This (pretty long) article is on iTunes, the much hailed and hated software and media distribution software brought out by Apple a couple of years ago and that since then has been quite a bit of a revolution as it has delivered a few much needed concepts to the desktop – both the Mac OS and the Windows powered one. I am not trying to look it eve

History

I have been a Mac user for quite some time now so I had a chance to follow iTunes‘ history closely. It all began on Mac OS 9 and it didn’t begin with Apple. It all started as a program named SoundJam MP by Casady & Greene’s which was one of the first MP3 playing and organizing (!) applications on the Mac. It wasn’t the first but it was one of the most impressive applications of all for a number of reasons.

First of all, SoundJam got a lot of things right and – even more important – it was a real Macintosh application in terms of behaviour, appearance and the general „look & feel“ that we Mac die-hards are so picky on. It just felt good to see proven and established principles of user interface design to be applied to music. Of course, there have been other players around but they either centered around a simple playlist concept and were not very predictable in other means. SoundJam felt like a good neighbour on the hard disk from day one. This appealed to a lot of users: the app became well-known in a blazing speed and was obviously commercially successful.

I remember being SoundJam being one of the first applications I bought on the Mac and I was quite surprised by that. Up to that point I have been cheating my way around as most apps I used have been usually by far too expensive for me and too feature-rich at the same time. SoundJam was different in the way that I got more or less what I wanted and I got it in a well-designed manner.

And then it happened: Apple announced they bought the product alongside with the programmer. The company continued to exist but had it’s heart ripped out. Not a long time after, no news emerged. Apple took the core part and it turned out to be one of the best decision of Apple for a long time. Apple got basically two things totally right at that moment.

First they noticed that music is going to be a huge thing sooner or later and that SoundJam was just the best product out there as it was well-designed and programmed according to Apple’s own user interface guidelines and also complying with most of the new things Mac OS 8, the then-current Mac OS, was bringing along. I don’t know if the digital hub strategy has been in the minds of anybody including Steve Jobs back then but for me it always made sense to consider my personal computer to be the center of basically everything I do.

Second Apple did finally realize that just selling boxes with a nifty operating system is just not enough to persuade people into buying into the Apple word. People don’t want operating systems, they want applications, they want to do things. An API is not enough to create. And Mac users are creators. Today we know that iTunes was the first step in the right direction. Apple now provides it’s customers with a critical mass of applications for the most popular activities: hearing, organizing and creating music, organizing and sharing photos, creating videos, typing text, laying out simple documents in a stylish manner and ding presentations. Furthermore, Apple provides an impressive line-up of professional applications.

iTunes drives Podcasting

iTunes is a lovely app. Everybody seems to get it’s simple user interface from the beginning although it’s quite capable. The sidebar makes the difference. Even more important: iTunes is both a playback machine and an organizer. Managing audio files based on tags is the only way to effectively deal with a huge library both on the desktop and a portable player.

The introduction of video and podcasting support in iTunes has pushed the application to whole new world and because of its popularity, iTunes is now one of the most important pieces of a new content distribution system that is embracing open standards, the web and the way people communicate and collaborate on the Internet. Apple tries to play nice in the web field by supporting things like RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0 and OPML, although the support is still buggy (ampersand and quote characters are not properly encoded/filtered resulting in ususable, invalid XML files).

Also, iTunes likes various file types. Powered by the QuickTime framework, movies and sound files in various formats can be played back. If you add the Ogg Vorbis Component to your system you can even use OGG (although it won’t sync nor play on the iPod) in the same way like MP3 or MPEG-4 AAC. iTunes is even PDF-aware, although it just downloads it and invokes an external reader. Fair enough, it makes PDF usable in Podcasts as well, which is good.

The Downside

There are a variety of things that I particularly don’t like about iTunes and the word must go out. Some of these issues applies directly to the podcast features, some are general problems.

I guess the most annoying problem is performance. Playback of video is laggy, full of hickups and seems to draw a lot more CPU cycles than other players do. There is just no instant starting of files in general, including audio, even on a very fast machine. There is always delay and although its not shaking my world, I wonder why this has to be. I have a theory which lies in its foundation: the old SoundJam application. While SoundJam was a modern app in respect to Mac OS 8, it is based on an outdated technology: Carbon. The event model in Carbon is different and it shows. Carbon apps usually not as repsonsive as Cocoa apps. I can tell whether an application is Carbon or Cocoa just by using it for a while. Sometimes even the look of everything is very telling. In iTunes it’s just the lack of performance and the inconsistent behaviour of the user interface (using full keyboard access in dialog windows is still not possible throughout the application. Why?

So why doesn’t Apple rewrite iTunes in Cocoa? The user interface is not that sophisticated that it can’t be recreated by a gifted programmer that has Apple’s full support as he is working on one of the most important applications of the company. I guess the problem at hand is Windows: iTunes has to run on it and although I have no real clue what kind of framework they are using in order to deliver iTunes cross-platform, it sort of rules out the use of Cocoa, which is Mac OS X only. I guess some of the core foundation layer has been ported to Windows anyway and it it is probably hardcoded in the Windows version of iTunes. But the higher-level features are just not there because the Cocoa framework is not there. So iTunes has to suffer and this makes a Mac user suffer.

Oh yes, I know. No big deal. It’s just an application and you get it for free! Sure. But then Apple can also stop bragging about its „consistent user experience“ as it does not really exist as there is no consistent programming model on the Mac (and don’t get me started on modern programming language support – i fully back John Siracusa’s view on this). For my taste there are by far too many „yes/no“ dialog windows as well. It’s really confusing.

And then, well, DRM (which Apple audaciously calls FairPlay). *Sigh*. I can somehow understand why Apple had to go the Digital Restriction Management way but that doesn’t mean, I like it. There is just no way forcing restrictions on how to use the stuff I bought. I want to retain my freedom. I only buy music on the iTunes Music Store because I can remove the DRM stuff with JHymn. The bad news is that Apple is still fighting these guys by introducing new restrictions that have to be conquered by the JHymn team. Currently, JHymn doesn’t work with songs bought with iTunes 6 so that means I bought the new Kate Bush album on Amazon because it supports my free choice. Unless JHymn does not work again, Apple won’t see a penny. Well, actually the music industry wins either way. But this is the second or third CD i bought since (I think) 1995 and I only buy it because it is Kate’s. CDs are just too expensive and the new methods applied by Sony are going to kill the CD empire soon. So I repeat: no more sales until JHymn works again. I will get back to P2P networks looking for stuff instead until I get my options back. Then you can have my money again.

Podcasting

Back to iTunes and back to Podcasting. iTunes‘ Podcasting support is not stellar, but it is viable. And considered that you can play and organize each file immediately after download from within the same application is cool. That’s why I put podcasts in iTunes instead of NetNewsWire. I can just hope that Brent Simmons will focus on Podcasting in the next release. It’s damn important. Kudos to Brent at this point for his great work. I am sure he is pretty aware of the trend so somethings going to come up soon, I am sure.

Podcasting is the big news and it’s going to drive sales of the iPod even higher than the iTunes Music Store did. Soon people will cry for more storage and features as TV is making inroads in the portable player world and new lovely formats arrive (like Mobuzz TV, Rocketboom, Chasing Windmills or 90 Seconds of Dave).

Another problem is bandwidth. It is apparent that Video Podcasting is going to be superpopular soon. So bandwidth is an issue if you deliver huge files to potentially thousands of people on a daily basis. A solution is on the horizon by using the BitTorrent protocol which makes totally sense as it produces the best results when many people try to download a single file at more or less the same time as it is the case with RSS clients regularly checking feeds for new food to swallow. I’d like to see BitTorrent support in iTunes as soon as possible. Quite a few Podcasting clients do it already.

Chasing Windmills is one of the reasons why video podcasting is going to take off like mad in the coming weeks and months. 90 Seconds Of Dave is another. There are many more.

After weblogs and wikis – now part three in our ongoing series „take back the media“: podcasting.

I wonder if TV networks already realize that they are about to lose their monopoly in media distribution channels or if they will shut their eyes the same way as the music and movie business still does. We’ll see.

Following the tradition of last years 21C3 weblog we have opened the CCC Events weblog that is going to keep you all updated about the upcoming 22nd Chaos Communication Congress. I want you to subscribe (yeah! just one more blog! how much harm can it do?).

The blog is currently named „22C3 Weblog“ to make clear that it’s all about 22C3 as this is our main focus now. We’ll switch to there more general term „CCC Events Weblog“ soon after to make clear what it is all about. Looking ahead we see more cool stuff coming from us and we want to make you all much more aware of what we plan to do. And we’d like to keep in touch with you and welcome your feedback and comments.

The blog itself is being updated by quite a few people, so far mainly Julia, Jens and fukami who have been all doing an incredible job in supporting me and keeping the faith up and the to do items checked. Thanks a lot.

I personally have to apologize for being pretty unresponsive to many of you lately. However, my colleagues have been in touch with many of you all the time and generate more e-mail traffic than I can read. There have been a variety of issues for me and I also moved on to a new computer which makes life easier as my old machine was severly br0ken and needs repair. It was so frickin‘ slow you can’t believe it.

The last months have been quite exhausting in terms of getting people on track for the upcoming 22C3 but we are starting to get things sorted out and you dear readers may expect a ton of information floating towards you real soon hopefully revealing everything you need to get your participation planned.

There will be a blog and a public wiki soon and the web site will get an update as well. I hope to have most things ready on wednesday.

So everybody is going to test drive Flock a bit and I am one of them, I admit. Looks basically like a good idea, to wrangle web log editing, public bookmarking and tagging into the browser. Not sure how all this will turn out. So far it’s looking not bad to say the least.

This entry was posted with Flock.

There is a webcam pointing to our Blinkenlights installation. It showed a different area yesterday but apparently, they moved it a bit ;)

Thanks to ST who told them to do so.

So. We sort of made it. The installation itself is running now and you can play Pong if you call 0190-987654. The money you pay on the phone is for the project. So you can donate by playing outdated computer games. Not bad, huh?

If you have installed the blinkensim you can choose a „hdl“ theme, make blinkensim connect to proxy.blinkenlights.de and get the screen’s content streamed over the Internet and play Pong from whereever you want.

No time for details on how to install blinkensim. Yes, we lack documentation on the web. I know. I’ll try to explain. But this first: it won’t run on windows and no, there is nothing we can do about it now. Get a Mac, get a UNIX box. Whatever. There it will work.

Some of you might have catched it already as we have started testing last night: Blinkenlights is coming back to its original building today for a limited time (two weeks). And yes, there will be Pong too and you will be able to receive the Blinkenstream via our X11 simulator software.

I’ll keep you posted. More stuff later.

I am back. I left Kuala Lumpur on sunday and I hadn’t the time to report on what was going on as I have been busy talking to people all the time and being in permanent combat with my Jetlag. I needed days to adjust and before you know it its over. Now I had some days to recover and I am sort of on my way to re-adjust to European timings. But all this has been quite stressful for me, surprisingly.

But this doesn’t apply to the conference itself which was very interesting. Thanks to Dhillon (aka l33tdawg) and his lovely crew for the overwhelmingly warm welcome and the overall good handling of everything. Special thanks also to Belinda and Amy who have been the most active and visible people for me. But there are many more who did work behind the scenes and have been generally helpful.

That said: it was easy for me to concentrate on the HITBSecConf2005 conference itself, a rather weird feeling for me as I am usually so busy with everything that I can’t really enjoy any talks at the Chaos Communication Congress. In KL it was different: I tried to follow as much talks as possible and the only one I really missed was the final goodbye event due to being too tired.

I will wrap up some notes on given talks in following postings.

I am in Kuala Lumpur now and have taken camp in a luxury hotel room with a view on the Petronas Towers. Excellent. This this building looks huge, but it is difficult to tell from here. Won’t find the time to get a closer look before the evening.

I actually arrived yesterday but I fell asleep because of the jet lag after 20 hours of traveling. Now I am up and running again and ready to take part in the HITBSecCon2005 conference which I am here for to talk about Blinkenlights and the CCC.

Everything seems to be well organized here. Just the Westin Hotel’s ISP (MagiNet) sucks because they try to charge awful amounts of money to the HITBSecConf2005 organizers for providing WLAN for the participants. Think of 13.000 USD for three days of WLAN! Unbelievable and I guess they are going to have a hard time once this information gets passed on the the hotel manager which must understand that this ISP is really hurting their business.

So I opted for paying for Internet on my hotel room which costs around 6 EUR a day. Speed could be worse but what really upsets me is that they are intercepting SMTP traffic on port 25. I am not saying they are blocking it. They are intercepting it! So this basically means they are getting in my flow and could probably get my authentication information if my e-mail client isn’t smart enough to automatically detect its connected to the wrong server. Let’s call this a man in the middle attack by the ISP. Unbearable. It’s really time to create a working OpenVPN setup for me.