Jaharmi’s Irreality renewable hyperlinks with 0% transfat since 1999

It’s that time of year again. My WWDC 2008 iMix has been posted.

It started as a gag but I’ve had occasional encouragement from others who thought it was a good idea. Plus, I generally like the music at the conference so it’s nice to save some record of it. It’s hard to find iMixes because you have to go into the iMix section of the store to search for them, so I wanted to help myself by linking to it here.

If you’re at the conference, feel free to send me submissions; information is in the iMix description itself.

Update: I had to replace the earlier iMix with a new version so I could add to it. It appears that if you create an iMix on one computer, you can't update it on another.

Does anyone else think that Apple has some ulterior motive for promoting Viva la Vida, the track on the new iTunes ad featuring Coldplay? That maybe its lyrics are indicative of something going on at Apple?

“When I ruled the world,” indeed.

No matter. I find it a fantastic visual treat and now the haunting music is stuck in my head. I would not be surprised if it were featured at WWDC 2008 in a few weeks.

Rick Falkvinge responds to the European Commission about the inadvisability of mixing DRM and law (in English, despite the preamble in Swedish, even though he is the “founder and leader of the Pirate Party movement and leader of the Swedish Pirate Party”).

[Via Waffle.]

Honeycut’s Exodus Honey track is associated with the new aluminum iMacs by their commercial. It’s on the new Amazon MP3 Store, which is mildly amusing. I’d never heard of the band before, but now I can pick out the song whenever it starts up.

Speaking of starting up, it’s also the song played by the Mac OS X Setup Assistant in Leopard. I suppose there are all sorts of tie-ins possible thanks to Apple’s involvement in the music industry; I’m surprised they haven’t done more of this.

Now that the Amazon MP3 Store has debuted, I’ve decided to make it quicker to search by adding it to my LaunchBar configuration as a Search Template. Quick and easy, just replacing my search term “blah” from a sample search with an asterisk. Maybe this will give me added reason to try it out, since it will be so quick to call it up for searching.

Also, in the ensuing discussion, I found out (via Daring Fireball) that eMusic does have browsing/searching for non-members. I’d hit the eMusic brick wall mentioned by John Gruber, too, and because I can browse/search as a non-member thanks to that tip, I am glad to see that I can now add it as a Search Template, too.

Now, I’m a Command-Space and another Space away from searching for music at those stores. (Searching in the iTunes Store is already in the default LaunchBar configuration, I discovered while adding these items. Unsurprising, given the general URLiness of iTMS.)

I like Search Templates. Ah.

I like mashing compound words together. Ringtones. Audiobooks. They sound like they should go together, don’t they? With plus signs, as popularized [sic] by HP and Entertainment Weekly, not to mention all of those “all in one” Time Warner commercials.

Wouldn’t it be neat — and by that I mean I really don’t think so myself, I just had this amusing-to-me tangential thought while reading The scourge of the damned frog song — if one could make ringtones of audiobooks?!?

Rawk.

I’m not a coffee lover at all, but I think the new link between iTunes and Starbucks is exceedingly interesting from a technical viewpoint.

I have to wonder if they are accomplishing the connection between song playing over the PA in the store to the iTunes Wi-Fi Store via Bonjour’s DNS-SD. After all, Bonjour is a service discovery protocol that Apple has been known to champion.

If you turn on Personal Web Sharing in Mac OS X, it publishes the URL for your server via Bonjour, and you can see the results in Safari (Bookmarks button > Collections > Bonjour). Recall that every item in the normal Mac/Windows version of the iTunes Store has a URL, and suddenly it doesn’t seem farfetched to publish that URL over a local network. Bonjour’s DNS-SD provides just such a mechanism.

What if they have a resource in each properly-equipped Starbucks that updates a Bonjour-published iTunes Store URL when the track changes?

If they wanted to provide history, rather than just the current track, I suppose there could be some intersection with RSS. (I wish Yes.com provided RSS feeds for stations for this reason.) An RSS feed URL is just as valid as any other, and I believe the iTunes software itself understands RSS (for its podcasting feature). There’s also nothing stopping them from publishing more than one URL, so they could conceivably publish both the current song as a direct link and an RSS feed (with individual song links) for history. Even without history of recent songs played, the use of Bonjour seems entirely plausible to me because:

1. it would only become available in the physical vicinity of the Starbucks’ Wi-Fi access point
2. it could link you directly to the track that is playing
3. it can be refreshed dynamically, without requiring a “Refresh” button in the user interface
4. it could probably work on laptops running an updated version of iTunes, as well, in a way similar to (but not exactly like) how you can already share your iTunes library.

Update: I fixed an error with the URL of this story, so the permalink actually works.

Wow, I must be shopping too much — but not buying enough — at the iTunes Store. I’ve filled it up!

I had used the shopping cart feature since my first visit to the iTMS years ago. It has become my wish list. There is no other good wish list feature I’ve found that lets me save references to what I want to buy from any computer so that I can see them on any computer where I access my account.

I could, instead, build one or more playlists for this purpose — it is perhaps little-known that you can drag items from the iTMS to playlists in the iTunes software’s source list area. The playlists, however, are per-computer; they are not saved with my iTMS account the way the shopping cart is.

I could send each playlist I’ve saved in the iTunes software to the iTMS as an iMix. iMixes are intended for community sharing, however. Creating an iMix would mean that others could see what I’m intending to buy, so it’s not entirely satisfactory, either.

So, I stick with the shopping cart and I’ve simply got too much in mine for the iTMS to handle. I don’t know if it’s related to the number of objects or the total cost of what’s in my shopping cart or some other limitation, but it’s full. Now, I have to buy or remove items.

I don’t know if I will get one. I certainly won’t get one until my Verizon Wireless contract has expired … and even then, there are factors to weigh.

But in the meantime, I’ve been staring squinty-eyed at articles about iPhone objections. You know, the ones about how it won’t work in the enterprise because it’s not secure, doesn’t have a firewall, and lacks critical Exchange support. Right now, I don’t know how we can make any evaluation about its security, other than to guess more of its OS has been written by experienced, senior programmers (sworn to secrecy) than the rest of Mac OS X probably is … and that may be a blessing. Given what’s riding on the rollout, hopefully some serious security audits have been done on the code, too.

How does some yahoo columnist trolling for hits know that the phone has no firewall? Do we have proof yet? Why isn’t the lack of open ports good enough in the first place? Do any phones, smart or otherwise, have a firewall?

We have Mary Jo Foley saying that Apple is rumored to be licensing Exchange ActiveSync. On the face of it, enabling Exchange ActiveSync would not suck at all. However, that would certainly muddy the waters for the local iTunes sync to your data, especially if you’re using Sync Services with Entourage (which itself can be connected to Exchange) at the same time.

Also, I fail to see how local iTunes synchronization with Outlook on Windows, for the people that want data from that Exchange client, is not good enough — even though it tends to be for non-BES BlackBerry users.

My request to Microsoft for “Entourage Mobile” would go “pop,” the need fulfilled.

What about remote wipe? I almost forgot! Who is to say that it won’t be available as some option in iTunes later, sort-of like de-authorizing a computer you’ve lost or sold?

And then there are objections about it being expensive — like duh, smartphones aren’t expensive? With their high initial cost, the regular cost of cell phone voice plans that generally start at $40/month, and the data plans that hover around that much, they are pricey items. Hey, I projected that my lousy, half-broken Treo 650 would cost me a minimum of$1700 over the two-year lifetime of my contract — making it the most expensive PDA I’d ever owned. It would have been, too, if I hadn’t cancelled the data plan and consolidated two contracts into a family plan. I doubt I’ve made enough phone calls to justify it, although I write down a lot of funny quotes in the note pad.

Finally, we have the performance objections. EDGE is too slow, they say. AT&T doesn’t have good coverage. This are both true, from what I can tell right now, particularly in the specific areas I might use a phone.

But then again, I cancelled my Treo’s data plan because the equivalent Verizon network was too slow, the browser too annoying (even for the lightweight Google Mobile), and when I was roaming I couldn’t get data anyway — so I’ve already demonstrated my lack of tolerance for that. The addition of Wi-Fi ameliorates many of my concerns. I do agree with Glenn Fleishmann, who would like to see the iPhone data plan bundle connections to AT&T’s Wi-Fi network; I might never actually use that or be within range of one of their hotspots, but it would certainly sweeten the deal.

Half the places I want to use my Treo, I already get bad or non-existent voice service. I miss a high percentage of my inbound calls. This may be due to my phone, which the service department claims is defective, or it may be due to other factors. The point is that my experience with the almighty of Verizon is substandard now, so if I move to something that’s even close to equivalent it’s not going to break me.

Frankly, I don’t need a cell phone. But if I’m going to have one, it seems like the iPhone isn’t a bad choice. At least the software doesn’t look like it’ll drive me mad, like my StarTAC did. The software looks like it’s the most accessible of any phone I’ve seen.

I am amused that The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” — formerly a theme song of Microsoft Windows 95 — is one of the tracks that is now sold DRM-free and at a higher 256-kbps encoding rate via iTunes Plus.