David Dugan

OS X Leopard rocks (literally)

This is one of the coolest music videos I’ve ever seen (by way of The Unofficial Apple Weblog), particularly appealing to Mac nerds like myself. It’s made entirely with the interface of OS X Leopard and various apps and utilities, like Word, Photoshop, Photo Booth, Final Cut Pro, even Stickies and Time Machine.

The song is “Again & Again” by The Bird and The Bee, and the video is directed by Dennis Liu.

I tend to think of myself as more of a craftsman than an artist--proficient with my tools--and the level of creativity and talent on display in this video is exactly why. There are crazy talented digital artists out there!

This is not just a cool proof-of-concept video either. The execution is flawless. Enjoy... Again & Again.

UPDATE: I love the little sequence at the end where they go to iTunes and purchase the song.

Apple v. Big Apple

There's been a bit of a brouhaha recently over Apple Inc. trying to block the City of New York from receiving a trademark for a similar logo they’ve designed for their “Green NYC” campaign. The consensus reaction seems to be that this is a fairly frivolous lawsuit on Apple's part, but I doubt that Apple really cares about this very much...they might even secretly approve of it for all we know.

What a lot of people fail to realize is that one aspect of being granted a trademark by the United States Patent Office is an *obligation* to vigorously defend said mark against any and all reasonable violations. Whether Apple wins or loses this case, they will have defended their trademark, which will reinforce their position against any future, more egregious violations.

So, there’s a good chance that the City of New York will win this case, and both sides will walk away happy.

However, Apple might just have the wisp of a case here after all. As with most people, I would have thought that the similarities between the two logos was mostly coincidental, but that was until I came across the image below at the Blue Ember blog, showing artwork from the “Green NYC” campaign alongside Apple’s three-year old packaging for “iLife ’05”.

It was easy enough to give the City of New York the benefit of the doubt when just looking at the two “apple” logos, but it’s nearly impossible to suppose that Apple Inc was not the primary inspiration for the “Green NYC” campaign when looking at the image above. I mean, wow.

Now, this is most likely still not grounds for a pure trademark violation, but it’s pretty clear now that the City of New York is not a completely innocent party here.

If, at this point, you’re asking yourself “Who cares?”, well the answer is “Nobody”. Moving on now...

$20: the price is right

At first glance, I didn’t think it was very likely that Apple was about to offer some form of unlimited iTunes music, but the more I think about it, the more I think it’s inevitable. From Apple’s perspective, such a move would do two things: it would rejuvenate a saturated iPod market at the perfect time, and it would seal the deal on the absolute dominance of iTunes, now and forever, in such a way as to completely discourage even the spark of an idea of competition from a new entity. And what’s in it for the labels? Only what the labels desire most...obscene amounts of money. More on that later.

There are two potential models being postulated: a monthly all-you-can-eat subscription for iTunes music; and a “free” music plan where the cost of the one- to two-year subscription would be baked into the retail price of an iPod or iPhone.

Apple could probably implement the monthly subscription plan into iTunes pretty easily, and offer it alongside the current “a la carte” model. In other words, iTunes users would have the option of either subscribing to an unlimited music plan or continue to purchase their songs and albums, or both. Conventional wisdom says that the vast majority of people aren’t interested in renting their music in this fashion—that they want to own their music—so it would be very interesting to see whether that is a legitimate consumer position, or if it’s just the end result of the fact that, to date, subscription plans have not been compatible with the market-leading iPod. I suspect the latter would prove to be true.

Though I’ve never been attracted to any of the subscription music services that are currently out there, I feel quite sure that such a subscription plan offered by Apple would instantly validate the subscription model, and be a smashing success. In other words, it’s quite probable that the only reason that all-you-can-eat music plans have failed to date is that Apple hasn't offered one. Apple’s custodianship of the fortunes of music in the 21st Century is that complete.

Which brings us to the second unlimited music model that Apple might choose to implement, the device-centric “free music” plan. Under this scenario, you would pay a bit more for your next iPod or iPhone, and that device would come with unlimited access to the entire iTunes music library for the life of the device, or—perhaps more realistically—a one or two year period.

The music labels love this idea because they have been dying to get their hands on a share of iPod sales, but threatening and cajoling hasn’t gotten them anywhere. By offering iPod users unlimited access to their entire music libraries, the labels would finally have a vehicle for sharing that coveted iPod revenue.

Rumor has it that Apple is agreeable to this model, but the two sides are far apart from each other when it comes to the money. Apple is offering $20 for each iPod or iPhone sold with the unlimited music plan, but the labels are asking for $80. The general tone of the punditry suggests that Apple needs to either cave in and give the labels what they want, or at least meet them halfway. But I think that’s a mistake. The labels should thank their lucky stars and jump on Apple’s offer of $20 per iPod and here’s why.

Let’s say that Apple agrees to pay the labels $80 or even $100 dollars per iPod. The punditry says that this is only fair because, after all, who on earth wouldn't happily pay an extra $100 for an iPod with unlimited music? Answer: a hell of a lot of people wouldn’t be willing to do that. There are a significant number of people who would look at two identical iPods on a shelf, where the only visible difference between them is a sticker that says “free music” and a price tag that’s heavier by a hundred bucks, and would walk out of Best Buy with the cheaper iPod and $100 still in their pocket. “Free music rental is cool,” they’ll say to themselves, “but I don’t buy that many songs anyway, and a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. No thanks.”

Apple would have no choice but to offer two versions of each iPod model and color—which would run contrary to the simplicity and elegance hard-coded into Apple DNA—and who really knows how successful those $100 “free” music plans would be?

On the other hand, if the music labels accepted Apple’s offer of $20 per iPod—which seems very low at first glance—then Apple would not have to offer different versions of each iPod model. Apple could bake that extra $20 into each unit in various ways (small increase in price, temporarily lower margins, etc.) and could simply offer the unlimited music plan with all iPods and iPhones, whether you wanted it or not. No sales pitch, no special packaging. iPods now come with unlimited access to the entire iTunes music library, period. Thank you, and you’re welcome.

Why should the labels be happy with only $20 instead of $80? Because at the $80 price, it’s impossible to know how many people would opt for the plan. Would one in four people pay the extra money for their next iPod? Maybe, maybe not. By accepting Apple’s $20 offer, on the other hand, the labels would get a smaller cut, but they would get that cut on every single iPod and iPhone sold, and Apple will sell 60 million iPods and iPhones in 2008 alone. That means that each year, Apple would write a check to the record labels for at least $1.2 Billion.

One point two billion dollars.

From one partner.

That’s a lot of cheddar.

Kudos to Fox

It's not very often that I find myself celebrating a music label or Hollywood studio for "getting it", but I've got to hand it to 20th Century Fox this week. Not only were they the first studio to sign on with Apple to rent their movies through iTunes (my prior complaints notwithstanding), but they have expanded their "Fox Digital Copy" program to be iPod/iPhone compatible, which is awesome.

In a nutshell, Fox DVDs with the Fox Digital Copy label on them come with a second disc in the package which contains a digital version of the movie that can be copied to your Mac or PC. Previously, these files were encoded with Microsoft's Windows Media DRM which hasn't exactly set the world on fire with its popularity. As of this week, Fox has expanded the Fox Digital Copy program to include H.264 files encoded with Apple's FairPlay DRM, making them compatible with iTunes, iPods, iPhones and AppleTVs. Whole different ball game...

The first DVD to be released with this feature is the Family Guy: Blue Harvest episode. I'd already seen this freakin' sweet Star Wars parody a few times, having TiVo'd it when it originally aired on Fox, so I had no intention of buying the DVD, but I was curious to try out the iTunes compatibility. The verdict?

Quick. Easy. Awesome. (And it looks stunning on the iPhone.)

An interesting side note: when you open up the Blue Harvest DVD, the first thing you see is an insert with instructions for copying the file to your Mac. Yes, that's right...instructions for copying the file TO YOUR MAC. The instructions for Windows were on the *reverse* side. I mean...wow. Did you guys feel that?

Did the Earth just flip over on its axis?

24 Little Hours

Count me among those that are quite pleased that Apple is now renting movies through the iTunes Store. I'm fairly stunned that Apple was able to sign all of the major Hollywood studios--the entertainment industry as a whole were seemingly girding for war against the iTunes juggernaut. Unfortunately for consumers (hey, remember us?), it looks like Apple had to cede a lot of ground to get the studios on board, including one restriction that might just doom iTunes video rentals to the long list of spectacular failures preceding them, such as CinemaNow, MovieLink, and Amazon Unbox.

I don't mind that Apple's starting out with only 1,000 titles (by the end of February). When Apple launched the original iTunes Music Store, they had only 200,000 songs, but now offer 6+ million less than five years later. In time, no doubt, the number of movies available to rent through iTunes will grow to several thousand.

In comparison, Netflix offers 6,000 titles for their unlimited streaming service (which is free with standard Netflix accounts), but those are mostly older catalog titles and are low-quality streams which can only be viewed on a Windows PC. Their service doesn't work with Macs and those streamed movies can't be moved to any portable devices or viewed on a TV.

Amazon's Unbox service offers 4,000 titles for renting, but the same limitations mostly apply. You can move their rental movies to a TV if you have a networked recent-model TiVo-brand DVR, but other than that, they can only be viewed on a Windows PC, with no support for Macs, iPods or iPhones. If you're one of the tens of people that have a Creative Zen however, you're in luck!

I feel confident that, by the end of the year, Apple will be able to match the number of titles available for rent, but will have a greater ratio of new releases to catalog titles, and Apple's rentals will work on both PCs and Macs, be viewable on TVs via the greatly-improved AppleTV, and be able to be moved onto iPods and iPhones.

I also don't mind that iTunes rentals will only be available 30 days after the DVD release. There are very few movies that I can't wait 30 days to see, and if a movie looks that good, I probably would have seen it in the theater. This, to me, is a non-issue. If this embargo makes the studios feel all fuzzy, then fine... though if the idea is to try to milk as many DVD sales as possible before rentals kick in, I'd like to see them offer those same titles *for sale* on iTunes the same day as they become available on DVD. It will be interesting to see if having movie rentals on iTunes softens up the studios to start making their titles available for sale on iTunes at all. It seems like a small step for them to take now.

I have no problem with the $3.99 price for new releases, and $2.99 for catalog titles is quite reasonable in my opinion. I have no use for HD video, but Apple is charging only $1 more for a 720p HD rental (10% of titles will be available in HD at the start), which is significantly less than rival services, such as Microsoft's Xbox Live platform.

The only thing that really bothers me about movie rentals through iTunes--and it just might be a killer--is that once you start your movie, you have only 24 hours to watch it before it explodes. During Steve Jobs' Macworld Keynote address, this was the part where I winced a little bit. This 24-hour viewing windows is exactly what the rumors were predicting, and it is the standard among digital movie rental services, but I just thought Apple would have been able to squeeze out slightly better terms in this one respect.

Now, 24 hours is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to watch a 2-hour movie in theory. In practice, however--in the big boy world--this means that you basically have to watch the movie in a single sitting or you're shit out of luck. For example, last night after I finished working (around 6:00 pm), I jumped onto iTunes to test out the service and rented the movie "Next". The download started without a hitch, and I was able to start watching the movie about 20 seconds after the download began. No problems, looks great at full screen on my ancient 22" Cinema Display, so I watched about the first two-thirds of it before other things came up and I had to save the rest for the following evening (because, during the day, I do this little thing called working).

The only problem is, by the time I finished up my work today (again, around 6:00 pm), iTunes started bouncing around in my dock, telling me that the 24-hour window on my movie rental had expired and the film was removed from my library. Ok, that kinda sucks.

For anyone that actually works for a living, or has young children, or ever leaves their apartment, this 24-hour window really means you have to watch the movie in a single sitting, which is just not always (in fact, rarely) practical.

Though Apple will take all the heat for this, I'm savvy enough to point my ire in the direction of the Hollywood studios who set the terms. All year long, pundits and analysts have been harping about how Apple has to start playing ball with the content providers if they want to flesh out the offerings on iTunes. Well, congratulations Hollywood! This is the result of Apple caving in to your demands... a perfectly wonderful product, except that it's mostly useless.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this isn't the studios' diabolical plan to sabotage the whole experiement so that they can say, "Look, we tried to give you movies through iTunes, but you didn't buy them, so stop whining and go buy DVDs." But in truth, I have to believe that, since they've finally put their eggs into Apple's basket, they want this to be successful and lay the foundation for the inevitable complete transition from physical to digital media.

With services like Amazon's Unbox and Microsoft's Xbox Live, there just haven't been enough users to make any waves about these kind of restrictions. Now that these reasonable-only-in-theory policies are going to be introduced to a truly massive audience through the iTunes Store, perhaps there will be enough of a protest to convince the studios relax some of these restrictions. Hell, they don't even have to extend the window to 48 or 72 hours... 36 hours would be perfectly adequate. Hell, even 26 hours would allow you to pick up watching at the same time the next day and finish your movie without being afraid to take a bathroom break.

Come on, Hollywood. Give us two more hours!

The Mystery of Market Share

Ten years ago, the Board of Directors of Apple Computer ate a healthy serving of crow, and pointed their beleaguered corporation in a hopeful new direction. Having soundly lost the war to Microsoft, and failed to successfully develop a modern new operating system in-house, they put all of their hope in one final desperate gambit. They purchased NeXT and its UNIX technologies from Steve Jobs, their exiled founder, and shortly after that, ousted their current CEO, Gil Amelio.

Jobs--who, even after so many years away from Apple, still bled in six colors--smoothly stepped in as Apple's interim CEO and immediately began implementing drastic changes. He killed the Newton. He killed the clones. He killed the six-color Apple logo, and he even evicted Clarus the Dog Cow from the manicured lawn of One Infinite Loop.

Almost nothing of Apple circa 1997 remains today. Back then, there was no OS X, no iMac, no iPod, no iTunes, no WebKit or Safari. There was no iPhoto, no iMovie, and no Final Cut Pro. There were no Apple Stores.

Fast forward ten years to 2007, and Apple is enjoying their greatest success ever.

On the music front, Apple has sold over 110 million iPods and 3 billion songs. In 2008, Apple will likely surpass Wal-Mart and Best Buy to become the No. 1 seller of all music (not just digital music) in the United States. Next Christmas will likely find the 200 millionth iPod in someone's stocking.

On the mobile front, Apple has managed to capture 27% of the North American smartphone market in the iPhone's first quarter of sales. This is fairly astounding, considering that it's not even available in two of the three North American countries, and is only available on a single carrier in the US. Only the entire family of Blackberry products (not any single Blackberry model) outsold the iPhone in North America.

But the real story is the resurgence of the Mac. When Steve Jobs opened the first Apple Store, he said their goal was to double the Mac's US market share, from 5% to 10%. In truth, Apple's market share at the time was probably closer to 3%, and less than 2% worldwide. Analysts now see the Mac's market share as somewhere between 7% and 9% in the US, and many believe that 2007 will have been the tipping point where the Mac's numbers started to snowball into the double digits.

Those numbers may still seem small and irrelevant, but they are, in truth, a bit misleading. The anecdotal evidence of the Mac's resurgence is all around us. You can't walk into a Starbucks without seeing glowing Apple logos all throughout the place. How many people do you know in your immediate circle of family, friends and coworkers who've made the switch from Windows to Mac recently? The answer for me is six. It's obvious that the hard numbers are not being accurately reflected in the real world, so what's really going on here?

The truth is that it's far more difficult to gain any ground in market share than one might think, and here's a prefect illustration of why that is...

Today, I stopped in at my bank to deposit a check. This Bank of America branch, at the corner of Stockton and Columbus in North Beach, is not a particularly large one by any means. It's quite representative, I imagine, of Bank of America branches all throughout the United States, and is perfectly illustrative of the terrible difficulty that Apple faces in gaining even single percentage points of market share against Microsoft Windows.

You see, in this bank, there were nine teller windows, each with a PC to account for the teller transactions. There were two more teller windows for merchant services and five desks behind the tellers, each with a PC (that's 16 so far). Of course, none of these PCs are running Microsoft Windows. After all, Bank of America is not insane. No, they're all running UNIX or Linux (probably even DOS) with BofA's own proprietary banking software and network. But it doesn't matter, because Microsoft gets paid for a Windows license for every single one of those PCs (which therefore contributes to its market share), whether or not it ever sees a Windows installation. That's the deal that Microsoft has brilliantly extorted from every single PC OEM manufacturer on the planet (except Apple).

On the other side of the bank are five more desks, for loan officers and account specialists, each with a PC running the BofA software. Behind a frosted glass facade, there's a bullpen area that I will assume houses at least three more PCs, which probably DO actually run Windows. So that's over 20 PCs in this one neighborhood branch of Bank of America in San Francisco, nearly all of them basically acting as the modern-day equivalent of the dumb terminal.

Then I walked back outside, and guess what...there was a US Bank right next door, and a Wells Fargo branch across the street. On the next block of Stockton Street are three more banks, and there's another, larger branch of Bank of America only four blocks away. Then there are all the restaurants and cafes on this little corner of North Beach, each with--at the very least--one PC as a cash drawer and one in a back office somewhere. At this intersection of Stockton and Columbus there may be as many as 200 PCs putting a hold on a check, or tracking an invoice, or calculating the cost of a white chocolate mocha with 8.75% sales tax.

Now add all of the other blocks in North Beach, then all of the other neighborhoods in San Francisco, then all of the cities of the Bay Area, then California, then America, then the great planet Earth (which is where Microsoft's dominance finally ends). Are you starting to get the picture? And we haven't even begun to count the number of corporate and enterprise PCs in the lofty towers of the Financial District overlooking North Beach.

Frankly, it's astounding that Apple has been able to gain even a single point in market share against that, much less five. The scary thing is that the momentum is picking up speed. Why should that be scary? I'll explain that in another post shortly...

iTunes + Radiohead

Word on the wire is that Radiohead is in talks with Apple to distribute (the official release of) "In Rainbows" through the iTunes Store. This is a rather interesting turn of events (if true), as Radiohead is one of the sole remaining high-profile iTunes holdouts. Led Zeppelin has just added their entire catalog, and with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr all represented on iTunes, everybody knows that The Beatles will be on board in the very near future. The other band that comes to mind is AC/DC, which made the curious choice of signing an exclusive deal with Verizon Wireless. (WTF? How's that working out for you, Angus? You must be selling tens of songs!)

I think Radiohead coming to iTunes is great for Apple, great for Radiohead, and great for consumers, but I wonder which side is going to cave in and give up their ground in this battle. Thus far, Apple has refused to cater to artists who won't allow songs from their albums to be sold a la carte, and Radiohead has been just as determined not to have their music sold online song-by-song. Indeed, Amazon's MP3 store has won some points among the punditry recently by taking on Radiohead's catalog and making it available as album-only downloads.

I suspect that Apple has the slightly weaker position of the two, and will probably be the one to blink if a deal is indeed consummated. Apple's reasons for wanting to sell songs a la carte are mostly about keeping things simple and providing people with the experience they have come to expect from iTunes, and that includes the ability to buy single songs (with few exceptions). Apple has done an astounding job of keeping the iTunes buying experience simple, conceivable and clean, but more and more complexity is inevitably creeping into the iTunes model as the Store grows to gargantuan proportions. The iTunes Store will be responsible for 22% of all music sold in the United States in early 2008, so they certainly don't need Radiohead, but I just see Apple's position as one of ideal convenience as opposed to necessity. It would be ideal to sell Radiohead songs individually in Apple's mind, but it's not the end of the world, either.

Radiohead, on the other hand, has staked their position from a foundation of righteous artistic dignity. "How dare you cut up our album to be sold as so much chopped liver! Our albums are concept pieces and must be listened to in their entirety!" Well, true enough, but here's what I don't get. If Radiohead is so passionate about the perfect art form that is the album (and don't get me wrong, five of Radiohead's albums are indeed works of art), then why do they allow their songs to be played on the radio? Why was "Karma Police" in such heavy rotation on MTV when "OK Computer" came out? Why did they bother to make music videos at all when that would take their song out of its context as a single piece of a conceptual album? And why, oh why, does Radiohead play these individual songs at their own concerts in a different order every night?

And why has this demand to keep albums wholly intact kept Radiohead from selling their EPs and other non-album singles on iTunes, like "India Rubber" and "Killer Cars"?

The irony is that Radiohead is one of the few bands today that still makes great albums. I don't think they need to force their albums on people, because most people don't feel like they're getting ripped off by Radiohead with one or two good songs surrounded by a bunch of filler (well, "Amnesiac" does spring to mind). I believe that half of the music sold on iTunes to this day is sold as complete albums, and I would expect this ratio to be even higher for Radiohead's music.

In the end, I hope it is Radiohead who changes their tune on this issue. If someone wants to download "Fake Plastic Trees" or "Creep" and doesn't want their whole album, let 'em have it, and make a buck or two in the process. Myself, I will continue to buy their albums intact as long as they continue to make some of the best albums of all time. In fact, if and when "In Rainbows" is released on iTunes, I will buy it again, as a complete album, for the superior DRM-free 256kbps AAC encoding of iTunes Plus. That's exactly what I want...iTunes + Radiohead.

Previewing Fonts in Leopard

I'd like to take a moment to talk about fonts in Leopard, and the unheralded feature that has changed my life.

As a graphic designer, I have way too many fonts. Always have. Probably always will. I've collected so many fonts over the years that even organizing them and activating them in my font management software has become a labyrinthine and herculean task. Quite frankly, I'm at the point in my design career where I just want to use my ten favorite typefaces for 90% of my work. I've got entire collections that I haven't even loaded into my font management software, fonts that I've never even looked at, and probably never would have...until Leopard!

Leopard has the ability to preview fonts right in the Finder, which is awesome. In fact, Leopard renders the icon of a typeface with an "Ag" sample of the actual typeface, right on the icon. When you're in the Finder's column view, you'll get a nice preview of the upper- and lower-case letters of that font simply by selecting the file, but wait...it gets better, because Quick Look gives you an even bigger preview of your selected font file (and oh yeah, by the way, Quick. Look. Rocks.).

This literally stunned me when I first stumbled upon it. I was able to blow through thousands of typefaces that I've collected over the years and separate the wheat from the chaff, and oh man, I had a lot of chaff (I'm talking about you, T-26). I've deleted so many crappy fonts from my massive, unruly collection that I no longer feel the need to even use Font Agent Pro anymore (the new version of Apple's FontBook is actually a pretty nice little app, and super fast).

I was pleasantly surprised again to discover that you could open a Quick Look preview (by pressing the space bar with a file selected) and then cycle through multiple files while the open Quick Look window gives you live previews of each file as you cycle through them. You can delete a file on the spot and the Quick Look preview automatically jumps right to the next file. That is just soooo nice.

I. Love. Leopard.