When Apple announced that they were partnering with Starbucks, many people scratched their heads. I’ve now changed my tune. In fact, I think the plan should be expanded to more types of stores.

Here’s the basic idea…you walk into a Starbucks. While you’re waiting for your double peppermint soy latte, you notice that you happen to like the song that’s playing. You take out your iPhone or WiFi-capable iPod Touch and it tells you what song is currently playing, as well as what songs were playing previously (in case you didn’t realize you liked the song until after it stopped playing). You can then buy the song right from your iPhone and sync it back up to your computer when you get home. The program is now active in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, and will expand to more cities next year.

It’s not something I can see myself using frequently unless I start spending more time in Starbucks, but the idea is sound. This morning, I went to get a bagel from Bruegger’s and heard a song playing that caught my attention. It was a female singer who sounded somewhat like Kate Bush and sounded like it belonged to the late 80s-era alternative scene from England. The sound system wasn’t very good, but I thought I made out the lyrics “We could be dancing” as part of the chorus.

I hate not being able to figure out what song I’ve heard, so I hopped onto Google when I returned home and searched for ‘”We could be dancing” lyrics’ in Google, but came up with songs that sounded nothing like what I heard. Thinking I may have miss heard part of the lyrics, I modified the search to “could be dancing”, “you could be dancing”, “I could be dancing”, even “be dancing”. None of the songs were even close.

I then resorted to a different strategy. I knew Kate Bush had recently released a new album, so I checked out the most popular songs from it using iTunes - didn’t sound anything like what I had heard. I then thought further: who sounds like Kate Bush, may even sound like she has a British accent, but is more recent? Tori Amos. I tried searching for ‘”We could be dancing” “Tori Amos”‘ in Google but again came up short. I tried several purported lyrics search site as well as Melodyhound, a site that lets you enter a tune to search with using a virtual piano keyboard. Nothing.

In one last attempt, I went to iTunes and looked up Tori’s newest album and picked the most popular song, Bouncing Off Clouds. To my surprise, that was the song. It turns out the would “dancing” was actually “bouncing”. Who knew? If Bruegger’s had a system like Starbucks, it would have saved me a great deal of wasted time and frustration.

I’m generally a sucker for the latest gadget, but one I won’t be rushing to buy is Amazon’s first entry into the market, the Kindle. The Kindle is an attempt to create what Amazon calls “the iPod of books.” This slim, compact device is innovative in several ways. Instead of using a traditional LCD screen like most laptops and cell phones, it uses a technology called “ePaper”. This technology, though not yet available in color, looks more like a traditional paper page than a screen - it’s not backlit, and can be read more easily in a wide range of lighting conditions. Users have said it is comfortable to read this screen for long periods of time, though I personally don’t have much trouble reading a traditional LCD screen. As a result of this technology, the Kindle has an decent battery life (Amazon estimates you’ll need to recharge every other day).

The second innovation is the inclusion of EVDO wireless data support for “free”. EVDO is the high-speed data network technology used by Sprint and Verizon (it’s not clear who Amazon has teamed up with), so you’ll have internet connectivity at most locations. Of course, Amazon is giving this to you for free so you can buy eBooks instantly from anywhere

This sounds fabulous, doesn’t it? Free high-speed internet? You can browse the web from anywhere? As always, there’s a catch. While there is no monthly fee, you do pay for usage of this network (outside of buying books and using Wikipedia). Want to browse the web? Sorry, you can’t…only read customized newspaper feeds and blogs optimized for the Kindle. Well, at least those are free, right? Nope, you’ll pay for a newspaper subscription or a blog subscription, even though these are freely available online. And remember, the Kindle is black and white only. Want to use the Kindle to send a few quick emails? That will be 10 cents per message. What happened to “free”?

One feature that jumpstarted the iPod revolution was the ability to take material you already owned (i.e. CD’s) and copy the music onto your iPod. There’s nothing analogous for the Kindle. Amazon will convert some files to Kindle’s format, but you’ll have to go through them each time you want to, say, add a PDF to your Kindle (amazingly, the Kindle does not natively support PDF).

Lastly, there’s the price. $399 for the device alone, then you’ll have to pay more for each book. All this to have yet another device you’ll need to carry, one that isn’t really practical for anything other than reading Amazon’s eBooks. Don’t get me wrong, I think that electronic formats are the future of reading (if not the present), but the Kindle does too many things wrong for it to be worthwhile in its current format.

And, it’s really ugly…

I’m a big fan of Apple’s Aperture photo management software (quelle surprise, I know). It’s a professional-level software package that allows you to import, manage, organize, and edit digital photographs in their original RAW format (the highest quality, uncompressed format generated by digital SLRs). I do my photo work on my desktop computer, but often wish I had my photos available on my laptop. This would allow me to access the photos from anywhere, and would also make my MacBook a de facto mobile backup of my photo library.

After searching around, I’ve finally found a solution…and it’s free! After installing Aperture on both machines, you can use a built-in utility called rsync to keep the portable copy of your Aperture library up to date. While there are tools to manipulate rsync using a graphical interface, I choose to use the built-in Terminal application to directly work with rsync.

For this example, I’m assuming both machines are on the same network, though this need not be the case if you have your computer’s IP address and have it accessible over the internet. I’m also assuming that you’re using Aperture’s “managed library”, where the software stores all your photos in a single “package”.

From my MacBook, I enter the following at the command line:

rsync -avzE --delete username@desktop.local:/Users/username/Pictures/"Aperture\
Library.aplibrary"/ /Users/username/Pictures/"Aperture Library.aplibrary"/

Replace “username” with your username (it appears 3 times in the command line) and replace “desktop” with the name of your desktop machine.

I run this periodically to keep the portable version of my Aperture library up to date.

I am eagerly awaiting Friday’s delivery of “Leopard”, also known as Mac OS X 10.5, the latest update to the Mac operating system. This one appears o bring a lot of goods to the table including many interface tweaks, automatic integrated backup (see my previous post on Time Machine), performance improvements, and several new and updated programs.

Apple is planning one of their iPhone-like hype fests by closing down stores for a couple hours only to reopen at 6 for a big launch party. I’m not camping out for this one since there’s going to be no shortage of the software. Instead, it should be delivered right to my desk at work. I finally got to put that nice iPhone rebate to work. The early reports of this software are pretty good. We’ll see in a couple days.

It goes without saying, but I’m looking forward to the upcoming release of Apple’s Leopard operating system. There’s many new features, but I think one which they really nailed is Time Machine, which is described well in a nice article by AppleInsider. In it’s simplest use, Time Machine is a an extremely easy to use backup software. Most people don’t back up their computers, and it’s no surprise. Most of the time things computers work fine…except when they don’t. Having been a victim of hard drive crashes several times, I’ve become a appropriately maniacal about backing up. Now that all my photos (and soon videos) exist only in digital form, this becomes increasingly important.

Backing up has become considerably less painful since hard drive prices have plummeted in recent years. The only practical way to backup these days is to buy a hard drive equivalent in size to your main data storage and duplicate your data on a regular basis; I do it nightly. You can get away with buying a slightly smaller drive and copying only the essential files, but it’s not really worth it. You can also use fancy mechanisms like a RAID that automatically keeps a copy of itself in real time, but I find this method makes it to easy to accidentally delete a file that’s important only to have it instantly deleted from your backup as well.

AppleInsider does a nice job with the ins and outs of Time Machine, but the basic idea is that it backs up your computer automatically once you assign a backup drive. After you’ve done one full backup, it will only backup what’s changed since the last time you backed up. It does this hourly, in the background, without you having to do anything. What’s great is that, space permitting, it keeps “snapshots” of the your hard drive at various points in time, so you can go back to retrieve a file you deleted a few months ago if there’s enough space to keep it around (hence the name “Time Machine”.

Apple’s magic, as usual, is not as much in the technology as in the interface, which interoperates with other programs. If you activate Time Machine while running iPhoto, the interface is optimized for finding old photos. If you activate it while performing a search, you can search various time points in the past. You can also do the traditional restore of your entire hard drive in the event of a crash.

October 26 is the rumored release date for this next version of the Mac operating system.

Apparently, some of the iPhone “hackers” who tried to modify their iPhone to work with carriers other than AT&T are finding out their phone doesn’t work after upgrading to the latest firmware from Apple. These hacks work by modifying the modem firmware on the device, and some of them do this irreversibly. Oops. The latest firmware is running pretty smoothly on my device.

I tried the iTunes WiFi Music Store today to buy an album directly from the iPhone. I have to say, it was pretty convenient. If you’re away from your main computer but want to pick up some tracks, you can do it from any WiFi connection. If there was only more open WiFi in the Boston area…

There’s a range of reactions to Apple’s recent price drop of $200 off the iPhone. The more spacious 8 GB version dropped in price from $599 to $399, and the low-end 4 GB model was discontinued. Many on-the-fence purchasers have been persuaded to loosen their grip on their credit cards when in the Apple store and push the sales tally over 1 million.

A few early adopters who payed the $599 are upset, saying that they are owed a refund. Some iPhone purchasers may not be used to the ups and downs of living on the cutting edge, but for many of us this is nothing new. It’s the cost of being the first on the block to have the latest and greatest. For me, $200 is the price I pay for owning the iPhone for the past 2 months…and I would do it again. It’s simply not worth suffering with older cell phones and lugging two devices everywhere.

Fortunately, Apple has placated many of the whiners by offering a $100 credit. They didn’t have to do this, but I think it’s a smart move overall to pacify the complainers. To be fair, the price drop did come rather soon after the release, but Apple had no choice. The population who would pay $599 for a cell phone has likely been exhausted, and the $399 price point opens up the market considerably.

After a tiff with Apple over pricing, NBC announced today that they would not renew their iTunes contracts for their TV shows. As their contract ended in December, they would plan to stop offering new shows on iTunes at the end of the calendar year. Why? NBC wants to raise prices above the current $1.99 per show (up to as high as $4.99) and bundle shows as packages. They also wanted more restrictive copy protection. Apple thinks their pricing is too high and wants unifromity. Hence the spat. The other major networks and many cable channels offer material on iTunes, which allows viewers to purchase ad-free shows for viewing on their computers or iPods. Apple fired back that they will not offer any of the new season of NBC shows starting in late September.

These may all be public negotiating tactics and we may well see a new deal before next month is done, but it highlights a problem in the industry’s transition to online entertainment. Traditional studios are still unsure of the market and are still feeling out the limits of what people are willing to pay to have downloadable copies of their shows. The insistence on restrictive digital rights management (DRM) copy protection highlights this. The copy protection aims to limit the number of devices the shows can be played on, but in practice only hampers the honest users. Most shows are readily available (albeit illegally) on internet sites, often in higher quality than what Apple offers. People use iTunes because it’s convenient (they don’t need to scour the net for their shows), because the ads are already trimmed out, and because the shows are pre-formatted for their iPods. I expect that NBCs move will end up driving more people toward piracy.

Part of the problem, though, is a result of Apple’s success. They are essentially THE online media marketplace at the moment, and this makes studios uneasy. It’s up to Apple to ensure they don’t abuse their power, but ultimately I think they are in the right on this one. $1.99 is already fairly steep for a single episode of a TV show, and prices of $4.99 are simply ridiculous. Perhaps NBC should stick with offering ad-supported shows on iTunes for free until they can figure out a business model that works.

I remember my parents first buying a camcorder some time in the 1980s. They transitioned from the noisy film-based movie cameras (that required a reel-to-reel projector for playback) to a not-so-compact Sony 8mm camcorder. At the time, I recall the salesman exclaiming his belief that the 8mm tape format would last far into the future. And it did…surprisingly long. Though supplanted somewhat by DVC tapes now, the basic concept is the same: record the video onto tape, which serves both archival and playback functions. It’s works fine if you keep your tapes labeled and organized, and if you typically like to watch the entire tape in a single sitting, but it is hardly convenient.

Look at what’s happened to photography - it’s rare to see people using film-based cameras these days, and for good reason. There’s no recurring media cost with digital images. You can easily snap one or two pictures and upload them for sharing immediately. Not so with tape - it’s impractical to digitize a few minutes of video tape at a time. The tape has to be rewound to the correct spot and you run the risk of either missing material for upload or uploading the same material twice.

My assumption, of course, that the ultimate destination of the video is the computer, but that’s clearly where this technology is heading. Bandwidth is good enough to easily share standard definition video across the internet, and even HD video is practical for those with high-speed connections. DVD-based recorders are a reasonable stop-gap measure, but you still end up with a pile of discs at the end of it. Two more exciting options are hard disk and flash based camcorders, with the latter being the more promising option. Hard disk camcorders record to a hard disk (no great surprise there). The large capacity of small hard disks enables the videographer to record 30 or more hours of footage before capacity is exhausted. When the camera is connected to the computer, the video is uploaded and removed from the hard disk.

This works well, but has a few limitations. If you’re on a long vacation and want to record more hours than your hard disk can support, you’ll need to bring along a computer (still, 30 hours is a lot of footage). More importantly, however, hard disks have moving parts and are prone to crashing, risking the loss of hours of irreplaceable video. Flash-based camcorders store video on solid-state memory, typically the same SD cards used for digital cameras. While the high-capacity cards can only store 1-2 hours of HD video, that’s more than enough for most people, and you can easily pick up additional cards if you run out of capacity without a computer handy.

Luddites will argue that tapes offer a timeless backup. With continuously advancing media technology, however, you’ll have to keep aging cameras available and working in order to play back older formats. Once in the digital realm, older video formats can usually be converted to more modern formats with ease. It’s also fairly easy to automate backups on the computer.

The main problem, up until now, has been the lack of decent, affordable SD-card HD camcorders. One of the prime contenders is the Panasonic HDC-SD5, a more compact and streamlined version of their popular HDC-SD1. The smallest HD camcorder (at least for now), this upcoming model looks to be fully equipped with the all the key buzzword features (though it loses the surround-sound capability of its predecessor). Samsung enters the fray this fall with its SC-HMX10, a similarly compact HD-camcorder. The Panasonic model offers a higher, “full HD” 1080p resolution using the somewhat contentious AVCHD video format which can compress large amounts of video into small amounts of memory at the cost of some motion artifacts and limited compatibility with editing software (notably, Apple’s iMovie recently gained AVCHD compatibility). Samsung offers the lower 720p HD resolution, but comes in at a cheaper price ($799 vs Panasonic’s $999) and uses the popular H.264 video format.

Both of these look appealing and will be available in the next month or two. The real question will be what the quality looks like once they get into users hands. Low-light video (i.e. most indoor recording) is a challenge for many small camcorders, and it will be important to see how these two stack up. Regardless, I know there’s one thing my next camcorder won’t have: a tape drive.