Mac/PC Debate Solved

Steve Jobs on DRM-free music distribution. Talk about WOW! It's kind of like is daring, no double daring the record industry to move to DRM-free music. His argument makes sense -- it really is good for consumers, not sure what impact there would be to the iTunes music store. No more iTunes vs URGE... just music. Apples in a good position to do this considering the large music library they currently command, particularly if the big four Steve mentions allows DRM-free distribution.

As Steve bluntly put it, they're forced to do DRM as well as SLAs for DRM breaches or face losing the record company's catalog. He even broke down estimates on how much music iTunes sells and what percentage of that music ends up on iPods -- roughly 3% of music on iPods are purchased from iTunes, the others were ripped or acquired, presumably DRM-free to begin with. Read it for yourself...

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

Someone in my office sent a promo code for a free MacWorld Exhibit pass, so an officemate and I took advantage of it. This was my first MacWorld -- considering all the free passes that I didn't take advantage of and the relative close proximity from my home, I'm surprised I never went (being a Mac-head and all).

The primary driver for me was to check out iPhone and a little bit of a sneak peak of of Leopard. The iPhone is to drool for and appears to be an amazing engineering achievement in industrial design, engineering and certain aspects of usablity. Based on what I saw in the demo, to call the interface a series of UI improvements is an understatement. To call it revolutionary, I'm not sure I would go that far, but it's definitely more than evolutionary in that someone actually thought the user interface on this device outl. There are aspects of the design that just seemed to make sense. There's definitely no reason why someone couldn't have done it sooner. I was more impressed that the thing was running a full version of MacOS X! I didn't see any processor specs though -- I'm going to suspect that going to an Intel architecture might have made the phone possible. The only thing I'm not too sure of with the design is a lack of tactile response because interaction is done almost completely using the screen. With no click or button forms, the experience is probably going to be fairly numb, although I'm sure aural response will be defaulted to on (one of the reasons I hated dialing on the screen on my old Treo). This might pose some interesting usability issues. I'm going to suspect that although the interface is cool (onscreen typing isn't new so I'm not going to call it revolutionary, and neither is auto recommendation since Windows Mobile/PC and most modern day phones have had this feature for years), people using their Blackberry or Treo phones as their primary diversion from reality will quickly give up on the iPhone if they're more interested in hours of thumbing fun.

That aside, for geek-chique and for status, this one's a winner. Apple's always been good at this.

For those who question the importance of tactile form and response (particilarly the Mac-heads), remember the original iMac mouse? The hockeypuck mouse sucked because it was impossible to really figure out which way was up and whether or not your finger is on the mouse button because there was no distinct shape to help orient and diffrentiate the mouse's body using it's form, and there really wasn't a way to figure out where the mouse button was. Apple fixed this after the first series of fruity Macs by adding an indentation on the button -- it didn't help (I bought the first USB Logitech mouse as soon as I could find one at Frys). Although I can hardly say the demo proved it -- texting and data entry accuracy rate during the demo seemed to allude to this. I'm wondering how much more difficult this phone will be used when used in real world situations -- like actually moving around versus standing behind a podium.

Apple TV was cool as well -- although it's definitely going to need beefing up if people are going to really adopt this en-masse. It has a 40 Gigabyte harddisk that I thought was a bit anemic given the price of storage these days and the growing size of iTunes users' video/audio library. Because of the relatively low resolution of iTunes movies, the lack of resolution was very apparent with the plasma flatpanels Apple used. Also missing is DVR functionality -- it's another box to add to your home theater. AppleTV can be connected to a PC/Mac running iTunes via a wired or wireless network (definitely going to need at least a 802.11G wireless network) and sychronized to download music, photos and video. It also allows you to connect up to connect with up to 5 computers on the network and connect to a guest for access to those iTunes libraries. One thing that wasn't clear was whether or not more that one AppleTV could be connected to a computer to stream or sychronize content. I guess we'll see.

The preview of Leopard demonstrated a lot of the stuff that Apple's Leopard website already explained, but in person so nothing too surprising.

One product I saw that looked really great was MS Office 8 for the Mac. I was glad to see a new Office as a Universal Binary (I'm finding Office 2004 somewhat sluggish on my MacBook Pro). More impressive yet is functionality that allows someone to contextually understand formatting changes to a document -- much like what Office 2007 for Windows appears to function. Funds permitting, I want to pick this upgrade up. Usability Gurus Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool had alluded to this in previous workshops I've attended.

There's only one item I want on my wishlist -- Creative had Cambridge Soundworks Radio 705. It's a Tivoli knockoff (kind of, but not really since Henry Kloss started CS). It comes in silver, white and black -- they had a test unit in pink. I suggested adding retro blue, retro green, retro cream, and retro mother-of-pearl with an old-school acoustic cloth speaker cover. Yeah, baby....

At the close of the day, we walked in out of Moscone and straight into an anti-war march... I'll post photos when I download them.

I'm toying around with open source content management systems for a couple of personal projects I'm working on. I'm going to start playing around with drupal (PHP) and umbraco cms (.Net). I'm in the process of installing them into a sandbox area to do more experimenting.

I started thinking more about this stuff after I attended developer training for Percussion Rhythmyx. Being involved in the world of UED and having been a developer for equally as long, I was a bit alarmed by the publishing interfaces presented to users, not to mention a handful of architectural decisions that didn't make sense to me. Rhythmyx looks to be a powerful CMS tool, but the UI design looked too much like programmers deciding how things should look based on the architecture of their application. The question in my mind is whether the target users (all non-programmers) will get it, particularly at the complexity at which it is being implemented. Things start to get non-intuitive with complexity :(