April 28th, 2011, 6 Comments »
The Internet has made me a compulsive self-documenter. Obviously.
It occurs to me, though, that in the past few years I’ve added a lot of what we might call data streams to the usual bloggy, Twittery, Deliciously (soon to change hands, apparently) morass that is my web presence. I collect this data, automatically and manually, through my interactions in the real world.
Most of these data streams aren’t public, for reasons which will become obvious, but at one time or another I’ve depended on a handy app to capture them. I wanted to share some of the apps I’ve used, and ask others what they use for the same purpose. Some of the links below point to the iTunes app store:
Money – Occasionally I want to keep track of every penny I spend, just to see how it gets distributed over a couple of months. The results are usually shocking. Unlike most money management users, I don’t want an app that interacts with my bank accounts–I just want to track outgoing dollars. I use the simple, non-web-dependent Expense Tracker – Spending. It does what I need it to. You can export your data to a CSV file, which is handy for obsessively making charts in Excel.
Calories – Much like money, sometimes I want to track every single grape or Grape-Nut that goes in my mouth. Most recently, I’ve used a website and app called MyNetDiary. 1998 called and wants its name back, right? The app is great, though, with a reliable bar code scanner and has over 100,000 food items in their database to make use of. You can even track the number of glasses of water you drink every day.
Exercise – I’ve written (and talked) about RunKeeper before, and I still use it. Bonus tip for going running or cycling in foreign countries: your phone probably doesn’t rely on your data connection for collecting GPS data, so you can still use it while on holidays. Before RunKeeper, I relied on Couch to 5k to get me off the settee.
Time-tracking – We sometimes need to track the number of hours we spend on client work. For that we rely upon Harvest, which does the job with a clean interface in its desktop, web and mobile apps.
What are your favourite apps for documenting your offline experiences?
6 Comments »
September 2nd, 2010, 5 Comments »
Over the past five years or so, people have asked me “should my company launch a social network?” My answer, 19 times out of 20, is ‘no’.
Instead of trying to drag your customers and prospective customers from wherever they currently live online–Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, community bulletin boards, blogs–go interact with them there.
In 2008, I think my company declined three different projects to promote newly-launched ‘green social networks’.
But what about Apple? They’ve actually built their new social network right where their customers are: inside iTunes.
Why have they launched Ping? Friend-powered recommendations are de rigeur these days, from the Levi’s store that enables you to shop for clothes that your friends have liked on Facebook, to the new Vancouver project Recotype. And, obviously, it seems like a good way to get people to buy more music.
I’ve learned not to boldly predict the success or failure of big tech projects. Thus far, I don’t see much value in Ping for me. I don’t think I have a music discovery problem. Nor do I necessarily see my friends as a good source of music that I might like. But we’ll see.
On a related note, Ping feels shockingly unfinished for an Apple project. There was no Facebook integration available when they launched yesterday–surely an important feature for spreading it quickly. Also, there are precious few artists which you can ‘follow’ on the service. I searched for popular acts like Feist, Vampire Weekend or The Killers and came up empty.
Band News, Not Music Discovery
Here’s what I wish Ping could do for me: index my music collection, and generate timely updates via email and RSS featuring news about those artists. When are my favourite bands coming to town? When are they releasing new songs? Where can I find their new video? iLike used to do an acceptable job of this, but they definitely skewed to the bigger, older performers. Maybe another service has comprehensively solved this problem?
This functionality becomes more and more important as we shift to a ‘singles’ music economy, where consumers own songs by many more artists than they used to. It’s possible to keep up with, say, 15 or 20 bands you like, but that doesn’t scale to 50 or 100. Each of those 50 or 100 bands ought to want to have an ongoing relationship with you, and Ping is one place where that could happen. However, I don’t want to use iTunes to get that information, so Apple would have to deliver it in other forms.
5 Comments »
April 26th, 2010, 9 Comments »
I recently wrote about the unreliability of all of the Apple computers I’ve ever bought. Last night, my iMac failed to start up, displaying a big white screen and what I came to understood as the ‘Forbidden’ icon. It made me miss the venerable Macintosh bomb icon.
This brings the number of Apple computers that have fatally failed within two years of my owning them to four. Here’s what my sad computer looked like:
Despite my distaste for the Uber-branded Orwellian weirdness that is the Apple Store, I took my iMac in. They decided that it was merely a ‘system problem’, not a hardware issue. So, we backed up my computer to a newly-purchased hard drive and they wiped the thing clean.
As I write this blog post, my CD drive is spinning and installing the dreck that is Microsoft Office for Mac 2004.
I suspected that my hard drive had died. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, as I do most of my work on the web and, besides, I had backed up about six weeks ago.
A License to Download, Once
However, I had bought about $20 worth of iTunes music recently. Most people know this, but I think it bears repeating: you can only download an iTunes song once. When you buy it, you’re buying, what? A license to play the song, and the right to download the thing once.
It would have been ironic in my case, as my Apple hardware failure would have vapourized a bunch of my Apple digital assets.
This policy, by the way, is farcical. Every other digital content vendor that I’ve used–Audible, for example, or PC games from Steam–enables me to download my purchases over and over again. This feature is particularly handy when my Apple computer stops working.
Truth be told, if my hard drive had failed, and I’d lost that music, my first tactic would have been to try to download it illegally. After all, I’d paid Apple, the artists and all the stakeholders once, why should I pay them again?
9 Comments »
April 21st, 2009, 3 Comments »
While reading about the new History Channel series Life Without People (brief review: fun, highly derivative of the excellent World Without Us, but the movie-guy narration is ridiculously overblown), I happened upon a reference to the seventies BBC TV post-apocalyptic TV series Survivors. It turns out that they’re in the midst of remaking the series–they’re currently shooting season (which, in BBC terms, probably means six episodes) two.
I really dig post-apocalyptic works of art, so I immediately went looking to watch the remade series. I read on this (Official? Unofficial? Hard to tell) blog that season one was available on iTunes. Great, I thought, I’ve got some travel later in the week, I’ll plunk down my 20 bucks or whatever and download them.
Alas, “Survivors” is not available on iTunes Canada. Nor, as far as I can tell, is it available on the American or Canadian Amazon sites. I’d gladly pay for the show, even with iTunes’s imperfect system, but I can’t. What’s left? Illegally downloading the show using BitTorrent.
The Excellent Yet Distant Online Content Distribution Model
This is, of course, a very common complaint. Over the last decade, as Cory Doctorow likes to say, content producers must be ““dragged kicking and screaming to the money treeâ€Â. Farhad Manjoo reflects this ethos, and describes some of the reasons behind it, in his latest Slate article:
In my dreams, here’s what it would look like: a site that offers a huge selectionâ€â€50,000 or more titles to choose from, with lots of Hollywood new releases, indies, and a smorgasbord of old films and TV shows. (By comparison, Netflix says it offers more than 100,000 titles.)
Things, of course, are even worse up here in the Canadian digital ghetto.
3 Comments »
September 9th, 2008, 14 Comments »
I’m not a huge fan of “The World is Flat”, but I’m keen to read Thomas Friedman’s new book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–And How It Can Renew America”. And not just because Seth recommends it.
I’m buying more and more audio books these days. I’m choosing audio books because I can consume them while I’m exercising or walking from place to place. Plus, of course, it eliminates the environmental costs of manufacturing, packaging and shipping the book to me.
I went to iTunes to purchase the “Hot, Flat and Crowded”, and was a bit shocked at the price. Then I compared it with Amazon.ca and Chapters:
iTunes: $45.95
Amazon.ca: $19.50
Chapters: $23.52
I’m usually happy to pay a ‘green tax’ for more sustainable options, but this is a bit ridiculous. I’d have to pay more than twice the hardcopy cost for, ostensibly, less value. It’s ironic, too, given the subject of the book. Why do you suppose the audio book is priced where it is?
14 Comments »
August 27th, 2008, 3 Comments »
“Borrowed Tunes” is one of my favourite albums from the nineties. It’s a two-CD set, featuring 37 Neil Young covers by Canadian bands. Like Young’s classic Rust Never Sleeps, the first half is acoustic and the second is electric.
There are so many good songs on this album. The Rheostatics and the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir do a wonderful, loosey-goosey cover of “Everybody Knows this is Nowhere”, Marc Jordan sings “Borrowed Tune” like it’s a lullaby and Crash Vegas kind of reinvents “Pocahontas”:
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I forget exactly how (it originated with Cover Lay Down, an excellent blog of folky covers), but yesterday I learned that last year a second “Borrowed Tunes” was recorded, by a (mostly) new generation of Canadian artists. I have yet to hear any songs from it, but I’ll definitely buy a copy. Not from Amazon.com, mind you, where it’s listed as an import and priced at $47.99. Instead, I can get it at Amazon.ca for $21.99 or Chapters.Indigo.Purple.Monkey.Dishwasher.ca for $20.99. Or, I suppose, there’s always iTunes for a mere $14.99 (link goes to iTunes store).
I don’t really want the physical CD, and buying digital is greener. Unfortunately, I can’t find the album on eMusic or Zunior, so I may have to buy it from iTunes and convert the songs to MP3s.
Proceeds from sales of both albums (plus another earlier, more indie cover album) go to support The Bridge School, a California instution which assists children with severe physical impairments and complex communication needs. Both of Young’s sons have cerebral palsy and his daughter has epilepsy.
3 Comments »
July 31st, 2008, 17 Comments »
I take an embarrassing amount of pleasure in pruning, tweaking and annotating my iTunes library. It’s strangely important to me that all of my songs display the right meta-data for song title, artist, album and so forth.
One of my long term goals is to rate every song I own. At the moment I’ve got 8487 songs in my library, and I’ve only rated 2856 of them.
So, most of the time, I have iTunes playing a particular ‘smart’ playlist through Party Shuffle. The playlist looks like this:
When I remember, I alt+tab over to iTunes and rate the currently playing song. I play it through Party Shuffle because, otherwise, when I rate a song in my ‘Unrated’ playlist, it instantly stops playing and disappears from the playlist (it is, after all, only obeying the rules).
My rating system is largely ad hoc, and works like this:
1 star = Awful, and I usually delete these.
2 stars = Not great, but I want to keep it because I have the whole album. Also, it could be a specialty song, like a Christmas song or a novelty track.
3 stars = Average.
4 stars = I like it, and would be happy to hear it once or twice a week.
5 stars = Songs for the ages. If this song was playing on my iPod when I was killed by a bus, that’d be okay.
Do you rate songs in iTunes?
17 Comments »
July 10th, 2008, 12 Comments »
Back in the eighties, Vancouverites would frequently made odysseys across the border and visit the foreign temples of capitalism. At that time, there were a ton of brands which didn’t have a presence north of the border: Old Navy, The Gap, Banana Republic and so forth. People felt thrilled and sophisticated to be wearing clothes that you couldn’t buy in Canada.
Times changed, and we have more than enough of those once-exotic stores up here. However, there’s a new segregation in town, and it’s digital. Canucks can’t watch Hulu, the popular TV on demand service. Likewise for a lot of BBC programming.
Personally, I’m frustrated by the fact that I can’t use Rhapsody’s or Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 services. I’d happily pay ten bucks for an album, but not if it comes with DRM or in some proprietary format. So iTunes is out. I already subscribe to eMusic, but they often don’t have albums that I want (Hem, for example).
Canadians are second class citizens, I assume, because these services haven’t negotiated deals with Canadian rights holders. And they’re probably in no hurry–there’s only 30 million potential buyers up here.
In the meantime, my only alternatives are going to a store and buying a hunk of plastic (unreliable and not very green) or illegally downloading the albums I can’t buy on eMusic (sometimes unreliable). I trust we’ll get MP3s on Amazon.ca eventually, but hopefully it takes less time than for The Gap to come to Vancouver.
12 Comments »
