Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

Every once in awhile, someone asks me to add a toolbar to Cocoalicious. As much as I appreciate the fine art of the OS X toolbar icon, however, I’ve always balked at this request. The main reason is that I’m very keen on keeping the Cocoalicious interface minimalist, and the standard Cocoa toolbar is, well, anything but. Cocoalicious also happens to use a metal textured window (yes, I know, boo hiss—cry me a river), and I have come to feel that the average OS X toolbar icon looks kind of lame on metal (see Adam Betts on this).

I definitely recognize the need for more intuitive access to some of the app’s more common functions, though, so I asked my brother to design a standard set of those little, plastic-looking buttons used in Safari. Always one to rise to the challenge, Bobby produced a lovely set of 100 icons (50 in the off state, 50 in the on state), which he calls “Expedition.” It’s now available from his site for $75. I’ve already bought a set for use in Cocoalicious, so look for them to appear in a future build.

Last night a friend and I were at the bar of a popular Las Vegas nightclub called rumjungle. We were sitting next to a trio of attractive, cosmopolitan young ladies, who were in the process of being chatted up by a trio of eager young men. At one point, my ears pricked up, because the topic of their conversation had turned to the iPod. The girls all professed their deep love for Apple’s chic music player, and everyone took turns enthusing about their devices’ respective song counts. Meanwhile, on the screens above the bar and dance floor, some familiar looking psychedelic computer graphics were pulsating. If that left any doubt as to which popular jukebox application was providing the evening’s soundtrack, a white Apple logo soon materialized to dispell them.

To say that Apple has gained some mindshare in the music business lately would, I think, be a severe understatement.

Interestingly, there was even a ray of hope for those of us who work on Apple’s less sexy, non-music products: one of the girls went one step further and proudly announced that she had gone “all Mac for everything,” which struck me as a pretty geeky topic of conversation for the mating ritual (at least outside of Silicon Valley). Could it actually be possible that “Hey baby, I work on Mac OS X” is about to become an effective pickup line? One can dream…

I don’t think I really took enough away from Bloggercon III to muster any sort of coherent essay, so I thought I’d just write up a few random observations:

• Dave Winer’s “unconference” concept isn’t a bad idea, but I think it was executed poorly. The “free discussion” model that Dave is trying to promote isn’t new—in fact it has actually been done successfully in college classrooms for years. The key is that the moderators need not abdicate their roles as discussion leaders, but rather should actively structure the conversation and guide it toward some conclusions. The problem with the Bloggercon sessions was that any speaker could steer the discussion into complete tangents, based purely on whatever nits they had to pick. The people who run next year’s Bloggercon sessions should try taking a literature class to see how class discussion is properly managed.
• The idea of Bloggercon as a “user conference” was confusing, and left many of the “techies” and vendors in the audience unclear whether or not they were allowed to speak up at all. It didn’t help that Dave Winer, true to form, shut down Bob Wyman in the most pointed way possible during Robert Scoble’s “Overload” session, alleging (I think unfairly) that he was promoting commercial interests. This, of course, ensured that “meta-discussions” about the rules of the conference regularly distracted from the matters at hand.
• As is usually the case with conferences, the best part was hanging out with people. I particularly enjoyed talking to Dan Wood about what I’m doing with Cocoal.icio.us and what he’s up to these days (an enigmatic secret project), Scott Knaster about a super cool upcoming project of his, Dori Smith about an equally cool upcoming project of hers (sorry I can’t give more details on these things), Min Jung Kim about working on her roommate’s campaign for San Francisco schoolboard, Courtney Patubo about all the blog meetups I’m missing these days, and Tantek Çelik about his, shall we say, pointed criticisms of OS X and his experiments with hCard and hCal.
• At any given time, I think only about half the audience was paying attention to the sessions. I personally was ready to commit a whole bunch of Cocoal.icio.us changes to CVS by the closing session. In that sense, at least, I suppose the conference was highly productive.
• Stanford Law School’s lecture rooms have Aeron chairs. If my university experience had included Aeron chairs, I think I probably would have spent a lot more time in class!

When Cory Doctorow lashed out over Apple’s disabling a third party iPod song copying plugin in iTunes 4.7, I decided to be prudent and bite my tongue, even though, as the author of a similar product, I naturally have an opinion about the matter. But sitting in Adam Curry’s Podcasting session at Bloggercon today, and listening to suggestions that Apple might somehow move to shut down podcasting, followed by a litany of grave “don’t trust Apple” warnings, I felt my blood pressure rising again and knew I wouldn’t be able to keep quiet. Unfortunately, time ran out before I could comment in the session, so I’m going to ignore my better judgement and post my comments here (the usual disclaimer applies: completely my opinions, not my employer’s).

As I see it, there are two problems with the suggestion that Apple might shut down podcasting. First, the only realistic way for Apple to stand in the way of an app like iPodder would be to shut down iTunes’ AppleScript interface and/or remove iPod support for open formats like MP3 (which someone in the session seriously suggested they might). The latter would amount to commercial suicide (witness Sony’s unfortunate experiment with an ATRAC only audio player), and the former would be unlikely because there are Apple products that rely on iTunes AppleScript (e.g. GarageBand). Second, it assumes Apple would have any reason to even care about how people get content for their iPod outside of Apple’s own applications.

And this brings me back to my criticism of Cory Doctorow’s screed, which is that he is missing an important point about the nature of the iPodDownload plugin that iTunes 4.7 disabled: it operates within iTunes. It essentially modifies iTunes itself so that it can be used to circumvent iTunes’ “no copying from the iPod” policy (it also violates Apple’s stated iTunes plugin license). By contrast, my own, standalone application, PodWorks, has been around for almost two years now, and has never been challenged by Apple (even though Apple could easily have made life difficult for me by constantly changing the database format, or encrypting it, sicking the lawyers on me, or things like that). Because PodWorks is a standalone application that has nothing to do with Apple, Apple just doesn’t have any reason to be concerned about it.

In my estimation, what it all comes down to is this: Apple is still walking a fine line between giving consumers what they deserve and giving the record companies what they want. In order to continue striking this balance, Apple must avoid any appearance that it is facilitating intellectual property theft, and thus must prevent its music platform from becoming a direct accessory to piracy. I don’t think anyone at Apple has the anti-consumer agenda that Doctorow suggests (“eat shit and die!”). If someone actually did, I can assure that PodWorks, at least, would have disappeared a long time ago.

Assuming I can drag myself from San Francisco to Palo Alto early enough tomorrow morning, I’m planning to be at Stanford Law School for Dave Winer’s “unconference,” Bloggercon III. If you’re going to be there (and can figure out who I am), feel free to say hello.