DVDxR/blog

I’m not sure how one company can manage to spin me on an emotional roller coaster, but Apple really seems adept at it. First today they announce iTunes 9 and the ability to arrange apps on the iPhone and the Touch. FINALLY!! WOOHOO! Queue the fireworks and ticker-tape. Then they announce the new Nano. Now, I have a 2nd Gen nano and really love it. I think it is probably the best iPod out there. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my 2nd gen Touch and am addicted to my iPhone, but the Nano form factor and feature set make it, IMHO, the best portable digital music player out there. And with the exception of it’s fat phase (3rd gen, wtf where the thinking?!) it’s evolved quite nicely. So the announce the new features, camera (vid only, why?), pedometer, etc. Then the kick in the nuts. It’s getting an FM radio tuner!

WHY THE HELL CAN’T I HAVE THAT IN MY FUCKING FLAGSHIP iPHONE 3Gs!??!?

The FM tuner in my Zune was one of my favorite features of the device. There are times that I do want to listen to a local FM station for a morning show or a just because I really like their play-lists. The truly annoying bit about this is that we know the iPhone contains the hardware already! The Broadcom BCM4325 chip it uses for WiFi and Bluetooth contains an FM tuner.  All they have to do is TURN IT ON.

Oh, and to give it just that extra twist to the nutz, it can pause and buffer FM as well.  Something the Zune really needed the ability to do.  Hopefully with the prospect of revenue from iTunes tagging (yea, it does that too) they will enable it in a future update.  Grrrrrr…

A thought occurred to me the other day.  Who really, in their job, needs a word processor?  Most of my users just use it to make documents and shove them on a file share to be forgotten.  These docs almost always contain information that, really, would be better stored in either an online document system or via email.  Think of it this way: You wake up in an alternate universe.  This universe is just like ours except for one tiny difference: The word processor, for whatever reason, was never invented.  Instead, for formal documents they use a….typewriter.  Really.  Or a typesetter for big stuff.  Anyway, you go to work and look at your alternate universe desk.  Now ask yourself, would that desk contain a typewriter?

I’ll bet your answer would be no (nostalgia “old school!” answers don’t count).  More than likely you would use email or use an online knowledge base or document system.  What got me thinking about this was Google Wave and the thought of integrating everything into a hybrid, web based communication system.   Foget document types, concentrate more on document content.  You enter it, drop it into an search indexed public or private folder. Want to email it, click email and email headers appear.  Sending it internal, it just links to the document in the folder instead of generating 5000000000 copies of it, since you, of course, hit reply-to-all.

OK, ramble over

Hoping to get back to this very soon after the last year off.  It’s a long story, and I’ll be posting about it soon.