iTunes

iLife ‘09: It looks like iMovie ‘09 is fixing some of the “dumbing-down” that occurred with the previous verison. I don’t do much with DV nowadays, but I would be interested with giving the new iMovie a try. The interface - with those weird pop-up menus - is wandering into dangerously un-Mac-like territory, though. Hmm.

As for iPhoto, I never really did use it, but the new features for geotagging and Flickr and Facebook export look cool. The face recognition is… a little creepy, I think. Can it work with pets, I wonder? Or how about children that have grown into adults?

GarageBand’s new tutorials look cool, but I can’t help but wonder if they’re more gimmicky than useful. I’ll keep an eye on reviews, and if they’re positive, maybe I’ll pick it up and give learning the guitar one more try.

iWork ‘09: Evolutionary steps. Nothing too exciting in my opinion. I wonder how iWork.com works? Are they PDFs?

17” MacBook Pro: Lust-inducing. However, I’m not too hot on the non-replacable battery idea, even if it does last for eight marketing-hours (six and a half human-hours, maybe). I’m currently having problems with my 15” MPB’s battery; it only lasts about five minutes, and when it empties out, it powers off hard instead of going to sleep. Seventeen-inch laptops are a bit too big for me, though - not to mention expensive.

New iTunes stuff: No DRM! Yay! I already upgraded everything that iTunes would let me to the DRM-free versions. The lack of DRM is one of the reasons I’ve been heading to Amazon’s music store first instead of the iTunes store recently.

Staggered pricing! Um… yay? I guess this is something that had to be done in order for the music companies to let Apple sell DRM-free music, but, well… nobody likes paying more. They’re saying that significant chunks of the library will use the cheaper 69-cent rate, though. Well, we’ll see.

Phil Schiller: I’m watching the live restream of the show. Phil kinda looks like my dad, and I think he’s doing a good job. If Apple reverses their decision to not come to Macworld any more - and I think they should - I think he’ll do a competent job of keynoting in the future.

You might have heard about the recent release of iTunes if you’ve read any sort of tech-related web site lately. The program has two new “genius” features; the Genius Sidebar and the ability to create a Genius Playlist. The Genius Sidebar is a clear ploy to get you to spend more money at the iTunes Store; as you play a song, it recommends albums and songs by the same or similar groups in the sidebar. It doesn’t seem to be the best designed as it often recommends songs I already own and have in iTunes… but it did successfully get $20 out of me the other day.

You see, as I played a song by Japanese rock group the pillows (lower-case intentional), it suggested I buy their two latest albums in the iTunes store. I was flabbergasted, as the company that was releasing their albums domestically has been MIA for over a year and a half and I hadn’t heard anything about a new deal being inked. I searched Amazon (both their CD section and their MP3 section) for the albums, but they weren’t to be found. It appears that Apple managed to make a deal to distribute their music digitally stateside, even though nobody is distributing their actual physical CD.

Now ever since Amazon started up Amazon MP3, I haven’t purchased anything from iTunes. Amazon offers DRM-free MP3s I can play on the Sansa Clip I picked up after the headphone jack on my iPod busted. (I still use it in my car.) But I had to give in and come crawling back to the iTunes Store to get those albums. So that’s how Apple’s unspectacular Genius Sidebar nevertheless succeeded in getting twenty bucks out of me.

Anyway, the Genius Playlist feature is more spectacular, as well as cheaper. Select a song, press a button, and it builds a playlist of similar songs to the one you selected and starts playing. I’ve used it a couple of times, and have been consistently surprised about how smart it is about grouping together complementary songs. It seems to favor hit songs. Check out the result of selecting a Red Hot Chili Peppers song in the image above.

iTunes 8 also includes new visualizers. Now I didn’t exactly write a master’s thesis on digital signal processing or anything like that, but is it really so hard to make a visualizer that matches music? I’ve never really been impressed with any of the ones I’ve seen, on iTunes or any other programs. Interestingly, the Stix visualizer, which is the most visibly simple (it’s just a single colored orb flying around in 2D), also seems to be the one which matches music the closest.