David Emery Online

Sche-dual

9 September 2009

I find it slightly amusing that several marketing departments around the world decided that, purely because of the aesthetically pleasing date, today was the day to announce and/or sell new things. Which of course possibly made today the worst day to announce anything without getting lost in all the noise, although maybe if you had techie news that needed burying that might be quite useful…

First dibs of course went The Beatles, who somehow managed to coax some more interest over selling some albums that everyone already has. Oh, and a videogame. Big whoop. I have nothing against the Beatles; in fact, they probably have the best back catalogue out of pretty much anyone but I know that because I already have the albums already.

Of course, potentially of more interest is the now annual Apple ‘stuff we want you to buy at christmas’ event. This always used to focus heavily on iPods but since the iPhone came along and made that party look pedestrian the September event seems to be sliding in a more ‘software’ direction.

By ‘software’ I of course mean ‘iTunes’, and this year round we got a fairly substantial update. I can’t quite be arsed (‘This word cannot be found in the dictionary’ => Right Click => ‘Learn spelling’) to write out my thoughts on it in actually bona-fide sentences, so here’s a train-of-thought bunch of bullet points:

• I have now decided that making iTunes visually inconsistent with everything must be some sort of strategy. Here we are with yet another new window colour – instead of using the system grey gradient, it’s very slightly lighter (even though it was right in the last version). They’ve also lightened the already custom scroll bars, presumably so they don’t match the custom scroll bars in all the other iLife apps.

  

  Similarly, the source view on the left now has a subtle inner shadow at the top, and all the table headers are lighter (and just look a bit broken – to my eyes anyway – like they haven’t drawn properly).

• On the plus side the new iTunes Store design looks a lot better, with much bigger images a much tidier layout. Interesting that they abandoned the carousels with little arrow navigation that practically everyone copied in favour of horizontal scroll bars (different ones to everywhere else though, of course).

  I really like all the little improvements they made, most notably the pop-up album overlay and the omni-present buy buttons that appear on hover all of the place, and also the global nav bar at the top. The new album pages are much nicer too.

• One thing I did notice straight away was the rather nasty fake pop-up menu you get if you click the arrow next the buy button (complete with slightly pointless post to twitter and facebook links), which is obviously not a normal system menu. It turns out that’s seemingly because the iTunes store is using HTML all over the place (unsurprisingly), and that menu is really just a li styled using a bunch of CSS3 and powered by Javascript.

  How do I know this you may ask? Well, in a bit of not very Apple-like accidental discovery I noticed you can right click the ‘My Wishlist’ link (in a doomed attempt to try and find a way of sharing wishlists) and choose ‘Copy Link’. When put in a browser, you get a slightly broken version of the page (it only shows movies for me, not albums). I’ve also just seen on Twitter a link to this page which has even more info.

• I’ll be honest I’m pretty non-plused about iTunes LP – it seems to offer exactly the same functionality as what you could do back in the day when they allowed QuickTime/flash-based interactive booklets. If they worked on the iPhone that would be more exciting but otherwise this just seems to be reinventing the wheel a little. It’ll be interesting to see what they’re written in – I haven’t had a play with one yet, but I’ve still got my fingers crossed for HTML+Javascript.

• I couldn’t care less about Genius Mixes to be honest, and all of the other changes – better syncing features and all sorts of little fixes like having a widescreen browse option – seem nice enough but hardly thrilling. What is more interesting is the new Home Sharing function which lets you share files (not just stream them) to other authorised computers on your network. As soon as you can do it over the internet (via MobileMe probably) I’ll be there like a flash, and tying it into your iTunes authorised computers should keep people legal.

I’m pretty sure they tweaked the iPods as well, but no one cares about them any more, and that includes Apple I think. Ditto (on the me not caring front) for the iPhone 3.1 update which adds nothing of real significance.

So, with Apple focusing on yet-another-new-version-of-iTunes it’s left to Leica to provide todays sexy hardware. Inevitable but no less delectable for it was the announcement of the M9, the first full frame Leica. It’s the Rolls Royce of cameras made even better, and if you don’t want one like a crack addict looking for a fix there’s something wrong with you. It’s also £4,850. Sigh.

Of more surprise (other then the leak I posted earlier this week) is the X1, which is a fixed lens (35mm equiv. f2.8) APS-C sized sensor (the same as most SLRs) compact camera. Seems like it’s the perfect second camera – a normal SLR with lots of lenses for ‘proper’ shooting, and a Leica X1 in your bag at all other times, ready and waiting. I’d love one, but it’s probably going to be £1000+. Hey, if anyone from Leica’s reading this I could do a great series of band photos if you could spare one for a few months…