One Leg at a Time

• The New York Times reports that record labels are greedy (BugMeNot required). Shocking of a development as that is, what it means for Apple is that they’re starting to whinge about the flat $0.99 rate iTunes has rocked since the beginning. Instead they favor a more complicated staggered pricing scheme where popular stuff (like the latest Hillary Duff poo-bomb) would be more like $1.50 and older stuff might even drop below the $0.99 point. I’m kind of torn because while I really don’t see anything going below $0.99, if it did that would be killer, but I kinda don’t see that happening. And I’m really not that concerned if “popular” stuff gets expensive, because I don’t buy much/any of that as it is. (Well, I guess you could count stuff like Coldplay as popular, so maybe it would affect me…) But it’s easier to envision them just raising the prices all around so an album ends up costing $12-$14. If that happens my incentive for buying online decreases since I can grab used CDs for way less than that (about $8.00 on average) and even though they’re used, it’s worth it for about five bucks in savings. And that’s not too cool since I actually really like buying online; it’s easy, it’s cheap and it’s much more likely to have something I want than a used record store which may or may not have much of anything. Plus I can listen to clips of the songs, which helps immensely.
• This is kind of tangental, but I just have to point out that there is still a glaring flaw in iTunes which needs desperately to be fixed which is that if I purchase a single from an album (or more specifically several singles), then if I decide the whole album is then worth my money I shouldn’t have to purchase those same tracks again. I understand that this means all songs would have to have a “single price” and an “album price” but here’s what I’m thinking: What if the single price were flexible and based on an algorithm that measured popularity (number of purchases/downloads) to raise the price to a specific cap? The lowest possible price would be the album price ($x divided by y where x is the cost of the full album and y is the number of tracks for simplicity’s sake, or something more complex that also factors in popularity) and once the song was no longer being purchased like crazy due to popularity it would dip back down toward the album price. Eventually most catalog titles would be pretty cheap for one-offs, or you could simply buy albums piecemeal, without taking a hit for trying stuff out. People would be encouraged to find stuff that wasn’t mainstream (because it would be cheaper) and those who really just wanted to be part of the crowd would either have to fork over the single price (supply and demand, baby) or take the plunge on the whole album. I’m just saying.
• Afterglow comes up with an intriguing new idea for the Desktop/Finder and I think he’s on the right track. One problem I see is that he seems to be kind of relying on the Dock being at the bottom and I prefer to keep mine on the left. I find that it gets in the way less over there (at the bottom on my 14″ iBook it makes me scroll more, especially when I’m editing already-too-big image files in Fireworks or Illustrator and on the right it gets in the way of my scrollbar(s)). I’m also not sure about the Clipboard thing, that sounds more like a Widget to me. Having used the clipboard manager in XP (which makes me insane, by the way, since in theory it’s a good idea but it always pops up when I don’t want it to… almost like there needs to be a new copy or cut command like CTRL-SHFT-X/C that copies or cuts and saves) I can say that it’s sorta useful, but not so much so that it needs to be a highlighted feature unless there was an easy way to access the clipboard history through shortcuts. I really don’t usually care to see what’s on the clipboard, I just want to be able to get it.
• Drunkenbatman rants about GTalk in a way that makes a lot of sense. I mentioned before that the only surprising thing about GTalk was that it was completely lacking anything remarkable. But the article suggests that the other IM providers are taking GTalk very seriously and so much so that they may soon start taking drastic measures to prevent Google from running them out of town, even if the chances of that happening are significantly higher in their heads than in reality. I actually think the article downplays the extent to which the other IM guys bailing out support for older clients could be exactly what Google is hoping for: If everyone has to upgrade anyway and no one’s multi-protocol apps work anymore, why don’t we all just switch to GTalk and forget these other jokers? I myself honestly could care less which IM protocol ends up winning, and I’d certainly be happiest if it were something open (like Jabber), but I really just want something to step up and clear out some of this cruft. I’d be much happier using AIM/iChat all day, but I have too many people who use Yahoo! or MSN exclusively to just abandon them so I deal with the questionable interface and weird status states of Adium (for whatever reason the “Automatically Reconnect at Logon” option doesn’t seem to apply to dropped connections, just re-launching the app) for the sake of communication. On the other hand, if AIM, MSN and Yahoo! got together and created a protocol to compete with Jabber/GTalk and closed it off saying, “From now on you can use whichever app you want and you can talk to anyone from all three networks and we’ll just compete based on client featureset” they could effectively kill GTalk before it even takes off, make multi-protocol apps obsolete and render Jabber another one of those funky hacker-alts like Ogg Vorbis that exists for the freedom freaks but is so far below everyone else’s radar that it might as well not exist.
• I’m not really suggesting anything by this, but I found a P2P app for OS X that connects to multiple networks called Poisoned. And if you were to download something like this, I know you’d only use it legally and for the greater good of man. Right?

Page 3 of 5 | Previous page | Next page