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.

I’ve been testing Aperture for some time, and it’s an amazing program. But I like iPhoto a lot too. There are many features in iPhoto that Aperture doesn’t have, and the other way. So I find it difficult to decide which one to use. If I could have one wish for Aperture and iPhoto: Use the same database and folder structure. I don’t care which one, where or how. Just use the same database.

So that everything I do in iPhoto (tagging, easy picture manipulation like removing red eyes, putting together some calenders and books), also shows up in Aperture.

And when I do advanced editing/correction/tagging in Aperture, it should immediately show up in iPhoto. And be available in all apps that tap into the media from the iApps, like Pages, iWeb, Keynote, Comic Life, Disc Cover etc.

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.

Note the little RSS icon after the URLs (I should probably make a better mockup with the new feed icon).

Now, in Mac OS X 10.5, coming early 2007, there’s an dedicated API for RSS inside the OS X. Which means that every app in OS X can get and display RSS feeds, if programmed right.

Having a display in my IM program that shows new posts for my contacts is a great idea (I use Adium X – you’ll find my nick on the about page). But I want to manage these feeds in my Address book. That way, all programs using the people in my Address book can use the feeds associated to each person.

Waiting for spring 2007 takes to long. I would like David Watanabe that makes NewsFire to make a new function for NewsFire. Scan all contacts in the Address book, find all URLs, load up these URLs and find the feeds for these pages, make a special folder in NewsFire called “Contacts”, then make a sub-folder for each contact, and put the RSS feeds for each contact in the right folder. That sounded a lot more complicated than I think it would be, but I’m not a programmer. So how about it, David?

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:

Now, R. Tyler Ballance has made Bonsoir, an app that halfway does what I would like it to do, and also adds in some new features.

What it does, is to broadcast your vCard to other people on the same local network. Now, I’m not sure how that works if you’re on the same 802.11 network? Will all the other’s on that same wireless network find your vCard when you broadcast it with Bonsoir?

I didn’t have anyone else to test with here, so I’m not sure.

Bonsoir takes advantage of Cocoa Distributed Objects, Bonjour, and the Address Book API for allowing the quick and easy sharing of vCards on a local network.

Bonsoir also adds some extra preferences: Adding your del.icio.us username and skype name. I guess these are distributed with the vCard? (Apple: When are you going to add a “skype” usename in Addressbook?).

This kind of functionality should be integrated in the OS, both Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista, in a simple and clean way. For now, running Bonsoir when on conferences is a great alternative. Unless you’re on Windows, that is…

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.

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 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

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?

Too bad it doesn’t DO anything. It would be nice if it was fed a fish everytime someone loaded the page (so if Boingboing adopted one, it would be really fat!). Or that it dived into the water and did stuff. Now it just stands there. Cute though!

A very short summary:
- Public broadcasters should use open standards
- People in general agree on this
- Microsoft Windows Media is not an open standard
- The public broadcasters should choose something else
- People question the knowledge of the broadcasters

Is there an open streaming platform that can meet the demands of broadcasters that wants an alternative to Windows Media. Eirik at Eirikso.com wants to know.

Still, I fail to find one single blog, comment or article that actually suggest a complete, working alternative.

Post suggestions to the article, or use Del.icio.us with tag “opencast”.

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 doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved. Being an avid Flickr and Del.icio.us user, I have fallen completely in love with tags. 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.

You may have read my post about tagging, smart folders and getting things done here on brilliantdays.com. I use this technique a lot, and the excellent Tagbag! widget by Benedikt Terhechte helps me find my tagged documents, files and folders without setting up lots of smart folders “manually”.

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.

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

See? These could have been my tags for four of the feeds I subscribe to. The tags could be entered in the infopane for each feed, somewhere here:

Next would be to make smart lists to use my new tags. Smart lists in NetNewsWire works the same way as smart lists in iPhoto and iTunes. I could set up a smart list for the tags I’m most interested in, like “mac”:

Naturally, there’s no category called “tag” in NetNewsWire. For now.

If I could pick just one new feature for the next version of NetNewsWire, tags would be the one. I have added this wish on the Ranchero bugs/feature wish pages. If you know Sheila or Brent of Ranchero, feel free to send them to this post!

Update
Andrew comments (scroll down to see it): “Why tag a static thing like a feed?” I subscribe to lots of feeds, currently over 400. So I use the feature “smart lists” in NetNewsWire a lot. Whenever a feed contains “Final Cut Pro” or “FCP”, it goes to my FCP smart list.

But the word “Final Cut Pro” is not very general. If I set up a smart list with the word “mac”, I will get hundreds, if not thousands of hits. Let me check. Ok, it was 1 386 hits.

So I put all the “Mac” feeds inside a folder, the “Mac” folder. But some of the sites that posts Mac news/stories, also specialize in other subjects too. Like 43folders” that is about David Allen’s “Getting things done”, productivity, moleskine, Mac software, OS X etc.

If I could tag 43folders with these tags, I could make smart lists based on my tags. That way, 43 Folders would go both in the “mac” smart folder and the “gtd” folder.

So when I need to check what’s new on the subject of “Final Cut Pro”, i have to check two places:

1. The smart list searching for the words “Final Cut Pro” and “FCP”
2. The smart list searching for the tag “FCP”

The second one would give me the feeds that normally serve me news on Final Cut Pro, and also the post that don’t contain the word “Final Cut Pro” – but hopefully something that relates closely to Final Cut Pro – the reason why I tagged the feed “FCP” in the first place.

One example to illustrate the difference between 1 and 2:

If you subscribe to the RSS feed of the Phila FCP Users Group, it contains 12 posts at the moment. All of them are related to Final Cut Pro in different ways, but not all of them contain the word “Final Cut Pro” (or “FCP”).

Here are all the 12 posts:

But my “FCP” smart list, searching for “Final Cut” and “FCP” only finds 5 of these:

Now, this isn’t the best example, because I could have added a search for “Final Cut Pro” in the name of the source. When doing that, the “FCP” smart lists catches all 12 posts.

But with other feeds, like 43folders, that wouldn’t work.

If you have suggestions on how to solve this without extra features in NetNewsWire, use the comments under.

Some features that would be handy: Let users specify their homepages in their profiles, and make it possible to send messages to other users.

And let people make suggestions to move tags of other users. Several of the tags placed in my home town totally misses the place they are supposed to tag.

With all this going on: How come there is no History-list in iTunes?

I need one! When I browse music at Amazon.com or any other webbased musicstore, I can use Safari’s history-list to see which pages I have visited.

Not so in iTunes. No list at all.

What I want, is something similar to the History tab in Photoshop. Not only does it show everything you have done, but it also have different icons for different actions.

iTunes need some kind of list like this, not to be able to go back and undo things. But to be able to see my footprints later – to be able to go back and see which songs I played and pages I viewed on the net with iTunes.

Here are some of the categories I would like to have:

• (Recent) Songs played
• (Recent) Songs added/imported to iTunes library
• (Recent) Songs transfered to iPod
• Songs deleted
• Pages viewed at iTunes Musicstore (one for each of the contries you use)
• (Recent) searches in iTunes Musicstore
• Imixes submitted
• Quicktime movies watched
• Podcasts downloaded
• Podcasts subscribed

When choosing one of these categories in the new History menu in iTunes, a list with the 100 recent items (or more if you set that number up in preferences) shows up, with a title, and a date. Choosing some of the will make that song play or page open. Choosing “Songs deleted” will just show a dialog box saying something like this:

“Songblahblah by bandblahblah was deleted from your iTunes library on monday, at 23:12. It has also been deleted from the harddisk. Do you want to do a Spotlight search for it?” and a “Yes” and “No” button.

Or: “Songblahblah by bandblahblah was deleted from your iTunes library on monday, at 23:12. It is still in that Trash. Do you want to put it back in the iTunes library?” and a “Yes” and “No” button.

If you haven’t thought about this before: With Spotlight you can search anything on your drives, even inside documents. With Safari, you can see all pages you have visited for ages back. But with iTunes: Nothing.

What do you think? Have you ever missed a History-list in iTunes? Use the comments!

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.

Make a bookmark for the feed by hitting Apple-D. Save it somewhere in your bookmark and close the page.

Now disconnect your computer from the net by pulling the ethernet cable or turning off Airport. Find the bookmark you just made.

Now, see: The page is still there, even if the Mac isn’t connected to the net.

Which means: The feeds you bookmark with RSS are stored on your computer somewhere (If you know where exactly they are, use the comments below to tell me!).

So why don’t the words on these pages show up in Spotlight searches?

Think about it: What if you cold make a smart folder that searched only the stored RSS feeds, and that searched for certain keywords you were looking for?

Say, you’re interested in the “Getting things done” concept by David Allen. If the stored RSS feeds were searchable with Spotlight and Smart folders, you could have searched for “Getting things done” or “GTD” or “David Allen”, and every time someone in your 10s (or hundreds or thousands) of RSS feeds mentioned these search words, the article would be visible in the Smart folder.

And with some folder actions, you could make the dock bounce, or maybe tell Growl to display a message when a new post your interested in comes in.

Macosxhints has an interesting post covering something similiar, about Spotlight not being able to search the Safari browser history. It also has another very good idea: Let Safari save the text of every webpage you surf during the day, and index it immediately in Spotlight. That way you could search for any word you browsed on the net that day, and wham! – reload that page with a click.

That index wouldn’t have to be big: It could just be all the words, and with a url connected to them. For most webpages, a couple of hundred words, taking almost no space on your harddrive.

So to my “Mac OS X 10.4.2 wish list”:

• Make Safari RSS feeds I subscribe to searchable in Finder
• Give them a special attribute so I can search in only this feeds, and not my whole disk
• Make Safari save the text of very web page I browse, let’s say the last 14 days
• Let me search this index in Spotlight

This is of course sent to Apple Mac OS X feedback.

Technorati tags: mac / osx / spotlight / safari

“Current plans call for podcasts to be free downloads: Users will submit their podcasts and Apple will be hand-picking the content it makes available to iTunes users.”

Interesting. I hope I understand this right, that some handpicked podcasts will show up in iTunes, but that you can use iTunes for other podcasts if you want. I like the new RSS feature in Safari a lot. So it would be great if there could be a clever way to integrate the RSS-feeds already in Safari, with a smart way to do it iTunes. As of today, RSS in Safari does not support enclosures.

Update: O’Reilly Radar has more details.

Technorati tags: itunes / rss / podcasting

Now Benedikt has made a widget that scans through all your files, and lists the keywords you have put in Spotlight comments for you. Great!

The next step for all Mac programmers out there: Make a widget/script/app that displays all tags like Benedikt’s TagBag, but also have a nice interface for changing tags, and to mark files that are “done”.

Technorati tags: mac / osx / spotlight / widget

If URL isn’t present, choose “Add field” and add URL.

Then add a custom URL with the popup.

Name your new custom URL.

Next time you add a new person, the new custom URL field will be present:

Thanks for the tip, Tim!!

Categories: mac / feature requests
Technorati tags: mac / osx / tiger

I can define my own categories for the URLs, which is nice. So I can add “Del.icio.us” and then enter someone’s Del.icio.us URL. But there’s a problem with this…

When I add a new category on one card, they are not in the dropdown menu for other people. So I have to type “Del.icio.us”, “Flickr” etc over and over again.

There really should be a global list for this, so that all adress cards share the same categories.

This could be a problem for some users, who enters different categories for different people, and end up with a monster list of categories. But for most people, it would help a lot if I add “Del.icio.us” as category on one card, it’s there on all cards.

Maybe there should be a little checkbox on the dialog box that pops up, when you choose to define your own new category (the text is in Norwegian):

The checkbox would just be “make this category available for all cards in your adress book”. It could be that this would be confusing for many users, but for power users it would be a great feature. With this, there also would have to be a list somewhere in the preferences where you could look at all the categories you have defined yourself, and which ones that are global and which ones are not. And a way to change a category from global to not global and vice versa.

Now, this is getting confusing. Hope you’re following me on this. Just make all user defined categories in Adress book global, and see if someone complains!

Categories: Mac / Feature requests
Technorati tags: Mac / osx / Tiger

A way to backup all the extra attributes for songs in iTunes into each file’s metadata and restore it as a cheap protection against the DB going south. Hopefully a later version of iTunes will have this.

…writes Codepoetry.net. Ah, yes. That would help. I must have lost all my ratings at least 10 times.

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?

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’re looking at a volume graph in ProTools, you can’t see the pan graph at the same time. Or if you are keyframing parameters in an eq, you can’t see the graphs for all the parameters at the same time. It’s so lame. Work one hour in After Effects or Motion or almost any program that deals with keyframes on a timeline, and you’ll see how lame ProTools is on this thing.

Try this: Grab a DV-camera and have someone run in front of you, starting on the lawn outside the house, into the front door, trough a long narrow hall, into a big livingroom, then a kitchen, and out on the lawn again, screaming all the way, all in one take. Then replace the original sound (which includes your own feet tramping) with a new scream from the studio. Then add the right eq and reverb etc. on the whole take, to make it realistic.

It’s a total mess in ProTools.

You have to change between the different graphs about 8 000 times. I once discussed this with a DigiDesign representative, and aske why they don’t adobt the multiple graph approach that graphics and video applications have. All I got was a answer like “people are used to doing it this way”. Oh, then leave it the way it is.

If Address Book didn’t have a contact with the name double-clicked, it could offer to make a Spotlight search or a Google search for the name.

And if it found two or more entries with the same name, it showed a list with thumbnail pictures (if available) and let the user choose which one to look at.

I would also like to have a bookmark toolbar inside the Address Book application. Read about that here.

So the next time I want to import a file from a server somewhere, i don’t have to…

1. Switch to Finder
2. Locate the file on the server
3. Locate my projects Capture scratch folder in another window
4. Copy the file from the server to Capture scratch
5. Switch to Final Cut
6. Choose import file
7. Locate file and press OK

The checkbox would read “Move to Capture scratch before importing”. With it checked, Final Cut would move the file you are about to import, from wherever it is located, to the current Capture scratch folder of your project.

See also Final Cut Pro – the Larry way.