on-screen statistics presented in a readable way. All the data on the gamers screens are made to be watched quite closely to the screen. People are not sitting that close to the tv so it needs to be bigger to be readable for television.

Game servers for broadcasters
3) Special servers. I think the developers of the games will start making special server software just for the tv broadcasts. When NBC airs the world finals in Project Gotham Racing 3, they would like to have access to all views and cameras in the game in their control room. All. So the tv producer can produce this like any normal Indy 500 or Formula 1 race.

Same with Battlefield 2: Several times during the game they missed important things because the guys in the studio happened to be on another camera when it happened. And they didn’t have replays. With special server software for tv companies, they could replay any event in the game, from any angle, not missing a thing.

As for now, this is quite geeky stuff. But still so mainstream that the website of Norwegian Broadcasting almost chrashed during the web-tv transmission. Over 15 000 streams were sent out, and 6 000 unique users were watching it live, making it the most popular live webcast in Norway ever. Even NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange), the hub of all net traffic in Norway, had problems because of this. See the graph and read about it at NRK.no o (in Norwgian).

(picture by NRK)

The final is still available in NRK’s web-tv here (Windows Media streaming). So have a look and see what you think. How long do you think it takes before a major US or European airs a game live in primetime? My guess, within two years or before.

Related: The best gamers in the world channel

Have a look here.

So who’s next? My bet: Amazon.com will buy Wists.com. Or maybe Yahoo shopping.

Why? It fits Amazon like a glove. They only need to add an extra “find this item on Amazon” under ever bookmarked item. Beacuse people will of course bookmark lots of stuff that’s NOT on Amazon. And being able to see what people bookmark at Wists all the time, would help them deciding which items to take into their store, which ones are popular outside Amazon, and what people in general wants. Some of the same reasons they bought 43things some time ago.

But for now, Wists isn’t owned by a big web company. But it’s still great!

If you haven’t used it, head over and make a new free account. Then drag the bookmarklet made for you to your browser bookmarks bar. Every time you see something on the net you would like to buy, click the Wists bookmark and Wists will show you a white page with all the pictures from the page you left. Click the picture of the object you want to buy (often there will be site icons, navigation arrows, ads and other pictures. But just choose the one that shows the object you wanted to bookmark).

When you have chosen your picture, the next page will ask you for tags. If you have bookmarked an iPod, you could tag it “ipod” and “christmas” and “Susan” (unless Susan knows about your Wists page and would discover that an iPod nano is heading for her christmas tree). To avoid that, you can mark items private. That way, only you can see them.

The items NOT marked private will show up on your Wists page, like these on my Wists page.

If you’re in a group, you could choose a tag that is special just for your group, like “ipod222albany”. You can see all items bookmarked with a certain tag by typing wists.com/everyone/ and then the tag. Like this: wists.com/everyone/ipod.

People use Wists for so much more than shopping: People bookmark Flickr pictures they like with the tag Flickr. And these are the items people have tagged “wishlist”. The most popular items on Wists are here.

There’s even whole sites based on Wists. Cribcandy labels itself “bookmarkable stuff for your home” and highlights cool stuff for your home. You can of course subscribe to the RSS feed of any user, like the Cribcandy Wists RSS or my Wists RSS). Or the RSS feed for a tag, like the iPod Wists RSS.

A few hacks:

1) Notice that when you are on Cribcandy or any page on Wists, you can copy any item you see to your Wists. There’s a link right under the picture (if your’e logged in).

2) Subscribe to all the Wists for a user by hitting “Add to my subscriptions” on a user page. So if you’re looking at my Wists page and want to subsribe to it, click Add (Oyvind) to my subscriptions.

3) If you want to make your won site, showing off cool things to boy or bookmark, just use Javascript to show your Wists on your site. Mine are here. Customize the settings first, then click “get code” in the lower left corner and copy the code to your site.

4) The Wists API lets you do all kinds of other neat stuff.

If you have more tips, add them in the comments below, or tip me! I would love to hear from you.

Wired Tech Trend

Originally uploaded to Flickr rich115.

Update: Picked up by Boingboing too.

“Only” $1,015…

If you’re new to Last.fm, it works like this: You download a plugin for your music player software. There are a number of plugins found here. Install the proper plugin for your OS and player. Some of the plugins also works with mp3-players like the iPod. So when you sync your iPod, it sends the tracks played to the plugin.

Register with Last.fm and create a free account.

Next time you play a song, the plugin will send the artist and track name to Last.fm. Now the whole world can see what you’re playing. Scary for some, cool for some! My Last.fm status page is here.

When you have registered (or if you already are a Last.fm user), head over to the brilliantdays.com group, and join. When 15 people have joined, you can see the collective music taste of the members at the group page.

7) On clients, they want to choose the highest-reach platforms. That doesn’t mean a Windows app. Or even an app that runs only in IE. It must run on every variant of Linux and Macintosh too.

In my opinion, this alone is good enough reason.

I’m so tired of Microsoft making non-standard stuff that doesn’t work in other browser, and on other OSes. One of the worst examples is Microsoft’s own IE 5 browser for Macintosh, that has msn.com as the default homepage. But what happens when you try to msn.com with a Mac? Doesn’t work.

From Tuaw.com:

They’ve made a change to http://www.msn.com that crashes Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh. Yup, that’s right…Microsoft has changed the coding on the default homepage for their IE5 browser on the Mac that crashes the very browser in question. And it gets worse. Since the only easy way to change the default homepage in IE5 is to do it in the browser itself (in the Preferences) and the browser is crashing with a spinning beachball of death (SBOD) when you launch it, there’s now a classic Catch-22. How can users change the homepage to something else if you have to do it in the browser, but the browser crashes loading the page?

Why can’t Microsoft code msn.com so that every browser that follows standards can use it without problems?

Now Microsoft is planning a new service called Windows Live. Will this work on other platforms? I don’t think so. Many people use Windows at work and Mac at home. Or the opposite. Or Linux at work and Windows at home. As the biggest player in the field, Microsoft should make it possible for people to use other OSes on their pages and services.

By making services uncomaptible with other OSes, Microsoft forces people over to their platform. Because people who are not as nerd-like as many bloggers, don’t want trouble. They just want to things that works. Whichever computer they’re sitting at.

Update: I might be wrong (and it would be so nice if I were!): They are trying.

Update2: Also see the Live.com blog at Spaces.

Update3:: Russell Beattie thinks Windows Live is Monoploy 4.0. And man, is that powerpoint behind Bill Gates ugly. Do they even have designers at Microsoft?!? Looks like some car sales person’s first slide after using Powerpoint for… 30 minutes. And what’s with that old iMac down in the right corner? Oh, I see. It’s there to fit the excellent blue color scheme…

This isn’t about surfing the Web anymore – it’s about having a lifestyle that doesn’t require you to think or reprogram. The days of the blinking 12:00 are long gone, but it’s obvious Microsoft and its vendors don’t know that yet.

Chris Pirillo thinks.

Apple’s iPod success shows that its not being the first, or being the one with the greatest number of features that translates into market share. Instead it is helping millions of consumers ease into the digital lifestyle that is the key.

Om thinks that the “Broadband-over-Video market” will take off by the end of 2006, and that Apple will have a more complete offering by then.

I agree. This is a test: Will people download video over broadband? I think they will, and by this time next year the iTunes store will have much more to offer: TV programs from all over the world, music videos, short films etc.

How long do you think it will take before a short film festival or animation film festival teams up with Apple to offer most movies presented in the iTunes store? Not long.

And by next year, the first Macs will be on Intel and Apple will have fixed the shortcomings of Front Row 1.0.

1) It’s too small. People are now buying 32″ and 42″ and even 50″ flatscreen TVs. 20″ isn’t enough. I would like Apple to stick together the 30″ display with the iMac. If you just took an iMac without the screen, you could glue it on the back of the 30″!

2) The harddisk is too small. With the OS and a full Final Cut Studio install, almost 60 GB is used. When I first digitized all the CDs, I used AAC. But if I should use the Mac as the station for playing music at stereo at home, I would redigitize most CDs as pure 44100 KHz AIFF. That would take lots of space. Add videos, audiobooks, podcast (many with video), and 250 GB would be gone in days.

What Apple really should consider is making a home edition of the Xserve with an Xserve Raid. Install it in a closet somewhere you can’t hear it, put cables around the house. And let all music and video stay on the Xserve instead of the individual computers. Make a version of iTunes that just hooks up to the Xserve Home, and puts all media there.

3) Look at the picture of the iMac with the new Front Row software again. Four “buttons”: Music, Videos, DVD and Photos. What’s missing? TV. Why on earth isn’t there a TV tuner inside?? Unbelievable. If Apple want people to put their Macs in the living room they have to make the screen bigger and put a TV-tuner inside. I want to record my own TV-shows. I want to pause live TV. I want to use an EPG to program which programs I want to record.

Also: Make an easy way to make plugins for Front Row. I want to be able to see my RSS feeds in there as well. The weather. The webcam for the roads on the way to work. The babycall from the kids room. Just add two more buttons, TV and Yours. And make an easy way for people to hook all kinds of things up to the software under Yours. Many of the widgets people have made for Tiger would be very nice to use (in a different form) on a big TV-screen with a remote. I would even consider reading mail in there, if the interface was good enough.

But that’s not what this is about. But the ability to watch the best gamers in the world race anytime inside the game:

“Enter Gotham TV—here’s were things get interesting. Inside this mode you’ll find the Heroes Channel, your Friends Channel, a gallery of your snapshots, and also your recorded replays. The Heroes Channel (…) provides you with viewing access to the Top 50 racers in the world (on Live). If you’re watching a race you can hop in and out of the perspectives all of the cars that are racing, utilizing the different view modes and camera options available. The Heroes Channel has tested up to 300,000 viewers watching a single race.”

The Heroes Channel will be very popular. People will want to watch the best players in the world driving. It will compete with “normal” tv-channels.

And after watching amazing races in PGR3, with cameras everywhere, what will happen when you watch normal races? They need to be TOP quality. Lots of cameras. Superslows. Inboard cameras. Everything you got used to in the games. Same goes with other sports. People will of course want to see the real thing. But the games will compete more and more.

The next logical step would is to let people watch the real games on their game consoles as they happen. Let me play WRC with Solberg and Loeb live as they drive. Let me sail the Volvo Ocean Race with the boats – live. Let me cycle the Tour de France with Lance.

Let me watch replays from games on the game console. With my own choice of camera angles. Let me see Superbowl on the Xbox 360 or PS3. Whenever something happens, I can use the console to see the situation from every possible angle. Add some microchips in the shoes, gloves and t-shirts of the players. And the ball. FIFA is already doing tests with a ball with a small chip inside to signal to the referee when it is a goal. So the technology is already there.

My bet: Superbowl 2007 will be live on Xbox and Playstation.

Also read my article about running and training online – on how to make it possible to compete with Lance Armstrong and Sebastian Loeb with your Xbox or PS3.

Sponsors:

The Mac is an Appliance Now, the Mac has more in common with your coffee maker than ever before.

Think Inside the Box Apple is doing a pretty good job with their bundled software – it’s seldom the most powerful or flexible, but it sets the standard.

Assume the Internet We’ll see more small developers and publishers who exploit the way the Internet can make the very small look bigger and work together synergistically to provide solutions that would previously have been the purview of much larger organizations.

Orb is a system for viewing your media (music and video) from other computers, in your house or on the net. My friend Eirik uses Orb at home, on his PC, and is very happy with it:

“This works:
- I can stream all my music to infinity and beyond
- I can browse and show all my pictures to all mankind and beyond
- I can stream all my videos, including recently recorded shows on my MCE box to wherever…”

Plazes: That we not only have over 10.000 users but only the smartest and webbiest. Everyone from Jimbo Wales to Joi Ito to the research labs of Yahoo, MS, Google or Apple to the Web 2.0 protagonists to all the A-list bloggers is on Plazes. That’s been really a lot of input. And even though we might not be mainstream (yet), it feels good to have the support and feedback from the people that have a vision for the future of the web.”

Full interview here.

I can’t even start to explain how amazingly stupid this person is.

I [heart] undo

Originally uploaded to Flickr jkottke.

Jason Kottke has posted this photo from the AIGA Design Conference. It reminds of a friend of mine who had been working 16 hours a day on a big project, sitting in front of her Mac editing in Photoshop.

She came back to her apartment, and had some milk. She was tired and poured lots of milk on the table. Then her left hand flew onto the edge of the table, her thumb pressed down and another finger hitting an imaginary Z key.

It took her several seconds before she realized the the real world doesn’t come with Apple and Z – the undo combination in all Mac software.

Also: If you’re designing stuff, and want this look without using actual tape, Fuse has a font called Tape type, designed by Fuel.

The most important thing missing in iTunes 5 is a history menu. Or log menu.

I have blogged about it before, I have reported it to Apple before, and I’m repeating it: Why isn’t there a history menu in iTunes? It doesn’t make sense at all.

Try this: Browse the podcast directory, choose a category (like television):

Find a podcast that you would like to subscribe to, click the arrow to see the info page for that podcast:

When the infopage is up, hit subscribe. Now iTunes switches to the podcast view in where I see all my podcast.

OK, now I want to go back to the podcast directory and check out some more podcasts. Where is that back button?

To get back where I were 10 seconds ago, I have to click on the “podcast” button on the bottom of the screen to see the iTunes music store podcast view, then click on one of the categories on the right. Then find the sub-category if I were browsing those.

No good. Let us have an iTunes history menu.

And most amazing: Dot-Pod. Which lets people connect to your iPod from the internet, controlling which songs to play. Ok, that must be the number one fastest way to mess up your iPod hard drive since some crazy engineers at Blackmagic Design used an iPod as scratch disk for HD material in Final Cut Pro.

(via eirikso)

All this is possible to enter in the Addressbook app in Mac OS X 10.4. As of this version (or was it 10.3?), you can assign as many webpages to a user as you like.

Here’s an example with some of my own links, in the Adressbook app:

Now, checking all my friends and contacts blogs, new pictures, fresh bookmarks etc. takes time. And what better are computers for, than doing the boring stuff that you don’t want to do yourself?

What I would like is to add a RSS button to all of these links. Like this:

Pressing one of these buttons should take you to the page, grab the associated RSS feed of that page, and display it like Safari always does. Here’s how my Del.icio.us bookmarks look as a RSS feed:

Clicking all my contact’s RSS buttons one by one isn’t much better than checking them manually. So the next step would be to add a command to Address Book that checks all links automatically, and then subscribes to the RSS feeds of them. Here’s my photoshopped new version of the file menu in Address Book app:

I have circled my new command; “Get RSS Feeds…”.

Choosing this command would go through every weblink in the Address Book app, find the associated RSS feed for them, and subscribe to them. It probably would be nice if this was somewehere in the preferences, so Address Book did it automatically for you if you wanted it to.

If you then go into the preferences and check the first check box:

You will now get a new “Address book” bookmark folder in your Safari bookmark bar. As you can see from my next pic, clicking this will give you a list of every web link you have put in your Address Book.

Apple need to make this menu a little nicer. Some suggestions:

• Make an small Address Book icon for it, insted of the full name, to save space in the bookmarks bar.
• Group the bookmarks by contact names. This will make the list shorter, and group all bookmarks of a contact in a sub-menu.

If the Address Book app had a functionality like described here, the “Address Book” bookmark folder would get a number behind it, showing how many new posts my friends and contacts have made since last time I viewed the feeds. Just as the “Apple news” bookmarks folder in the pic above has 65 unread articles.

Every time I start Safari, a neat little Address Book icon would display a number, showing how many posts my contacts have made. Wouldn’t that be cool?!

This tip is submitted to Apple Mac OS X feedback.

Update In version 10.5 of OS X, there is an API for RSS systemwide. So maybe it’s possible to have RSS in the Address Book of Leopard?

If I should suggest a new feature for SlothCam, it would be that I could group my cams. SlothCam has a feature that lets you cycle the cameras automatically. But I don’t want to cycle all cameras, just a few of them. With groups, I could have chosen a group and cycled just that group.

Example: In the winter you could cycle webcams from different slaloms slopes. In the morning, cycle a few traffic cameras etc.

Oh well, if you happen to have some very old people around, and they want their music on your new mp3-server upstairs, check out some fine advice from Playlistmag.

Technorati tags: mac / mp3 / osx

Mike Wendland (NBC-TV News Channel Internet correspondent) called it “ultra cool organizational things Mac Tiger users can do”. Thanks, Mike! It entered the Del.icio.us popular list with lots of people bookmarking it.

It topped at #8 on Populicio.us New popular sites (Just new in last 24h). Right now it’s still #20 on the 48h list. It was linked at excellent Lifehacker (absolutely on my “10-sites-to-check-every-day” list!)

David Allen

Then, David Allen himself posted a link to my blog. Thanks, David! Your book has changed my life. Really. It would be close to impossible to organize a busy worklife, blogging, family, kids and friends without my Palm and your lists. Thanks again! I will keep writing about GTD techniques here at brilliantdays.com, as this is something that does mind-boggling things for you.

MacSurfer

The post was at Macsurfer.com (also on my top10-list) on sunday and monday.

Bruce writes “has a great blog post on how you can use Spotlight and Automator to assist you in organizing your digital stuff”. Thanks Bruce!

Keith at Asterisk writes “This seems like very smart way to use some of Tiger’s new features.”. Thanks, Keith!

And finally Stephen at Wettone writes “This is the best reason I’ve yet found for using Mac OS X Tiger.” Thanks Stephen!

Stephen also writes on his site: “Stephen Wettone is a software engineer who discovered the Internet in 1994 and hasn’t slept since.” The next thing I’m getting done, is some sleep!

This is what I need: A Mac mini with a huge harddisk. OK, that one is covered already. The Mac mini is silent and the MicroNet miniMate doesn’t have a fan either. Nice!

Next: A quality software solution to record tv-shows, pause live broadcasts, organize my music and photos, and show them on my tv-screen. iTunes and iPhoto is great if you are sitting 50 cm from your screen. If you are sitting 4 meters away… No chance.

And a way to control this. The iRemote or whatever clever name the Apple guys can come up with without getting sued by some grey-box-pc-company.

Do you listen, Steve? M-e-d-i-a c-e-n-t-e-r software. Before summer. Please?

If there is a link or photo you want me to see (and don’t bother to mail me) just add the tag “foroyvind” (=For Oyvind) at Flickr or Del.icio.us.

I have added the tag already to one of my own photos at Flickr, and a post from my blog at Del.icio.us.

Here they are: Photos tagged “foroyvind” tag at Flickr” and Bookmarks tagged “foroyvind” at Del.icio.us”

I’m subscribing to both tags’ RSS-feeds: Flickr “foroyvind” RSS and Del.icio.us “foroyvind RSS.

Brilliant idea, Brad!!!

Now, what if there was an easy way to do what Eirik has done?

EXIF to the rescue
As you may know, EXIF is the standard used to store camera data in every digital photo. EXIF makes it possible for programs like iPhoto to tell you that this picture was taken April 2nd, 2005, with a Canon Powershot S50, aperture 5.6 and so on. The EXIF standard has a tag for GPS data, and there’s even a proposal to make a more “human” location data tag in EXIF, like “At Aunt Mary’s cabin, Nordfjord, Norway”.

Superb camera site dpreview has a good page about EXIF. Sites like Flickr reads the EXIF data, and displays it when you look at pictures, like this one I took last year. Flickr will display the correct date I took the picture, even if I didn’t upload it until later.

Jeffrey Early has made a Mac OSX application that let’s you put GPS data in pictures EXIF data. Add a comment if you know any Windows or Linux programs that does the same. Jeffrey writes that “Apple has confirmed that MacOS 10.4 will support the GPS metadata tags in photos. This will open up a whole realm of opportunities for users and developers to take advantage of the position data on photos.” Excellent! I couldn’t find on the 200+ New features page for Tiger at Apple, but it’s probably there.

Jeffrey also made a photo album with maps, to show an example how to combine photos and GPS data.

A GPS in every camera and cameraphone
In a few years, most cameras and cameraphones could have small GPS units inside, that stores the exact location every picture is taken. But already now Flickr should add maps, especially now that Yahoo has bought Flickr. So when I add GPS data to my pictures before uploading them to Flickr, I could have a small map next to the picture. Clicking this will list every other picture at Flickr taken at the same spot, or within 50 meters, 500 meters, 5 kms etc.

I blogged yesterday about Gary Turner’s GPS/Flickr/Mobile wish. With Yahoo and all the data already in Yahoo maps, and GPS already in the EXIF standard, why wait until 2015? Why not this friday?

Just a little wish to Yahoo maps and Google maps all others making übercool maps on the web: The world. Not just the US. Every street in Europe, Asia and Australia is already in a database somewhere. I want to make my own “Google sightseeing” of the neighbourhood.

Update As of 1st of August 2006, Sony has launched cameras with a GPS unity connected to them. More about it here.

If you want an iPod for your kids, I recommend buying an iPod with video.

iPods with hard drives (the 30, 60 and 80 GB models) have moving parts. So teach your children that the iPod is not a toy. Don’t shake it while playing music and movies. It survives normal movements but doesn’t last long if you shake it like a rattle for hours and hours…

If you want an iPod that is “rattle-proof”, buy an iPod nano. The nano doesn’t play video, but is excellent for sports and is easier to fit in your pockets.

Protect the iPod

Now, add a TadPole case from iFrogz. It comes in six different colors…

…and there are over 200 designs for the click-wheel to choose from:

If you would like to support this site, use the link below to order your TadPole:

Putting CDs and DVDs on the iPod

Now, start putting your music and videos on the iPod. For music, use iTunes that comes with the iPod. And for video, use Handbrake Lite, a small app that rips DVDs and puts them on your iPod with two clicks. It’s Mac OS X and it’s free. If your using Windows XP, Eirik has lots of advice for you.

Enjoy iPodding! And do remember that ears can’t be repaired. Check that the volume of the iPod doesn’t hurt your child’s hearing. There’s a maximum volume setting on all iPods, which you should use if your kids are using the iPod. Remember that only some seconds of loud noise can damage the hearing forever. Also remember that different headsets have different volumes, so check before letting your kids using a different headset than they usually do!

—

There’s the iPod, the iPod mini, the iPod photo and now the iPod shuffle. The next step for Apple should be an iPod maxi. Yes, the iPod maxi. And it’s for the kids.

The normal iPod is too tiny and advanced for smaller kids. And they mess up their CDs and their CD-players. So Apple should make a huge iPod, with easier controls, and padding that makes it impossible to break.

It should be as big as three iPods next to each other, and as deep as three iPod photo in front of each other. It should be padded with white rubber all over, so that it can fall to the floor several times a day. And it should have the new feature of the Powerbooks, that make the drive stop if it moves.

Three big dials and a color display

It should have three dials:

• One to change the album
• One to change the track
• One to adjust the volume

It should also have a color display that doesn’t break easily. The display shows the cover art from the album playing, along with a huge track number, and the name of the song “in large friendly letters” (stealing a qoute from the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. Oh, it’s on page 6).

Apple needs to upgrade iTunes to make it easier to add cover art. Hacking around with Applescripts etc. is fun for some. Most users would prefer if cover art were downloaded automatically. Apple already has cover art on iTunes music store, so iTunes could at least download covers for the songs and tracks that is in the iTunes music store.

Someone care to make a 3D model?

There you have it. I’m no 3D expert, so if someone would like to make some suggestions for the design, feel free to contact me!