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When Time Machine appeared on OS X, it was met with a collective shrug among the Linux community : “It’s just a good-looking backup system, anyone can do the same with a cron/bash/rsync”. This is wrong and here’s why, in pictures.

When you activate Time Machine from the Finder, you get this :

But here’s what you get when you activate Time Machine from Mail :

Yes, you stay in Mail. You do the lookup within Mail. You don’t have to drop into Mail’s guts and how it stores messages to restore one. The backup system is fully integrated in the applications it backs up. 

Same from the Address Book :

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like this for all Apple applications yet (for instance ical or iphoto don’t support this at the moment, which is too bad since they’d be good candidates). Nevertheless, you can see that the intent goes way beyond providing a backup system with a fancy UI. The level of integration in the OS is unprecedented. Good luck ever implementing that on Linux.

Right now the only serious competition the iPhone has is Google’s android platform. As with desktop OSes, what makes the winner is the available applications. Well, while the echoes from the iphone developers are, shall we say, rather positive, it seems the Android folks are having some tough time. Now let’s see, “Software providers finding it difficult to develop programs on a platform still going through revisions”, “Handset (i.e. hardware) manufacturers having a tough time integrating that software into their devices”… now where have I seen something like this already ?

So here’s a cheap prediction : android and the iphone will replicate the same pattern as linux and os/x, for the exact same reasons : unfocused bazaar community on one side, singled-minded well organised one on the other. Yes, android will likely go into a myriad of unexpected directions, appearing richer than the iphone.  But it will never be able to achieve the same level of quality as the iphone, and will be just as confusing an offer as Linux.

Two things I’ve come to realize after leaving the Linux community :

• it’s actually very small
• if you left out of disillusion, you’re not alone

The guy’s spot-on almost every time. In particular, his rants on how to write a Gnome app and its obligatory counterpart, how to write a KDE app, are real gems.

Despite the many predictions that CDs will soon disappear and be replaced by fully digital distribution, I’ve always thought that they would rather be displaced toward a “high-end product” niche. That is, mp3 is for the music you just like and listen to casually, but for bands and artists you really care about, you’ll gladly purchase a CD.

Back when the CDs first appeared, I was still mostly using audio tapes for stuff I didn’t really value but was interested in nonetheless. Then CDs became much more common, all stores started to have bargain bins, and lending CDs from friends or a library replaced the tape. Then came CD burners. And finally mp3s. Nowadays if someone tells me about this band he’s just discovered, the band’s name is usually enough for me to find out what he’s talking about.

So, it seems a study has somewhat confirmed my intuition. It’s surprising that a study commissioned by the British recording industry (British Music Rights) would reach conclusions which are (apparently) not totally biased.

Among other findings, 80% of the youngsters they polled claimed they would pay for “a legal subscription-based music service that would allow them to discover, swap and recommend music”. May be there’s room for this kind of service after all. While I still believe Jobs got it right when he said that people don’t want to rent their music, there could be a “don’t care so much about it” space where renting would be good enough. Time will tell…

By now you’ve probably already seen this leaked video from Microsoft, apparently an internal “motivating” video from the Vista sales department, about SP1.

Microsoft claims it’s actually a spoof, but I have a hard time believing it. I’ve seen my share of sales droids making complete fool of themselves in trying to be “cool”, embarrassing their audience to the point of physical discomfort. And for a spoof to be this long and so dull, it’s just not convincing at all.

At least when geeks behave in a ridiculous fashion, like when they go to a Sci-Fi convention wearing appalling costumes, they have the excuse of being out of touch with reality. That’s part of the definition. But sales people ? These ones are supposed to be very much in the real world, aren’t they ?

May be not so after all :-).

A while ago I read this post (linked from here) which tells about how Gerald Buckley had successfully used his iphone to display his boarding pass and get the barcode scanned at the boarding desk.

Well, I just tried that this morning, and… it worked, much to the amazement of the guy at the desk. Reading the comments on both posts, it seems there’s nothing new to it though, people have been doing this for ages, even on other devices.

So today I finally made official my move away from Linux, through a post on the rosegarden-devel mailing list : I’m an ex-free software Linux developer, aiming to be a free software OS X developer. My only use of Linux is now on my home server (except at work where I still write Java on Linux). It’s been 13 years since my first Slackware install, with kernel v1.2.8 back in 1995 on a 90MHz pentium with, at the time, 16Mb of RAM and 512Mb HD.

The first reply I got was a “me too” from an other user, who had made the same switch for the same reasons. He also mentionned that sound on OS X wasn’t that rosy either : USB peripherals recognition problems, stability issues with Logic Audio… However these problems are on a higher level than those on Linux. Actually, I wish Linux had this kind of problems, but instead we have to deal with the most basic “can’t hear anything” issues (or similar basic stuff like my mouse’s tilt wheel being broken by a kernel update). And I’m just so f*cking tired of this.

Plus there’s the fact that writing a music editor for an OS which already has the equivalent of alsa, jackd, qsynth and our own RG sequencer in it is somewhat more motivating than endlessly trying to debug random sound setup problems.

To tell the truth, even though I did gain a lot through these years, had I known that Linux would still be in such a state after all this time, I would have had jumped ship two or three years ago already, when OS X was starting to look welcoming enough. Core Audio might not have been as mature as it is now, though.

One thing which I’ve long wanted to do with my ipod was to easily keep it filled with a random selection of albums. Not songs. I don’t like listening to songs at random, likewise my squeezebox is most often used in “random mix album” mode (the only caveat being with albums fitting on two CDs - there’s an option to tell it to collapse multi-CDs albums in a single one, but while you want this for a concert spread on two CDs, it’s less useful on a boxed-set of 10).

So I wanted to have the same thing for my ipod, and the solution is simply a playlist which randomly selects albums. It’s actually very easy though not quite obvious.

As a digression, I was also looking for a way to automatically expire old mail in some folders under Mail.app. Again, no specific feature for this, but it’s very easily done with filtering rules. The common point in this is that a UI is kept simple by making some of its features powerful enough that they can serve other purposes, rather than adding more features which would be rarely used. It’s a hard balance to strike, though. 

• it could use a cut’n paste method (though I have no idea how it could be implemented, as far as UI goes)
• it doesn’t sync the known wifi networks with your mac - shame. Another overlook I wouldn’t be surprised Apple will fix in an upcoming firmware upgrade.
• the ipod side doesn’t seem to have a “random album” feature like my old ipod nano has, which is basically how I most often use it (i.e. “play a random record”)

So my iphone was finally activated on friday. First impression : it is cool. Just as damn cool as the demo videos show it to be. It feels like you’re in a Sci-Fi movie because of how amazingly well done it is.

There are a couple of lacks :

• notes are nice, but apparently there’s now way to access them outside of the phone. Well, that’s one thing even my first palm could do ten years ago :-). But it would be surprising that a future firmware upgrade wouldn’t provide a way to sync them with the notes on Mail (although this would mean a dependency on Leopard…).
• speaking of Mail, synchronising the todo’s would be good too. Again, for a future upgrade.
• in at least one case, it could use a clickwheel :-). More specifically, using the finger to navigate back and forth a video or a song is not very precise, if the item’s duration is above 10mn (quite common for podcasts).
• more generally, “old-fashioned” ipod navigation is still more practical while you’re in your car doing something else. But that’s a little drawback, really.

But ultimately this is, without contest, the best designed piece of hardware and software I’ve ever seen. Today I smiled when I first placed a call while listening to a podcast : just select the phone number, the podcast’s sound fades out, talk to whoever you’re calling, bla bla bla, hang up, the sound fades back in. I had seen it in the demos, but this is one of the things you actually marvel over when you experience it directly : “damn these guys are good”.

But what really marks the difference between any existing phone and the iphone is how you set up your voice mail : Enter your code. Confirm it. Record your message on the iphone (and not through it), listen and re-record as much as you need, press “ok”, and it sends the whole thing over to your provider. And that’s it. And you don’t have to meddle with one of those dreadful voice menus (”press 1 if you’re happy with your message, press 2 to record it…” *hurl*). Once I had done it, it just struck me : there’s nothing special here. That’s just how it should happen, and every other phone which forces you to go through a voice menu is retarded.

One last thing (pardon the pun) : following up on my previous post on the iphone’s potential as a universal remote, I confirm that driving my squeezebox with it works like a charm (just use the Nokia 770 skin until v7.0 of SlimServer - now renamed to SqueezeCenter is released, then you can install ipeng, a skin dedicated to the iphone, which depends on SqueezeCenter).