I vaguely recall a quote from Henry Ford saying that customers could purchase a model t Ford in any color they wanted as long as it was Black.  That is apparently the approach that Palm has taken with the Pre on many areas, especially on the music manager.  You can use any music manager you like, but the Pre will only work with itunes.

That’s just fantastic if you already use itunes, like itunes, want to keep using itunes etc.

If you manage your music in Windows Media Player, Real, Winamp or just play music from folders on your hard drive or something, well then you are kind of stuck with Model T coloring.

Personally, I use Windows Media Player.  Is it better than itunes, is it superior to Winamp?

No idea and I don’t care.  I use it, because that is what I use, have used, and what I have thousands and thousands and thousands of songs organized within.  So to have to switch to itunes, basically means that ALL of my songs are now lost and disorganized in itunes and I have to start from scratch.

Not cool, but as an early adopter of a new device, I realize that the customer is not always right.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d be just as un-right if I were trying to use an iphone, but that’s kind of expected from Apple, because they are the screwy fools that made itunes!  Palm’s been working with other music players for years and years and doing it pretty damn well from my past experiences with treos, handsprings, palms etc.

I guess, I’m currently hoping that some non-Apple fan boy at Palm stands up and says, “hey some of our customers don’t love Apple just because, maybe we should give them some music player options on the Pre, after all we are trying to save our company with this phone, no point in alienating Windows Media Player users.”

Oh, and while you’re at it, don’t forget to fast track that Audible project.

I still really like the Palm Pre, but after my first Palm Pre died the yesterday, and Palm sent me on a 150 minute wild goose chase through technical support, I guess you could say the honeymoon period is over.  Oh, and if you are wondering what all those crazy stupid ‘itunes’ hyperlinks are for, you can find the same links by doing a google search with the keywords ‘itunes sucks’. 

Note. I’m a blogger, not a journalist.  I’m purposefully subjective, and prefer to look at the applied uses of gadgets and software in specific unique circumstances, and at extreme tolerances.  If you are looking for a generic ‘review’ of something, you have mistakenly come to the wrong place.  We don’t sell black model t cars here, we offer chartreuse model t’s with glitter pain jobs, flames on the hood, and well, that analogy is a little tired, but we don’t do generic reviews here.  If you want generic and objective, go over to Cnet and read a paragraph with a lot of verbage that you probably could have found in a Palm press release.

After I have had some more hands on with the actual player on the Pre, I’ll cover that again soon.  At first glance, the sound (and the headphones that come with the Pre) are excellent.  I would like to see software improvements in the following:

• the ability to adjust volume on the touch screen
• the ability to delete a song from the device (haven’t found this yet, if it exists, then it needs to be added as an option in more spots
• the ability to convert part of a song into a ring tone.  The G1 (android) from T-Mobile has this capability and it was excellent, a little music editor that you could select part or all of a song and set it as a ringtone or notification.  The ringtones that come standard with the Pre are about as diverse as a gaggle of Canadian Geese
• the ability to drag and drop songs up and down within the play list as the songs are playing (mixing on the fly)
• The ability to rate songs with stars on a 1 to 5 rating level and then later play songs by rating level, and better yet, have it update my computer files
• push button notification to update my facebook letting people know what song I’m listening to & maybe it includes a YouTube link if it can find one, or an Amazon MP3 sales link on my Amazon Associates account so I can make a fortune of my friends. 

But like I said, haven’t had a chance to think about this much yet . . .

From a Palm Pre perspective, I found this test to be very similar to my own results.  However, I think the lady using the Pre might have pushed a couple buttons wrong on the browser test, which might have slowed her down even more.

I am still stunned every time I use the camera.  The Palm Pre is actually faster than my crappy Kodak 10 mp camera with HD.

If you are getting an error that states that the Music Assistant from Palm designed for the Palm Pre is ‘Unable to find a compatible desktop music application’ then you likely do not have itunes installed on your machine.

The Palm Pre Music assistant does not work with Windows Media Player. 

That said, if you are an itunes lover, you should be happy because Palm found a great way to get access to itunes and you will have a lot of functionality syncing up your itunes collection to your Pre.

Problem Solution

Simply download itunes from Apple (free download that only requires your email address).  Install the application.

If you do not want itunes to be your default player, make sure you uncheck these boxes during installation

Be warned the itunes installation is long and slow.  Its not like installing Microsoft Office or Vista upgrade slow, but for a music player it is ridiculously slow and long, even on a new, fast machine.

Even AFTER you install itunes, it still has to be configured!  Watch out for this gem, sure to ruin your day if you are not expecting it and just hit the next button repeatedly through the itunes configuration process.

And when the program finally does run for the first time, it tries to find my music files, but doesn’t allow me to tell it where I keep my files (portable hard drive) it just assumes I keep them in ‘My Music’, plus it then goes and cycles through every image and movie file on my hard drive. 

If you have gigabytes of music, as I do, be prepared for a bit of a wait on this step too.  (understandable having to wait on this part, but the other steps and slowness gets you just annoyed to forget that this one is probably normal) I have been buying cd’s for almost 20 years so I have hundreds of gigabytes of music .. . I started downloading itunes at 2:02 pm, by 2:28 pm I was at this stage and waiting for thousands of songs to get processed into my itunes installation. 

Update at 3:04 pm it was still trying to process, I noticed that for about 5 minutes, itunes just seemed to lock up, wouldn’t minimize, showed no status, I thought it had crashed and then it started up again, processing more songs.  (1 hour and waiting for music!)

OK, at 3:20, I noticed that it seemed to have ‘found’ all of my music, but its now converting some of those files that are in .wma file format.  (I didn’t approve this, and have no idea how long it will take, or even if I want these files converted, might be garbage or something for all I know.)

Don’t expect to have music in your Pre quickly!

Correction, If you have a Pandora account, you can get the Pandora App and start listening to music via Pandora very quickly, but that is not exactly YOUR music.  So if you must have music now, listen to Pandora while Apple itunes wastes a couple hours of your computer cycles.

Once you FINALLY have itunes running, this is the screen you should see to start the actual import process of music to your Palm Pre. 

Congratulations You Survived! 

The Palm Pre is excellent at managing contacts even though they limit themselves largely to the pitfalls of working with gmail and facebook (as opposed to say Outlook, Plaxo or Linkedin, much better professional sources for contacts), but the music side of this device is a little over looked in its initial release.

A friend of mine recently stated that they wanted to learn graphics and wondered if I could recommend any good websites.

Graphics is a pretty wide ranging topic and my own experience is still growing so this is the response I provide, which might help other people as well.

  ~~~~~~~

What type of graphics are you trying to learn? There’s a pretty wide range of potential items to consider.

Camtasia is considered to be one of the best screen video capture and editing programs. Its not cheap at about $300 or $180 with an education discount. Camtasia studio comes bundled with SnagIT also (normally about $30). SnagIt is pretty much an essential tool for bloggers doing static screen shots, but its actually kind of cool for creating flash images rapidly and on the fly with clickable or hover over items.

On the graphics side I use the following programs regularly:

1. Snagit for day to day blogging images and basic image manipulation – sometimes some light web design graphic images.
2. Camtasia – Excellent for turning a presentation into a video (any format including flash) You can also capture video of your computer screen with easy zoom and focusing options.
1. 
3. Jing – free video capture program made by TechSmith that also makes Camtasia. This is a very limited video capture program, very easy. Only enables output to swf files for embedding as flash (no .avi or .wmv or .mov options which means you can’t make the video viral)
4. Fireworks – good for taking a graphic designed image and converting a concept into a web page in Dreamweaver (made by Macromedia owned by Adobe and bundled with Creative Suite 3)
5. Photoshop – Good for creating the designed image above to make a web site concept (made by Adobe bundled in Creative Suite 3)
6. Illustrator – Good for logos and other parts of images to then send to Photoshop  (also bundled in Creative Suite 3)
7. Flash – I actually don’t use this much the last 9 months. SnagIt and Camtasia(this month) are probably going to cover most of my flash work as they make it easier than Flash itself.  (bundled in Creative Suite 3 also)

Money Savings Tip! Now Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash all come together if you buy Adobe Creative Suite 3.  That retails for $1700 unless you are student.  Then you can buy it for about $589  through Campus Tech.

That may seem like a lot for a student, but it is not all that much and if you are a college student that needs to find a way to make $600 to buy the software, I can help point you in the right direction.  If you are not a college student, but you want your school aged children to learn how to use this software, they can qualify for an educational discount if they are in k – 12 or in college. 

For an $1100 savings, it might not hurt to go sign up for some college courses yourself.  Might have to forego a new pair of Nike golf shoes and some time on the links, but picking up some new job skills and learning how to use this great software could do your career some wonders.

All that said we are both doing it the hard way. Graphics is much much easier if you have a Mac. Doing graphics on a PC is like doing this stuff with your mouse hand tied behind your back.  (my friend and I both came out of the corporate world and still rely to heavily on personal computers)

Not sure what you are trying to do first with graphics, but I’d recommend getting the software above as you prioritize it and then learning it. Once you figure out which software program you are trying to learn I can probably help you more figuring out where to go.

I have a weird and slightly lazy dream to some day sit in my favorite recliner and productively work my tail off in comfort.  A couple months back, I even did a little experiment.  I positioned my portable projector from the office at the ceiling of my house and reclined a recliner back.  I set up my laptop keyboard on an inclined keyboard holder and typed away while laying back and looking straight ahead at the ceiling.

I’ll admit that it worked but not as well as I would have liked.  I was very comfortable, but the distance was a little to short to get the projected image large enough to be comfortable. 

Canon does have some new projectors that have an amazing capacity to make very large images from a short distance.  You can even look at a mindmap at like 20% zoom and see the individual topics extremely clearly but I digress.

Anyway, my idea or day dream was slightly reinforced about a week and a half back while I was attending CES in Las Vegas.  I came across the i-FI chair that I would describe as a recliner with the sound system built into it. 

Now, I have never been terribly impressed with the concepts of investing in home theater furniture such that you feel like you have a miniature movie theater in your house.  I’ll take a great couch or recliner any day.  I do not need something that feels like a goofy theater seat chair.

Plus, I have three kids under 10 and its not too hard for them to regularly recreate that spilled sticky ambience on any given surface in the house!

Amazing Voice Clarity in the Sound

Now, as I test drove this chair at CES, I rapidly learned what almost everyone there learned.  The sound quality is not only great, but for very loud movies engineered for surround sound, you can understand what people are saying as if there is not a lot of surround sound background noise. 

I’m sure you’ve probably watched a movie at home where you had to turn the sound up to 40 to hear the words and then when the action picks up, all the trim in your house is vibrated away to dust.  This chair seems to eliminate that catch 22.  Plus, it has a very cool built in ability to create a sound vibration in the chair without cranking up a sub woofer that can be felt in the ground from 10 miles away like listening to a freight train through a rail road track.

(video of the LA Times here, I’m standing in the background in some of the frames, but the LA times video is kind of rough, they are writers and not film types I guess)

 

All in all, I’m not crazy about the name that the i-Fi Company has come up with but in all fairness this is not only a chair for to work with your home entertainment system, but it is also an iPod accessory that enables you to dock your iPod.  So they seem to have the obligatory ‘i’ in the name.  That said, I can’t think of a better name to counter my critical view of their name, so I guess I should just leave it there.  Its priced at about the level you could expect for a high end comfortable leather recliner.

I was just reading over at Family Matters, who in the great spirit of the blogosphere was nice enough to quote arstechnica.com, who reported from MacWorld that Apple is picking up the licensing engine for Dragon Naturally Speaking, throwing out iListen and pushing in Dragon Naturally Speaking into MacSpeech in a product called Dictate (in beta).

I came out of the fortune 500 corporate finance world powered by PC’s and the Mac was always some obscure piece of equipment that under funded*(or over funded depending on your perspective) art schools tended to use to get work done.  Over the last 2-3 years, that inbred corporate perspective has been changed as I started to do a great deal more work with graphics, video, audio and web design.

One of the things keeping me on the fence from making a final conversion or at least making an addition to my computer collection in the form of an Apple iBook or an Apple Air (odd name in that I want a computer with substance as opposed to a box filled with . . . .) is the absence of 2 tools.  One is a better version of MindManager for the Mac and the other is a great speech recognition program, preferably Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Here’s the quote from the articles I mentioned above:

ars technica reports from MacWorld:

As Nate noted on his staff journal this week, MacSpeech has now licensed the technology behind Dragon Naturally Speaking for its new product, MacSpeech Dictate (iListen is no more). MacSpeech claims that, with Nuance’s speech processing engine, Dictate is more accurate than iListen ever could be. We hit up the MacSpeech booth on the Macworld Expo floor to find out more about the software.

First off, Dictate is not shipping yet (contrary to conflicting reports on the Web). The software is still in beta, and we weren’t allowed to play with it directly—instead, we had to watch a demo. With Dictate, “training” the software to your voice only takes ten minutes, the company claims, which will then bring the software up to 95 percent accuracy. From there, it learns based on your speech. Like Dragon (read Nate’s review for more detail), there are a number of commands you can use to correct errors if they crop up, in addition to commands that can be used to open, close, switch, and otherwise control various Mac applications. If more than one person uses your Mac and wants to use Dictate, you can set up different profiles for each person’s voice—in addition to plain ol’ American English, Dictate is capable of understanding a number of accents, including (as our demo showed us) Australian English. [Read entire article.]

My wallet won’t be happy ($199 – includes headset) but my carpal tunnel can’t wait for the release. Stay tuned, I’ll be talking about this a lot more.

Family Matters » » MacSpeech Announces Dictate

*  My wife graduated from a great art school called the Savannah College of Art and Design.  I do believe that art schools can teach very useful knowledge, skills and abilities that society needs for many purposes. 

** On a complete side note if you want to find a great weekend getaway I highly endorse Savannah.  Break out your beach stuff, and pack up your travel gear and check out Savannah.  I highly recommend it in April when the flowers and trees are blooming and the beach is hot but not too hot.

So iPhone users are starting to experience the joy that comes from doing business with the worlds oldest phone company, at&t.  Their iPhone web surfing and texting transactions are itemized and printed out on detailed pages.

One user put together this short little video showing her 300 PAGE phone bill from at&t.

She posts a nice message at the end of the video encouraging people not to kill forests with their iPhone and change their default billing format to something that won’t require a back brace to move from the mail box to the house.

Disclaimer: I refuse to do business with at&t on principle. They slammed me into a $2.50 per minute calling plan in 2000 when I relocated from Illinois to Florida. They didn’t ask me nor did they tell me that they had slammed me into a higher rate. I didn’t learn about it until I received a long distance bill for $1,000+ Their response to their practice was almost as bad as the bill. As a result I will never do business with at&t again. I’m sure at&t will win over the hearts and minds of iPhone users across the US in similar fashion.

Its not exactly a problem I could call a product liability attorney about, but it sure did raise my blood pressure for several months as I had to deal with customer support on hold for about a total of 50 hours. (unsuccessfully I might add, I had to pay their trumped up bill in full and on time or risk having thems sabotage my credit for their thieving business practice.)

Here’s a simple alert that should ring true with your common sense.  Wearing headphones for your iPod during a lightning storm is a good way to blow your mind, literally.  A man wearing headphones attached to his iPod was struck by lightning.

Now that would typically flash over a person and a minor amount of damage would happen.  However, when the electricity hits something metallic, like headphones in the ears, or the wire attached to the iPod or that shiny metal backed iPod itself, that electricity is going to burn and penetrate. (Listening to MP3s in a storm could blow your mind – health)

So if a storm crops up, get out of harms way.  Leave the iPod home or in the car.  You might even want to pick up a water proof accessory to drop your iPod into if it starts to storm so that you’ll be protected from the burn.

But if you just have to listen to your music while you are outside in a lightning storm maybe you should pick up some car or truck accessories that let you crank up your music or audio book and blast it from your vehicle at a distance.

That or just take a day off from exercise.

You probably remember seeing some of the media hype running up to and through the iPhone launch on June 29. You probably heard some of the estimates that the iPhone could, would and had sold 500,000 iPhones the first couple days it was on the market. Well, if those numbers seemed suspicious to you, then give yourself a pat on the back for being able to cut through the spin.

AT&T said it signed up 146,000 iPhone customers, well below analyst estimates, which ran as high as 500,000 units. Shares of Apple were down as much as 5 percent in early trading and about 2.5 percent at midday, trading around $140. AT&T?s shares were down less than 1 percent, at slightly under $40.

AT&T has an exclusive deal with Apple to provide wireless service for the iPhone, the combination digital music player, cellular phone and Internet device. The phone went on sale on June 29, two days before the quarter ended, amid fanfare surpassed only by the release of the final ?Harry Potter? book last week.

AT&T Earnings Up, but iPhone Sales Disappoint – New York Times

Selling a cellphone is for good or bad currently about signing up a subscriber. No subscriber is pretty much no sale. Carriers own the market for good or bad and possibly until Google attempts to ‘open’ the market with their own variety of Information Monopoly. At&t released their 2nd quarter numbers and it shows that the iPhone did not due even half as well as the news media claimed. The iPhone didn’t sell 500k nor 400k nor even 250k. It sold 146k.

So there was a lot of hype in those numbers. Now sure, you could argue that some people bought the iPhone from an Apple store. You could say there were difficulties with people getting signed up with At&t resulting from buying from an Apple store even. But let’s think about that for a second.

1. If you make the argument that the sales came from Apple Stores (say 364,000 units sold), then that would indicate that only Apple can sell the iPhone most of the time and that At&t doesn’t know what they are doing. Now I wouldn’t rule that out, but it doesn’t help Apple be successful setting up partnerships with the cell phone industry let alone At&t who has a 5 year lock on the iPhone

2. It could be argued that the phone subscriber number was low due to the difficulty signing up with At&t. There did seem to be a few anecdotes on the internet, but nothing indicated that 364,000 people were having trouble. That would be proof of a very serious problem for At&t and Apple (ergo don’t buy it at the Apple Store if you want an easy transition onto your At&t plan.)

3. Let’s look at the dark side for a second. In the book publishing world, publishers hire people to go out and buy up their books to create the illusion of a best seller. If 500,000 units were the number of total iPhones sold, and lets say that only 50,000 people experienced a slow sign up(that’s still a huge number of customers treated poorly), then we have to account for the other 294,000 unit sales. Could it be that Apple or At&t or someone else with an iPhone agenda went out and purchased up the other 294,000 units to pump up the numbers? Obviously, Apple would have the most to gain from hype, but it could be that a number of people wanted to see if the iPhone would sell on eBay or ask the question Will it Blend? for their YouTube show.

Now don’t get me wrong, neither Apple nor At&t have the best track records at book keeping. I have no idea what type of financial reporting software either company is using nor how their accountants and auditors de’ jour are applying GAAP principles to their numbers. It could also be possible that neither company knows how to count. Regardless of the scenario and possibilities, stock holders didn’t like the news and peppered their At&t stock on Apple before taking a bite out of Apple’s value.

Last week we wrote about the rookie mistakes that Apple made on the new iPhone.  We covered 19 mistakes that we noted within the first 48 hours of the release of the iPhone.  Many more mistakes have been identified since then, some of which might be able to be fixed with iPhone 2.0.

However, those were mobile phone mistakes for the most part.  Those were rookie mistakes made by a rookie mobile phone designer.

We would not have expected them to make rookie mistakes when it came to the design of the MP3 player in the iPhone, the thing that put the ‘i” in the iPhone.  Apple apparently forgot to include some of the core functionality that imprinted the Apple signature on the iPod and made it a great device in the first place.  (not the only thing but a key thing)

They purposefully removed the ability to drag and drop music onto the iPhone.  They went for a glitzy looking interface on the phone itself and dumbed down the interface between the phone to the computer to iTunes.  So its now just as tedious to synch up the iPhone with your computer as any other MP3 player with the exception of an iPod.  The iPhone might have been a great gadget if it had been as good as an iPod plus had the abilities of a good phone.

In fact it doesn’t have the capabilities of a good phone and isn’t as good as an iPhone.