MacWorld Keynote: One More Thing…

I’ve just finished checking out all the coverage from Phil Schiller’s keynote and I have to say, I’m satisfied. Let’s take a look.

It’s the ‘One more thing’ that we’ve been waiting for for a long time. iTunes is finally going DRM free! That’s right, Apple seduced the record industry into giving up their strangle hold on what people were stealing anyway!

This is a big achievement for Apple. If you didn’t know, all the record lables hated Apple’s monopoly over the music retail industry and for a long time wouldn’t give them DRM free music to put on iTunes. I know there must be some sort of catch for Apple and it will be interesting to see in the coming weeks what they agreed to in order to get DRM free music from all for major labels.

Let’s step back a moment. For those who don’t know, DRM stand for Digital Right Management. It is what the record industry forced Apple to put on most of the music in the iTunes store in order to stop people copying it and distributing it. DRM severely limits what you can and cant do with music. For example, you can’t use DRM music in applications that don’t have the sam DRM programed in, making music previously bought on iTunes unusable with Windows Movie Maker (God forbid!). DRM = Bad. DRM free = Good! Now that DRM is gone, you can use you newly purchased music for whatever you like, with anything you like!

It also means higher quality audio, as the flavor of iTunes DRM free music has a higher bit rate than DRM music, meaning you get clearer, crisper sounding songs.

I really don’t know why the record labels make this bold move but I’m not complaining. In Australia there is no viable alternative to iTunes meaning that all my music has DRM on it. In the US, it will be interesting to see what effect this has on Amazon, who have captured the wallets of nerds who know what DRM actually is and wouldn’t buy iTunes music because of it. Now that DRM is gone, I wonder if they will all return to the largest music retailer in the world.

In any case, this marks a huge leap forward for the record industry. It can now be said that the majority of music sold worldwide will now be DRM free. Our next goal, DRM free movies!

Are you OMGing over DRM free music? Leave a comment!

Update: The iTunes Review Process

This is a follow up to my previous post about the terrible application review mechanism that has been implemented with the new iTunes Application Store. Basically, people had been able to review iPhone and iPod touch applications without buying them (or just downloading them in the case of free applications). This led to pathetic, stupid and even racist reviews infiltrating what is known as Apple’s walled garden.

Prior to recently, the walled garden was being vandalized. Thankfully, in recent weeks Apple has silently changed their review process. Now, you have had to have downloaded/purchased an application before you have the right to review it.

To me, a person who doesn’t want to leave the walled garden, this is excellent news. It does two things for the iTunes Store. First, it prevents idiots writing trashy reviews that are incoherent, full of abbreviations and even racist and derogatory remarks. More importantly, it gives some legitimacy to the Applications Store and allows it to be used for it’s original purpose; to inform people about the quality of an application before buying it. We will now only see people who have forked out the cash to buy an application reviewing them based on their experience and not just by looking at the pictures. It’s no lie when I say that only dedicated, helpful people are the one’s writing reviews. Finally their valuable word will be able to be heard above the noise and we will see useful information that will help us in making a final judgement about an application.

Unfortunatly, there will still be noise. There will still the people who, however well intentioned they are, will only write “This app is bad. Don’t buy it” but at least Apple is on the right track. I mean, you just can’t prevent people speaking their minds (in the US anyway, it’s much more clear cut for you people).

iPod Event and iTunes 8

As most of you know, 2 days ago was the Apple iPod event that I (and many others) posted about. Well now that the event is done and dusted, what has come out of it? In short we saw iTunes 8, a new iPod Nano and a new Touch (plus some new headphones but they don’t count). Because these will require a fairly long post all together I have decided to split them. This one is about iTunes 8, the first new product I got my hands on.

Before I start I would just like to point something out: *cough, cough* (kevinrosewasright…)

Browsing

The new browsing feature in iTunes 8 is a grid view. While this is a fairly obvious feature and one that is available in other media players (such as Windows Media Player) it has taken until version 8 of the world’s most popular digital jukebox for it to arrive. Before now, I didn’t feel like I needed grid view but now that I have it, I’m not going back. I think of it best as a comfortable mix between Cover Flow and the list view with albums covers. Music is viewable in the same categories as were previously available: artists, albums, genres and composers. For those who don’t wish to flow through their music with ease, the list view is still available. Cover Flow has been drastically improved. Where as before when Cover Flow would lag if you scrolled fast, now it breezes through albums with no hiccups.

Genius

Genius! I love Genius!! Genius is a brand new feature to iTunes 8 that attempts to mix the world’s of Pandora and Last.fm with the smart playlists already available. What Genius does is analyses your entire music library to tell you what music goes great together. This is not a process that just analyses your music alone, Genius synchronizes with Apple’s database containing millions and millions of other data like yours, making the analysis more accurate. All you have to do is select a song, then hit the Genius button down the bottom right of you iTunes window to create a Genius playlist. This new playlist suggests a list of songs that sound great together. My personal experience with Genius has been great, the playlists it creates contains songs that I wouldn’t have put side by side but now I can see why. Choosing ’15 step’ by Radiohead gives me a playlist containing Bloc Party, Coldplay, Madonna, The Fray and even Bob Dylan. The oddest sounding playlist that makes perfect musical sense. You really have to try it for yourself but be warned, some haven’t had the best experience with it so far. As time goes by, Apple’s database will grow and evolve and so will the Genius’ recommendations.

Podcast Management

Something overlooked by nearly everyone is the more refined podcast management options in iTunes 8. In iTunes 7, you could tell iTunes to check for new podcasts and how often to, tell it what to do when new episodes were available and how many episodes to keep. This was great, but not if you have different podcasts which you want to download/keep at different times. iTunes 8 adds the ability to choose all of the aforementioned settings for each individual podcast. I find this useful when I get lapse at listening to daily podcasts, but when still want to keep the podcast feed, and when I still want my weekly and periodical podcasts to still always download. This new revision of podcast management give you greater control over you content and how you use it. A must for anyone who listens to podcasts!

Visualizer

The incredibly date iTunes visualizer has been given a new breath of life with a new audio visualizer! For those who didn’t know this feature even existed, play a song and hit ctrl+T (command+T for Mac) and see what you were missing. I love and hate this visualizer. I love it because it’s georgous and pretty and fantastic in every way. I hate it because it’s so pretty it distracts me too much and I have to turn it off. This is different from the visualizer that I saw but it is still amazing. While this is nothing to be over the moon about and is by no means a key feature, it’s still nice to have.

While all of these new features are an amazing improvement to what iTunes 7 offered, it all comes at a price. The RAM consumption of iTunes is phenomenal! Currently, iTunes is taking up 317.5MB of my 2GB or RAM. Talk about hulking! I have no idea if this number varies from library to library but it has definetly increased since the introduction of iTunes 8. For me this is no problem, but if you have an older computer, multitasking may become an issue.

 

See why I decided to split all of the new products up?

The iTunes Review Process

 

There has been some talk recently over the process by which application are allowed in the iTunes App Store. Whilst this is a problem, I think the customer review process is proving to be a bigger problem.

When browsing the App Store a few days ago I came across an application called iPray Pro. I found out from the page that it is an application that gives Muslim prayer times as well as the direction of Meca and among other things, religious holiday dates. I was glad to see an application like this, not because I would personally use it (being a Catholic) but because it is good to see a wonderful device such as the iPhone being used for a purpose that someone else could really appreciate.

 

Scrolling down to the comments I found this:

Ignoring the highly pathetic comment this person left, it highlights a problem that Apple has that hasn’t yet been addressed. The ability to leave a review of a product is one that can be a highly effective way of getting the word out to people on the quality of an application. But this process is being abused by people such as ‘m_peace’ (iTunes screen name). Besides from racist clueless insults, the review process is one that is being used by people who have just looked at the preview pictures and made a judgement from those. I barely look at the star rating of applications anymore because they are most likely not a reliable way to judge the quality of an app. From what I see, this looks like a briliant and polished app, but I wouldn’t review it based on that assumption.

There is one easy and obvious way to fix this: only allow people to comment who have bought the application and tried it. Apple has purchase data on everyone who has an account, why not use it?

This is not the only example of the review process being abbused, but in my opinion is definetly the worst. Comments like this (plus the whole tattered product review process) don’t reflect well on Apple. The best I could do to help this situation was to report this comment as offensive.

Please Apple, lift you game on this!

Side note to m_peace: dude, have you even heard of the IRA?!