Hopeless Geek

I’ve been without DirecTV and TiVo for about a month now and I figured now’s a good time to look back on it and see if this was a good decision. The best way I’ve found of determining that is the venerable pro/con list. So without further blathering, I’ll just drop into that.

Pros

1. Recording four shows at once without degradation in video quality. A DirecTiVo can do this for two shows at once but I, alas, have one of the old 40GB Series 2 TiVos that was controlling the DirecTV box via IR cable. So not only was I getting compressed video off DTV, but then TiVo was compressing it again. Best Quality never was. With U-Verse, however, what I see in a recorded show is always the raw MPEG-4 stream that it received, so that’s spectacular. Then on top of the better video quality, I get four at once.
2. Better conflict handling. Rather than TiVo’s priority-based approach, the U-Verse box walks me through conflict resolution when it happens and lets me sacrifice a recording right there in the “please record this” screen. TiVo makes me add the show as all-or-nothing and then tweak it in the Season Pass screen (for which processing takes forever when you change something).

After talking to people that waited for them and reading around the web, here’s some of the things that are coming to light for me that make me a little happier to have waited:

• No phone-to-phone Bluetooth for file/photo/contact transfers. If I take a photo, I can’t just fire it off to you. I have to email it.
• No MMS. Again, no way to get a photo off of this outside of email or sync.
• No custom ringtones. Rumor has it that’s coming from the iTS and you’re going to have to buy it. You can’t take music you already have licensed (“bought”) and use it and you can’t even make your own from you screaming into the microphone (music might be playing in the background!).

The [iPhone] interface makes all the other mobile devices I have around the office look dumpy and half-functional; the sleek form factor makes my other smartphones look morbidly obese. I want to pick them up and gaze upon them pityingly, then throw them all in a blender and hit “puree.”
Boing Boing: Jesusphone: He is Risen

I’ve heard the same sentiment from others, but none quite so graphic or amusing.

I remember trying TextMate back when it sucked, around 1.0 or 1.1 or something like that. It was this bastard program that everyone hyped for RoR development and called insanely cool and yadda yadda. Everyone was raving. So I downloaded it and tried it out. I hated it. It broke everything I knew and loved about the Mac in terms of how it worked, and I kept accidentally triggering macros and didn’t see the point to code folding and, really, it was a strange new land that I was totally not ready for.

About a year passed, I think, and I was at a WWDC session this past summer when much of the session was about using TextMate to speed up development. Then I see that some of TextMate’s ideas were incorporated into Xcode 3.0 (code folding, for one). Later, I’m two rows behind Allen as he won an award for the best Mac OS X developer tool.

Apple’s finally created an iTunes that really embodies Apple’s media efforts with iTunes 7. Sometimes, as I poke through it, I see things that have been done that were on the back of my mind forever as flaws in iTunes. Then there are other times that I see a feature and just stare at how well it was done. Then, of course, it crashes.

The Good

Real Queued Downloads

This is the big one for me because podcasts were useless the way they were implemented previously. Before it just cycled the download in the HUD and that was … less than perfect. Pair that with the program locking up both an iBook G4 and a dual-core MacBook Pro with just downloading three or four items and you quickly start to look for another solution for getting your podcasts.

Now, however, there’s a full download manager in iTunes that handles podcasts, iTMS purchases, and even iPod software updates. Pretty much any time the program needs to get a file, it’s going to push it on the download queue and off it goes. It’s great, and it really shows that iTunes is becoming more of a complete media center than just a music player.

In fact, a lot of the things in iTunes 7 really promote the program from being a music player with crap tacked onto it at the last minute to being a complete media player that respects that it works with differing types of media.

iPod Management

Which brings me to the iPod management. The addition of the iPod preference pane in iTunes 6 was fairly welcome, but after using it for a while it became apparent that it was a solution to the problem in the strictest sense. It was clear that the actual implementation of the feature wasn’t the subject of endless meetings, but more that some manager said, “It’s a preference? Make it a preference pane. Shoo.”

So now when you pick an iPod, the main view switches to a new view that lets you configure everything about the iPod, including performing software updates for the iPod from within iTunes (finally).

Coverflow

Apple bought Coverflow and integrated it into iTunes 7. Not much to say outside of the fact that while I thought it was a cool idea, I was of the opinion that I would pretty much only use it if it was integrated into iTunes. Well, yeah. I love it.

Backup

Proper backup is built into iTunes now. It’s in the File menu as “Back Up to Disc…” and it creates a CD/DVD set out of your media (either everything or just purchased media). The really thoughtful part is that it allows for incremental backups, copying only media that was added or changed since the last backup. Nice.

Which is to say that Apple solved two problems with this:

• They will issue less freebies to idiots that didn’t backup because now iTunes does it for them.
• They have an unpaid backup solution for iTS media, rather than recommending .Mac Backup to everyone that wants such a feature.

Bravo.

The Bad

The interface for iTunes 7 will surely be the hot topic for many of the anal GUI reviewers out there. Personally, it’s a love-hate affair for me. I do like how it looks as a finished product, but it doesn’t make me feel like I’m using a Mac at all. It looks like the new iTunes Store does, right down to the scroll bars and buttons.

The only reason for this that I can put forth is that they needed one unified interface for both Mac, Windows, and the iTS and we thus have this new concept. It’s interesting, and it’s not entirely unusable, but it’s kind of annoying to have this iconic Mac application turned into a bastion of wishy-washy cross-platform interface design, from a place of pure principle.

So far I’ve run into the dark blue and gray versions of the following elements:

• Buttons
• Scroll bars
• Table headers
• Table views
• Pop-up menus
• Checkboxes
• Radios
• Sliders
• Tabs

It gets a little worse, however. Not only does Apple change these basic and fundamental interface elements in the main window, but it’s not consistant. None of the modal dialogs use any of these elements; they use the standard system widgets. The preferences dialog is completely lacking the new elements. Then there are the little ones, like how in the iPod settings there’s an overridden pop-up menu, but in the equalizer it’s an Aqua pop-up.

If you’re going to break a UI rule, break it consistantly. If you’re going to follow it, follow it all the time. Kind of a basic concept that they’ve missed out on just to look cool. Kind of sad.

I signed on with JVDS quite a while back, perhaps a year ago. It was right around the time I moved this site to Drupal. JVDS’ server, the one I chose, runs FreeBSD and uses simple jails for their virtualization technology. For easy-going people this is good, and in all honesty it worked fine for a long time. Now and again some fuckhead would get a broken program stuck and take over the machine, but that’s what you live with. It never ran out of memory, and when it had 16 people on it things were excellent.

Then they got bought ever-so-shortly after I joined. In time I noticed more and more disks being added (jails) and, today, that number sits at 38 jails on the one machine. Load is always at 3.00 or higher and disk access times are insane. So, CP, MG, OBS, AA, and some other sites all ran very, very slow.

It took some shopping around, but I decided the best way to defend against overselling was to pick a place that used a virtualization technology that could not be oversold. It appeared that Xen was the answer to that. Specific CPU time, RAM amount, and disk amount for each VM, as well as SSH console access and so on. Looked great, so I looked for providers.

In the end I narrowed things down to unixshell# and Quantact for the providers, based on price, offerings, and searches of “[name] sucks” in Google. I stared at the price lists for a few days, in-between projects and such, until deciding to try Unixshell first.

I requested an account and 22 hours later I had one. Warning number one.

After playing with the newest iPod for a few days I’ve grown quite attached to it. There are some features of the 3G that I liked more, but the improvements in the 4G mean my wife can have the 3G.

I spent the better part of last night downloading various notepad/memo/journal applications from MacUpdate and seeing if any of them met my needs and, if not, if they had features I wanted to put into my own notepad program. I wound up downloading something on the order of 50 programs. Fifty. Five zero. Of those 50 programs, the overwhelming majority spent more time on their serial code implementation than on the program itself.

(One let me “register” with 98765. Failed to register with 98756, 98675, 87654, 12345, 54321, or 56789. Mathematical curiosity, it seems.)

It seems that they know there’s a dearth of programs that can actually just do note-taking so they whip up something and then defend their little ground with fervor. It’s kind of pathetic.

So I have expanded my feature set for my notepad program significantly by doing this, and that’s a good thing since it means you don’t have to go through the pain I just went through. To help in the near-term, here are some of the more polished programs that I found in the mix and at least one reason I found them notable. Note that this doesn’t mean I would use them, or that in some other ways they don’t suck horribly, but that they I believe the programmers spent more time on the program than they did on serializing it.