iTunes 9 and other wonders…

Apple’s 09/09/09 Media event introduced some new things both expected and unexpected, many expected an iPod touch with a camera but instead there was an iPod nano with not only a camera but FM radio and a built-in pedometer! I was surprised about the FM radio as I never expected that to be added to an iPod. Here’s a few of the things Apple introduced today along with some thoughts / notes etc:

iPod shuffles – shiny rainbows

Now in multiple colours as well as a special edition stainless steel model. There were rumours that this tiny little iPod was going to be ditched but that didn’t happen. They also announced a new 2GB model along with shuffle-compatible third party headphones and controller peripherals. I’m not sure how much smaller you could make an iPod shuffle really. (iPod shuffle ?)

iPod nano – complete with camera

At first I didn’t think an iPod nano with a camera was that big a deal but after watching one of the video clips demoing the video features I found myself wanting one to carry around so that I could film things again. I’ve missed being able to film stuff since getting my iPhone 3G, however, there’s no way I’m buying yet another iPod so I’ll just have to look into getting an iPhone 3GS at christmas time instead! The nano’s video format is 640×480 pixel h.264 video and looks to be pretty good quality, it almost makes me wish Apple would just make a dedicated camera but I don’t think that will happen. (iPod nano ?)

iPod classic – memory bump

There’s nothing that different in store for the iPod classic, just a simple storage bump from 120GB to 160GB instead. I still like the classic iPod and the scroll wheel, it’s a great interface for accessing files. The iPhone / iPod touch’s touch screen is great but the scroll wheel is still very efficient I think. I wonder though how much time is left for these iPods? Probably still a fair bit, but once flash memory gets into at least 128GB sizes I think the iPod classic will be assigned to the history books. (iPod classic ?)

iPod touch – 64GB model and price drop

There was no rumoured iPod touch-with-camera announced, just a price drop on the existing model as well as a 64GB model announced. I think a new version with a camera is in the works, it just doesn’t make sense for the nano to have it and not the touch. Also the lineup is now 8GB, 32GB and 64GB, I’d expect to see it become 16GB, 32GB and 64GB when the new model is announced. That’s just my speculation though. Update: This press release from Apple about the new iPod touch updates paints a slightly different picture though, it indicates that the 32GB and 64GB iPod touches have the same internals as the iPhone 3GS, “The 32GB and 64GB models also include up to 50 percent faster performance and support for even better graphics with Open GL ES 2.0“. Interesting. (iPod touch ?)

iTunes 9

An expected announcement and one that took up the majority of the media event. iTunes 9 introduced a revamped interface (with it’s usual introduction of unusual / new interface aesthetics!) and a few other new features. One thing that’s disappeared though is the shopping cart feature, now you have to either add it to the also newly added Wish List feature or you have to use 1-Click purchasing! That’s a little bit scary.

There’s now also the option to share items on the store to either Facebook or Twitter, I was hoping for more integration with social networks, particularly last.fm but alas it’s not to be. One other thing I noticed is that iTunes now finally behaves like all other good Mac apps and will actually maximise when you click the maximise button! Previously this would toggle iTunes into it’s Mini Player mode, I’m really glad they’ve changed this.

Here’s a rundown of some of the new features of iTunes 9:

  • iTunes LP – Intended to introduce the digital equivalent of album covers complete with liner notes, lyric, videos etc. This is something that is long overdue, I look forward to checking out some of these. Another question though is how are these made? I’m pretty sure they won’t involve Flash but I’ll be keen to find out how they’re produced.
  • Home sharing – This basically allows you to easily share tracks between up-to five machines that you can authorise to play back songs. This seems really handy for households with more than one computer, drag and drop songs between shared libraries.
  • Redesigned iTunes Store – Improved navigation is one of the main tweaks, it now seems more like a web page with consistent navigation along the top of the window. You can also set an option in the preferences to use the full window when browsing the store, this basically gets rid of the list of options on the left hand side. It’s quite handy to get a bit more space when browsing the store.
  • iTunes Extras – Another long overdue feature! I’m not that impressed with the iTunes store’s video offerings, many movies are not available to rent until long after many other rental stores have had them. So these movies are only available to purchase, what’s more they’re a bit expensive too compared to picking them up in DVD format from somewhere like play.com or even at your local Tesco supermarket. Ok, rant over. iTunes Extras basically adds a bit more value by including the special features that you’d get on your regular (and cheaper!) DVD purchase. I’m a tiny little bit more likely to buy one now (I still probably won’t though).
  • Genius mixes – An interesting new feature, it finds songs that go well together and automatically makes mixes out of them. One thing to point out though is at first I couldn’t see where this feature was, you need to choose ‘Update Genius’ from the Store menu in iTunes in order to update and activate the feature.
  • Improved syncing – Undoubtedly one of the most sought after features by anyone who owns an iPhone or iPod touch and has a lot of applications on it, you can now organise the layout of all of your apps inside iTunes itself. It’s not quite how I’d proposed it but close ;)

iPhone OS 3.1

iPhone OS 3.1 for iPhone (and 3.1.1 for iPod touch) were announced too. It introduces a few new features that tie in with iTunes 9’s new features, nothing massively new but then again it is a point update. Amongst the various features shown on the iPhone OS software update page a couple of little tweaks caught my eye:

  • Remotely lock iPhone with a passcode via MobileMe
  • Warn when visiting fraudulent websites in Safari (anti-phishing)

Being able to lock an iPhone remotely enhances the already brilliant MobileMe feature of locating your iPhone via GPS and also remotely wiping a lost iPhone. Anti-phishing support in Mobile Safari is a great feature too, something all browsers need these days.

Anyway, enough writing about it all, I’m going to go and re-organise my iPhone apps :)

Touchgrind (A short history of skateboarding games)

Anyone who is into skateboarding and owns a games console has no doubt played at least one of the many games in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series. This game defined the genre for several years and had no equal. In recent years EA’s Skate presented the first game to seriously challenge its place at the top. One of the things that set Skate apart from the Tony Hawk games was that there was a learning curve more closely resembling the real skate experience. Skate was also helped by the capabilities of next generation consoles like the Playstation 3 and the XBox 360 which offered amazing graphics.

In the area of hand-held consoles however, the Tony Hawk franchise offered the only skateboarding games for Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s DS. Skate was never released for either of these hand-held devices perhaps largely due to the selling point of their high-end graphics. The sequel, Skate 2, will also only be available for the PS3 and XBox 360.

Nintendo’s DS and Wii consoles represented a new approach to gaming. Instead of focusing on photo-realistic graphics like the PS3 and XBox 360 these consoles used a combination of unusual interfaces and input devices to create a unique and new gaming experience. The release of these consoles brought a slew of games making use of the DS’s two screen / stylus input and the Wii’s highly-physical Wiimote / accelerometer based controls. A follow-up title ‘Skate It’ brings the gameplay of Skate to these consoles, although it’s not so much a sequel to Skate but more of a game in its own right. ‘Skate It’ for the DS and Wii makes use of the unique controls of these consoles to offer something even more akin to the real skating. The Wii in particular offers something new with gameplay being controlled with the Wiimote, nunchuk and also the Wii Balance Board enabling game control with hands and feet.

In regards to hand-held consoles the DS is the only platform offering the mixture of unusual interface / input and the unique game play of the Skate It games, although the Tony Hawk franchise is currently regrouping and planning a new wave of games to make use of these types of unique interface so presumably this will include the DS.

However there is also one other unique gaming platform on the scene, one which has kind of slowly crept in under the radar without, intially at least, any kind of fanfare or hyped launch as a gaming platform:

Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch: a gaming platform

The iPhone and iPod touch platform offers an awesome touch screen interface allowing input such as an onscreen keyboard and finger gestures for scrolling and resizing. Since the launch of Apple’s App Store third party developers have been launching games by the thousands making the iPhone platform a hugely popular and financially successful platform for many game developers both small and large.

As I said before Apple really seemed to kind of just sneak in with the iPhone as a gaming platform, although many saw the potential of the iPhone as a platform for mobile applications I don’t think many realised just how capable the platform was especially in the area of graphics performance on such a small device.

Interestingly this isn’t the first time Apple has considered developing a gaming platform, the Pippin console had limited release back in the 90’s but was eventually shelved. Since then many people, including myself, have pondered as to whether Apple, like Microsoft, might make a new attempt to enter the gaming market.

The iPhone and iPod touch are the proof that Apple have indeed entered the gaming market, but like they have done before it is on Apple’s own terms by creating a unique platform unlike anything else on the market.

iPhone + skateboarding = Touchgrind

Ok, we’re up to date with the history lesson. As you might expect such a powerful hand-held gaming platform as the iPhone / iPod touch has some great games available for it, Super Monkey Ball, Crash Cart Bandicoot, Cro-Mag Rally to name a few. But, what about skateboarding games?

There have actually been two skateboarding games to date, the first to launch was called iSkate (iTunes Store Link) but wasn’t really much more than a proof of concept, it lacked any real game play and was poorly received (especially as people paid for it).

Touchgrind (iTunes Store link) by illusionlabs however is a different story. Built on the same basic principle of iSkate, the idea is that you see the skateboard from a top-down view and you control the board with two fingers. A combination of finger gestures allows you to flip the board in various ways. It’s a bit like playing with a virtual fingerboard, and if you’ve ever messed around with one of those you’ll know it’s hard to do tricks with your fingers!

The interface for Touchgrind is nice, you spin a skateboard wheel and choose from one of six sections on the wheel: Options, About, How To, Warm Up, Jam Session and Competition. Options lets you switch off sound effects and About gives you a link to the developer’s website. The next option gets you into the nitty gritty, How To is the first thing you need to check out when you first try out Touchgrind as it explains the concepts of how to maneuver the board and do tricks.

Warning: Learning curve ahead

I have to admit that when I first tried it I found it pretty hard, like the Skate and Skate It games I mentioned before there’s actually a fair bit of a learning curve in getting the techniques down. At first it was a bit frustrating and I ended up coming back to it a few times before it really clicked with me. That element of frustration is actually quite cool though as it’s a pretty realistic skateboarding learning curve, it’s not uncommon to experience frustration learning tricks for real!

After working your way through the How To section and you’ve managed to get to grips with the basic controls then the next section to check out is the Warm Up. This section lets you just go and cruise around, there’s a few ramps and a rail that you can try and grind. There’s not that much to skate but the point is just to get familiar with skating around, trying out the various tricks on some real obstacles as well as in the large amount of empty space around the obstacles.

It soon becomes apparent that with the top-down view that Touchgrind uses it’s quite hard to see where you’re going. Because of this there are icons that indicate what type of obstacles you are near and which direction they are in. This at least gives you some indication of what’s near you and allows you to steer in the right direction. However, it’s still a little tricky knowing exactly when you’re going to be near enough to an obstacle to jump on to it.

To help you know how near you are to obstacles there is also the ability to zoom out by clicking on the magnifying glass in the lower-right hand corner. The view then zooms out and you can see a larger area of the park, not the entire park but a larger section so you can get a better idea of what you’re trying to skate towards.

You can drag around with your finger to see all available obstacles (or in the case of the Warm Up park lots of empty space!). This certainly helps when you’re trying to line up for an obstacle, and is especially useful when trying to gauge how far away from an obstacle you are.

Warmed up? Let’s jam…

After the Warm Up section you can then move onto the Jam Session where you get to use the full skatepark with a lot more obstacles. The main object of the Jam Session is to see how high a score you can get with a single trick or combination of tricks on an obstacle, there’s no time limit so you can just skate around for as long as you want trying to get that flip-to-grind flip-out combo down perfectly!

Competition is the final section and this gives you a 100 second time limit in which to skate around and build up as many points as possible. As you get higher scores new boards are unlocked which can be selected when starting the Competition or Warm Up sections. I’ve managed to get to over 400,000 points so far but still have a way to go to get over 1,500,000 points to get the highest board! I’ll need to practice a bit more :)

Finishing off… Last run…

So, that’s my quick-ish overview of how Touchgrind works, the best thing to do though is go ahead and buy Touchgrind yourself and check it out. It’s only £2.99 from the App store but the quality of the gameplay in Touchgrind, like many of the apps in the app store, is worth more than its price tag. The developers of the game, Illusion Labs are keen to get feedback from users so try it out and tell them how you think it could be improved. I’m sure some kind of multi-player mode is likely to be added in future, playing over wifi could be an interesting experience although I’m not quite sure how that will work due to the challenges already present with the top-down UI that Touchgrind uses.

I think Touchgrind is a great example of how powerful a platform the iPhone / iPod touch is, the touch screen interface offers a completely new control interface for a skateboarding game. As yet Touchgrind doesn’t make use of the accelerometer in the iPhone / iPod touch, perhaps this could be made use of in a future version? Or perhaps in some other skateboarding game?

I’ve included a few more screenshots from the game just to give a bit more of a taste of how it looks, go ahead and check it out.


An idea for improving iPhone App management in iTunes

The iPhone App Store is a huge success with thousands of applications available. However, it doesn’t take long after downloading a whole load of apps before you’ve got pages and pages of apps on your iPhone. With just two, three or maybe even four pages of apps it’s not too difficult to remember where specific applications are but beyond that it gets harder.

One solution to helping find the apps installed is to create pages with specific types of apps on each page, perhaps Social networking apps on one page, games on another and so on. However, you can soon end up with a lot of pages using this method. Currently on my iPhone I have about seven pages of apps and it’s getting increasingly difficult and time consuming to manage this as I add more applications.

Screenshot of my iPhone screen layouts
The current app screens on my iPhone

The problem is that you can only move applications around one at a time so trying to move apps from one page to another is a pretty slow and laborious process. It’s made worse because there is no way to adjust the order of the pages of apps or to insert a new page, so if you wanted to insert a whole new page in between your second and third pages the only way to do it is move all of the apps from the last page onto a new page. You can then move all the apps from the the third page etc one page forward, not a simple or quick process! Obviously this method of management is pretty useless with an increasing amount of apps.

Tuning up iTunes App management

So, what can be done to fix this? Well, I’m sure something could be done to make app management on the iPhone itself better but the solution I’ve got in mind is to improve the Applications management inside the desktop iTunes application.

When your iPhone is mounted you can currently configure which Apps are synced across to your device, What’s needed is an additional panel within this section that shows the layout of all the pages of apps on the iPhone. This panel would allow you to easily drag and drop applications between pages using your mouse or trackpad, you would also be able to re-order the pages and insert new pages in between the existing pages. It would also allow you to delete pages including all of the apps on them, unless of course it contains any of the core apps that cannot be deleted. In that circumstance a warning message would appear indicating that fact but the page would be left alone.

Mockup of iTunes app management screen
Mockup of iTunes app management screen

It seems like a simple and user friendly way to manage all your apps. If you think of how you manage music in iTunes, you can create playlists and drag and drop files in and out of them. This method of management would give that same kind of control for applications.

So, how long until we see this method of app management in iTunes? ;)

iTunes Movies and TV coming soon to UK, apparently…

According to a post on the Ars technica website those of us in the UK will soon have the ability, finally, to buy Movies and TV shows direct from the iTunes store.

It’s been a long, long time coming for sure, hopefully there’s some truth to the rumours as it seems such an big gap in the UK iTunes store offering, it would surely be very successful, assuming the price point isn’t too high.

The following quote comes from the article on Ars Technica:

Unfortunately, we still don’t have news for you about overall European deployment of iTunes movies, but we do have news about the UK. Trusted sources inside the company have told Ars that Apple plans to introduce movies and TV shows to iTunes UK very soon?as in, a couple of weeks.

Finally a reason to get an AppleTV?

If this is true then that’s pretty good news for all those UK purchasers of the AppleTV, now you’ll be able to buy some movies in a compatible format for once! Although the number of online sources for purchasing Movie downloads is increasing, invariably they all sing to the same tune of Windows Media Player and accompanying Windows-only DRM. The fact that the BBC’s iPlayer offering is also Windows-only means there are not a lot of options for mac users.

What sort of content will be available to download is anyone’s guess, I just hope that it isn’t too crippled a list of series to be purchased. I’m thinking that given the amount of hassle I’ve been having with my Sky broadband and general lack of excitement over the current programming that I would consider being able to purchase series such as Lost and Battlestar Galactica straight from iTunes a very attractive alternative to renewing my Sky contract once my 12 month minimum term is up! I’ve got a longer post about my experience with Sky coming up shortly ;)

~Rick

Thoughts on WWDC07 keynote announcements / rumours

Rumours of iTunes movie rentals

If this turns out to be true then it means the FairPlay DRM scheme must now have the ability to do time-limited control of playback capabilities. This will definitely make a good addition for those with an AppleTV. If this story is true then the BBC iPlayer team should go talk to Apple right now!

Safari for Windows

Wow, I hadn’t thought about this, but seeing as Adobe’s Apollo (now known as AIR) initiative uses WebKit and runs cross-platform then it makes sense that a native Windows version of Safari would be possible. This will be very handy for web developers ‘stuck’ on Windows! It’s available now as a beta for OSX and Windows.

OSX 10.5 Leopard preview

Great looking set of features in there, I’m really liking the changes to the look and feel of the user interface. The iTunes-esque Finder looks to be a good update, I’m wondering how well those who really hate the current finder will take to this, will it be an improvement or not? I’ve not seen any concrete evidence that the Finder has been substantially rewritten, will this be the end of spinning beachballs when network volumes disappear?

~Rick

PureTracks.com to go DRM free – tipping the balance? [updated]

With all the recent hubbub about DRM and downloadable Music tracks it has perhaps comes across as purely rhetoric by a lot of the record labels.

Some people have called into question Steve Jobs’ motives over the whole ‘Thoughts on Music’ letter as being simply a smokescreen to deflect the grumblings within various European companies.

Whatever your opinion on the matter there is some positive movements happening within the Music download industry, money being put where their mouth is so to speak.

PureTracks.

iPodObserver.com reports that Puretracks.com has announced the removal of DRM from their music files, starting with the Independent labels and adding more DRM-free tracks as time goes on.

Interestingly PureTracks previously used Windows DRM for their files which means the tracks would have been in Windows Media Audio format files, this move indicates that it will make use of pure MP3 format files as PureTracks have indicated that the will work on iPods. It does appear there will be a mix of both DRM’ed and DRM-free tracks available depending on the Record Label’s preference.

If PureTracks can mix it up, why not iTunes?

I’m playing devils advocate here I guess but I’m wondering if there’s no way that the iTunes Store couldn’t offer a mix of track types? My original thought is that Apple would prefer to keep the user experience simple, so offering some tracks with DRM and some without would be a bit confusing for the user. However, John Gruber of DaringFireball.net wrote an interesting article “Would Apple Mix DRM and Non-DRM Music at the iTunes Store?” which has some interesting points. Maybe there’s scope for a mixture after all?

Update: A couple of interesting links…

Rick Moynihan left a comment pointing to an article by Cory Doctorow regarding Steve Job’s call for removal of DRM from music tracks. I also came across an interesting article on the LA Times website which gives another interesting perspective on the call for removal of DRM, both definitely worth reading.

~Rick

What’s the future for ‘iTunes’?

Ever since Macworld San Francisco I’ve been wondering about the future strategy for the iTunes application in regards to it’s name. I mean I know that the Store is known just as the ‘iTunes Store’ and not the ‘iTunes Music Store now but ‘iTunes’ is still a pretty specific reference to Music really.

Not just music…

As the iTunes Store has for a while sold TV Shows and Movies (at least if you live in the US, not for me in the UK though) then it’s pretty obvious that there’s more to it than just music. However, what I’m really talking about is the actual iTunes application. For the last couple of major versions it has supported playback of video as well as audio, this hasn’t been hard to miss. However, the changes that have been slightly under the radar has been the fact that synchronisation of non-music features such as Contacts from the Mac OSX Address Book application, once something handled by the (increasingly redundant!) iSync application, is now handled inside iTunes.

The iPhone effect

With the announcement of the iPhone then it’s a no-brainer that this handling of Contact information is going to be even more important, perhaps even genuinely useful! (I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve looked up contacts on my iPod).

One of the innovative aspects of the iPhone is the visual voicemail feature which allows you to browse a list of all the voicemails you’ve received. It’s just a guess but I would imagine that this will be added to the list of things that may be synchronised to your computer via iTunes. Ok, so adding audio voicemail into iTunes is still just dealing with audio files, but I reckon it’s just just the tip of the iceberg in regards to the data that will be contained on the iPhone.

Name dropping?

So, with all these different data types in the mix it’s interesting to ponder how the name ‘iTunes’ fits in amongst all of this. Will we see a change of name? Perhaps there is a different iApp required? Maybe, but perhaps it’s a likely outcome that it’s just a further evolution of the iTunes app name to encompass the broader capabilities and functions it contains? Ok, doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with that theory I guess.

What’s in iName?

Anyway, let’s see the names in use amongst the iLife / iWork apps already:

  • iTunes
  • iMovie
  • iPhoto
  • iDVD
  • iWeb
  • GarageBand
  • Pages
  • Keynote

Ok, there’s not a completely consistent ‘iName‘ format here so it doesn’t mean that any new name would have to be in that format. However, I think it probably would be purely because of the core association of iPod and iPhone with iTunes as it is now.

GarageBand as a name is a bit of an odd one out really as it’s the only app in the iLife suite to to have the ‘iName’ format. Of course neither of the iWork apps are in that format either but they are part of the iWork package, I wonder if this is a possible scenario for iTunes as an app? Perhaps it could split off into two or more apps as part of a renamed ‘iTunes’ package? Maybe…

Educated guesses?

This is just my little bit of idle pondering, but I’m really not sure what the future of the iTunes application and/or name is. Any ideas?

~Rick