Music is the best.
By popular demand, here’s most of the music that played between sessions at An Event Apart Seattle 2007 (requires iTunes). The complete playlist can be viewed on iLike.
[tags]aneventapart, imix, itunes, music, mixes[/tags]
At long last, the new iTunes upgrade lets you replace DRM versions of music you bought at the iTunes store with new, higher-quality, non-DRM-protected versions. Everyone must be as happy as I was; the whole world apparently bought non-DRM-protected versions of its music today. How else to explain the inability of Apple’s server to deliver the purchased music?
I’ve got 45 files stuck in a download queue that blazes along at about 16 bytes per second, yes, I said bytes, before timing out and locking up. (Screen shots: 1, 2.) The first 50 files or so downloaded at normal speed; then everything ground to a halt, and it’s been that way for hours.
I don’t mind waiting for Apple to sort its network problems. I just wish iTunes would quit nudging me to sign in and download files that are just plumb stuck.
Speaking of music and bandwidth problems, in less than two weeks of use I have become addicted to iLike™. This clever web app uses iTunes APIs to keep track of the music you are playing and “watch” the music your friends are playing via a sidebar that installs itself in iTunes.
Think of it as part Truman Show, part personal radio station. Nobody will know you’re dissecting a moose, but everyone knows you’re listening to Barry Manilow. Insidiously and almost overnight, the app changes the way you listen to music. It might even change the music you listen to. (You might stop listening to Barry.)
With iLike, you can preview your friends’ music, recommend tracks to others, find free music by little-known bands that matches the music you’re listening to, and lots more. It’s a great little application. But the developers need more servers. The app often crawls. At times it’s too underpowered and overtaxed to find your friends’ music, or to record the music you just listened to. Sometimes it even goes offline, and then what do you have? Just you, listening to music. Which suddenly seems not to be enough.
[tags]itunes, ilike, web apps, bandwidth[/tags]
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web and founder of the W3C, announces reforms:
It is really important to have real developers on the ground involved with the development of HTML. It is also really important to have browser makers intimately involved and committed. And also all the other stakeholders….
Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn’t work.
[tags]W3C, webdirections, accessibility, haslayout, browsers, mcsweeney’s, folkways[/tags]
Baseball weather has come to NYC. And a baseball stadium is where we’ll hold An Event Apart Atlanta in just a few days’ time. If global warming worked the other way — if the winters were getting colder each year — the world’s governments would have already worked together to reverse global warming. But when winter grows milder and spring arrives sooner, it feels so good it’s hard to realize how bad it is. But I digress.
We’re busy prepping for Atlanta, so here are some links:
I blame Mark Simonson.
