So you're a pirate

You pirate music, tv shows, and movies.  Are you justified in doing so?  Are you hurting your loot's creators? -- Yes and no.

If all the media you consume has been acquired for free, then yes, I would call you a pirate.  I'd even say what you're doing is wrong--you're stealing and we all know what God has to say about this.

However, I believe the majority of us, the ones who still buy dvds and cds from time to time, aren't pirates at all.  To explain this, we're going to have to step into a hypothetical situation involving two dimensions of reality: one where illegally pirated media is readily available via the cloud (our current reality) and another where the idea of media piracy is unheard of and not practised to any degree.

Anything you download in the first dimension that you didn't legitimately purchase in the second would definitely be considered pirating.  You are downloading something that you would have purchased had you not known you could download it.  This is pirating.  You are a customer for this media, but have chosen instead to steal the media rather than acquire it legitimately.

If you had instead downloaded something in the first dimension that you'd never even think to throw money at in the second dimension, then you aren't a pirate at all.  You wouldn't be considered a customer for this media and are essentially free to try it if you wish.  In fact, this is a benefit to the author since he is exposing his creation to a non-customer, expanding his audience.

The basic idea is if you download the latest Britney Spears album out of honest curiosity, listen to it, bob your head, and move on, then no harm done.  You'd have never bought this music had illegally downloading it never been an option.  You aren't a Britney Spears customer and, as far as I'm concerned, can download as much of it as you like.

There's no reason to bust you for trying media that you'd otherwise never spend money on.  However, if you just download everything, even the media you'd purchase otherwise, shame on you.  You are lazy and you are cheap.  You're stealing from the very artists you most admire and appreciate.  As far as I'm concerned, you're going to hell and the only way out is to support these robbed artists by scooping up a few band tees or concert tickets.

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A Podcast about Podcasts

I've just realised that I haven't mentioned my podcast on this blog before.  Well, I have a podcast.  It's a podcast about podcasts and it stars Simon Frankson and myself.  Every few weeks we record an episode where we discuss podcasts we've been listening too and recommend which ones to subscribe or unsubscribe to.

We call the podcast Subscribed.

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Featured in MacHeads

Last summer I spent a lot of time at a local cafe that prides itself on latte art.  Every latte they pour is topped off with the classic rosetta symbol in steamed milk.

After spending day upon day, upon day working out of their cafe on my Macbook Pro, it was no surprise that the baristas would begin to recognize me.  Soon enough I would exchange nods, smiles, and the odd "hello" between them as we began to take get used to each other.  Then one day, completely out of the blue, I was served the following latte:

It's unclear whether or not the face is supposed to be Steve Jobs or me.  Either way, I thought it was fucking awesome and pushed it right onto the cloud and into my Flickr account.  Over the following weeks, that photo gained a lot of traffic and was linked to in several Mac blogs. 

The latest surprise has been its inclusion in the upcoming documentary, MacHeads, a documentary about the culture surrounding Apple and it's followers fans.  These guys have recently posted a trailer on their website and I urge anyone reading this to go check it out—it looks awesome.

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MacWorld Predictions

This year will mark the first year Apple will have the pleasure of enjoying my company at MacWorld and as such, I felt it would be appropriate to post my MacWorld predictions...A New MacBookIt won't be a MacBook Touch, or the ridiculously predicted MacBook Air, Mac Rumour's predicted, making the juvenile union of the MacWorld tag-line and the rumour of an ultra-portable Mac.  Why won't it?  A MacBook touch, as the (Mac) public has prophesied, would require a touch screen along with a touch interface for Leopard.  Now, what applications could this have?  Well, an obvious feature would be to create a touch interface for Front Row.  As for the rest of Leopard, a touch screen doesn't make sense or at least, doesn't improve upon the capabilities of the mouse and keyboard.  Sure, drawing would be made easier and more accurate, but not an index finger—we'd need a stylus.  Apple would obviously prefer to steer clear of such peripherals.  I think when we do see a MacBook Touch, we'll also so a Leopard Touch that strips down the current version similarly to the iPhone, but not as drastically.The new MacBooks will see an upgrade similar to the iMacs.  The MacBook is the only Apple product (save a handful of peripherals) to be dressed in the mug-me white of yore.  The new MacBooks will be thinned down, sure, but not to the extent of removing the slot-loading drive and replacing the hardrive with one made of NAND chips.  We'll simply see the iMac-upgrade applied to it's portable brother and that's it.  I'm not sure where people get the idea that Apple reinvent the notebook or introduce an entirely new line of portable computing things.  When has Apple really released something so sensational as this?  The iPhone? Not really.  The iPhone is simply the perfection of previously released technologies.iPhone 1.1.3 & SDK PreviewBut as we know, nothing is truly perfect.  So Apple will release the next iteration of its iPhone OS, with the recently leaked 1.1.3; it introduced the features listed here.  Along with a quick demo of the new home screen bookmarks and google maps, Apple will announce that the SDK will be released at the end of February.  With this re-announcment, Jobs will demo or at least display screenshots of, some iPhone apps that they have been working on internally or closely with third-parties.  These apps will launch in February alongside the SDK.  This will be followed up with the announcement of the iPhone App marketplace in the iTunes Store.Movie RentalsThe iTunes Store will see another burst of content with the first movie rentals, available exclusively in the US, something we Canadians have become used to by now.  We've been seeing iTunes Easter eggs for the last year and when coupled with this year's MacWorld slogan, "There's something in the air.", it only makes sense that we'd be getting movie rentals.  These rentals will be available to the Apple TV, either via a new iTunes Store interface--I honestly can't see this being announced with my other predictions--or the current streaming or syncing method.  Movie rentals are in the air.AfterthoughtsThis year's slogan is delightfully mysterious, more so than those from previous MacWorlds.  Obviously the something that's in the air is media being transferred from an Apple this to an Apple that.  This could be the transfer of media between two friendly iPhones (aka. the Zune squirt), or the downloading of iPhone apps via the wifi store, as I predicted above.  It could also be the downloading of media via an iTunes interface from the Apple TV.  The problem is that the majority of these ideas are big ideas.  More importantly, they're exactly what I, and I assume most of you, want.  This leads me to believe that they won't be announced, at least not just yet.  Apple has never really wowed us to the extent that these announcements would.The Sum UpNew MacBooks designed similarly to the iMaciPhone SDK & app demosiPhone OS 1.1.3iTunes Movie Rentals

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Upload in Progress

For some reason, moving large files between computers is still a pain.  Sure, we have thumb-drives and cd/dvd burners, but lets face it, most of the time we want to send someone a large file, they're on the other end of a series of tubes.

Most of the time our email clients freeze up at the site of a file attachment any larger than 3MB.  IM clients aren't any better, suggesting astronomical ETAs for the smallest of files.  Then there's the FTP client, for those of us with access to our own servers, but alas not everyone is so fortunate.

What does that leave us with?  Web services.  There are many out there that let you upload files to a server, producing a download link to share with whomever.  But, most of these sites request that you sign up for an account first, weed your way through tons of ads, or even make you wait for a timer to count down to zero.  A couple that come to mind are YouSendIt and RapidShare, the later of which is ridiculously confusing for first-time users.

There is, however, one that stands out from the rest.  Senduit (send-u-it).  Save the one restriction—a 100MB limit—this free and stupid-easy service is the best file sending site out there.

Let It Do the Talking

We all love pictures and truth be told, they do a much better job of explaining things than I do, so here are the steps one takes when sending a file with Senduit:

Select an Expire Date

Upload your File

Uploading...

Copy, Paste, and Send the Link

Downloading...

That's it-couldn't be easier.  All thanks to Davidville.

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iPhone Unlocked

If I had a nickel for every stranger who's drooled over my iPhone, I could buy you all iPhones.I've you've been following this blog at all or know me in real life, then you know that I've had an iPhone since launch week and am probably one of the first Canadians to be so lucky.  If you are already aware of this then you probably know how I "broke" it and had it sent to a friend in NYC for repair.  Well, fortunately it was and I got it back a few months ago.  After a few hours toiling through the sea of legally-grey wikis and tutorials, I had it unlocked and have been using it as my phone/ipod ever since.

You've heard this before and you'll hear it again: this is the best phone ever.  It's also the best iPod ever—save the cellularly-impotent iPod Touch.  After using the iPhone for the last few months, I can't imagine ever buying another iPod or cellphone ever again.  Having my two most-used tools combined so elegantly is a dream.

I'm walking downtown towards Bubby Roses to meet with Andrew, listening to Tegan & Sara when the song slowly fades away, followed by the sound of my ringtone.  I squeeze the little nub on my white earbuds to receive the call.  When I'm done, I squeeze again to end the conversation and have my paused music fades back in. You'll be astounded when this happens.  Two clicks.  The only way this could be any easier would be if I were able to answer calls with my mind.

I was chatting with Simon trying to finalize the night's plans with Tom and the gang.  Suddenly, I heard the beep-beep that sounds when someone tries to interrupt a phone conversation.  I looked down at the iPhone's screen and saw it was Tom.  I also saw that the iPhone had changed one of the buttons to Merge.  I touched it and suddenly Simon, Tom, and I were all finalizing our plans together. Yes, every phone can do this, but it's not handled as gracefully as this.

It's not the web browser, nor the email, nor (and especially not) coverflow that makes the iPhone the pleasure to use that it is--it's experiences like the ones I mentioned above.  No longer do I have to miss calls because I wasn't able to pull my iPod from one pocket, pause it, and pull my phone from the other in time.  But it's not just the way the iPhone makes it easier to handle your calls, it's also the way it delights you every step of the way.

Good design works.  Great design delights.

The iPhone is very well designed.  Some may find flaws with its absence of smart phone features like copy&paste or the ability to mark all emails read at once, but when compared to your standard Razr the iPhone is in a league of its own.  The true testament to its greatness is the fact that everyone, from all walks of life, adores and admires it.  Even the most technophobic of people melt when they try an iPhone for the first time.  In fact, for the first time ever, I saw a piece of technology charm my father.  So much so that he calls on me to show it off to his guests.  I have even given a demo to a few dentists and nurses while I was getting moulds of my jaw done--I had a mouthful of wet clay at the time.

I was waiting in a hotel lobby with some friends when the strangers sitting next to us noticed I had an iPhone.

Do yourself a favour.  Sell your iPod, sell your phone, and pick up an iPhone.

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iPhone Unlocked

If I had a nickel for every stranger who's drooled over my iPhone, I could buy you all iPhones.I've you've been following this blog at all or know me in real life, then you know that I've had an iPhone since launch week and am probably one of the first Canadians to be so lucky.  If you are already aware of this then you probably know how I "broke" it and had it sent to a friend in NYC for repair.  Well, fortunately it was and I got it back a few months ago.  After a few hours toiling through the sea of legally-grey wikis and tutorials, I had it unlocked and have been using it as my phone/ipod ever since.

You've heard this before and you'll hear it again: this is the best phone ever.  It's also the best iPod ever—save the cellularly-impotent iPod Touch.  After using the iPhone for the last few months, I can't imagine ever buying another iPod or cellphone ever again.  Having my two most-used tools combined so elegantly is a dream.

I'm walking downtown towards Bubby Roses to meet with Andrew, listening to Tegan & Sara when the song slowly fades away, followed by the sound of my ringtone.  I squeeze the little nub on my white earbuds to receive the call.  When I'm done, I squeeze again to end the conversation and have my paused music fades back in. You'll be astounded when this happens.  Two clicks.  The only way this could be any easier would be if I were able to answer calls with my mind.

I was chatting with Simon trying to finalize the night's plans with Tom and the gang.  Suddenly, I heard the beep-beep that sounds when someone tries to interrupt a phone conversation.  I looked down at the iPhone's screen and saw it was Tom.  I also saw that the iPhone had changed one of the buttons to Merge.  I touched it and suddenly Simon, Tom, and I were all finalizing our plans together. Yes, every phone can do this, but it's not handled as gracefully as this.

It's not the web browser, nor the email, nor (and especially not) coverflow that makes the iPhone the pleasure to use that it is--it's experiences like the ones I mentioned above.  No longer do I have to miss calls because I wasn't able to pull my iPod from one pocket, pause it, and pull my phone from the other in time.  But it's not just the way the iPhone makes it easier to handle your calls, it's also the way it delights you every step of the way.

Good design works.  Great design delights.

The iPhone is very well designed.  Some may find flaws with its absence of smart phone features like copy&paste or the ability to mark all emails read at once, but when compared to your standard Razr the iPhone is in a league of its own.  The true testament to its greatness is the fact that everyone, from all walks of life, adores and admires it.  Even the most technophobic of people melt when they try an iPhone for the first time.  In fact, for the first time ever, I saw a piece of technology charm my father.  So much so that he calls on me to show it off to his guests.  I have even given a demo to a few dentists and nurses while I was getting moulds of my jaw done--I had a mouthful of wet clay at the time.

I was waiting in a hotel lobby with some friends when the strangers sitting next to us noticed I had an iPhone.

Do yourself a favour.  Sell your iPod, sell your phone, and pick up an iPhone.

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Awesome Life-size X-wing Model Rocket

Utilium is an online course pack builder and resrouce database. For this release my skills were used to template.

I've been pretty busy lately, but I had to write about a very cool new feature in Leopard.  A feature that I pioneered the discovery of and am here to present to you today.

Spotlight now searches the text of every web page saved in your Safari history folder.  I first read this in Apple's list of 300 features, but when I had finally installed Leopard, had forgotten about.  Just now, however, I was reading Andy Ihnatko's latest piece in MacWorld where he writes:

[Spotlight] indexes the pages you've viewed in Safari, so when you do a Spotlight search on "awesome life-size X-wing model rocket" the number-one result will take you to a bookmark file in Safari's "History" folder

Immediately after reading that I thought, wouldn't it be crazy if I entered awesome life-size X-wing model rocket in Spotlight and it found Andy's article?

It did.  And it was incredible.  The very web page I was on had been scanned and indexed for Spotlight the second I opened it, making it instantly searchable through Spotlight.  This is what Andy is referring to when he says [Leopard] is a game of inches.

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Leopard To Launch Next Tuesday?

If you take a look at the iPhone box art, you'll notice that the Calendar app's icon displays the date Tuesday 9.  It just so happens that there is a Tuesday 9 in the very same month that Apple has said they'll release the long-awaited follow-up to Tiger, Leopard.  The next time we'll see a Tuesday 9 will be in September 2008, an unlikely release date for Leopard, unless it's the planned release date for iPhone 2.0.

Of course, this is complete speculation.

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Intel Doesnt Sell Processors, Computers Sell Processors

A business needs to make money.  To make money it needs customers.  To attract customers it advertises its products.  However, there are businesses that simply don't need to advertise.  These businesses sell products that are so engraved in our culture that we can't help but spend money on them on a regular basis.  An example of this is milk.  We've all seen the Got Milk? ads that feature celebrities holding a glass of milk with a curious milk moustache.  As if people would stop drinking milk--what would we dip our oreos in?

This brings me to the subject of the post, Intel.  In the remaining issues of my big-mistake-subscription to Popular Science these new Intel ads started appearing, featuring hip young adults doing back flips, supposedly because their Acer notebooks are powered by the new Centrino Duo processors.  It's insane.  It's a waste of money.

Do they really think that this will increase their market share?  People don't buy Intel processors, they buy Dell computers.  They buy HP Pavilions.  It's like a Windows Ad.  Windows is the default OS.  When someone wants to buy a computer, they go down to Best Buy and pick up a PC notebook, unless of course they were persuaded by those Get-A-Mac ads to do otherwise.

People don't read "Maximize Your Discovery" or "Multiply Your Scholastic Curiosity" and think, "Oh shit!  That's what I want to do!  I better make sure my next notebook has one of those Centrino stickers on it!" They probably look at the ad, see the Intel logo and think "Hey! That looks like the sticker on my laptop" and then turn the page.

"Over 2x Processor Performance when Multitasking with Intel Centrino Duo Processor Technology.  Multiply your possibilities with notebooks maximized by Intel Core 2 Duo processor.  Learn more at intel.com/core2duo/cmt.htm"

Lets take a look at this for a second.  So, this ad tells me that when I multitask on my computer, an Intel Duo Centrino Duo Processor will double the processor performance.  Well, how does this affect my performance?  Does my performance double as well?  Wait! Does that mean it'll play my MP3s twice as fast?--I don't want that.  Hold on...does this mean I can download Lost episodes twice as fast?

Who knows.  All I know is everything I do is maximized, multiplied, and doubled.  Chances are, though, that I never even read that.  I just read the ambiguous "Maximize your Discovery" and moved on.

Sorry Intel, but leather-bound break-dancing teenagers promoting every synonym of increase are not going to sell more processors.  Intel doesn't sell processors, computers sell processors.

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A Backwards Performance on Kimmel

I recently saw Mutemath play live.  They put on a spectacular show.  When I arrived home afterwards, I went skimming through YouTube for videos of these guys' and stumbled upon their music video for their latest single Typical.  It's a great video.  It's fun, creative, and just plain cool.  They recorded themselves playing the song backwards.  So when played in reverse, you watch them play the song normally, but moving in reverse.  It's so bizarre.

This week, they played that single on Jimmy Kimmel, recreating their music video live:

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Go(to hell)Daddy

This summer, I was clearing out some old databases I had created through my GoDaddy hosting and accidentally clicked the trash can icon next to my blog's database.  That was it.  That's all it took to delete my database.  No "Are you sure?" JavaScript pop-up. Nothing.

I couldn't believe I had just deleted all my blog articles ever.  So I emailed GoDaddy and told them what I had done--the deletion of my database was still pending at this point.  A few days later I received an email back from GoDaddy containing the following text:

Please clearly state that you except the Restore fee of $150.00 and provide us with the last 4 digits of the payment method on file that you wish for us to use for this charge.

Conveniently enough, a few days before this debacle, GoDaddy had sent me an email letting me know that my hosting plan was about to expire.  A few days later I had successfully transferred all my domains over to HostMonster and had terminated all ties with GoDaddy.

It is unbelievable how easily you can delete your databases.  The trash can icon is less than 14px by 14px, making it easy to miss, and situated between two other small icons: Edit and View.  They wanted me to delete that database.  They wanted one hundred and fifty dollars.

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A Summer of Redesigns

I took the site down for the summer for a number of reasons.  Mostly because I just wasn't happy with the site's design at the time and also because I was going to be spending my days during the summer creating websites with MetaLab and didn't want to spend my nights tweaking them as well.  I did, however, spend some time in Photoshop playing around with a few mock-ups.

I completely regret never saving any of my old designs.  It would have been so much fun to look back at them and analyse the differences between them.  Fortunately, I took this regret to heart this summer and saved the five different designs I had toyed with.  The general theme of these designs was simplicity.  I took a lot of inspiration from a few sites that seemed to follow this idea as well: CNN.com, Khoi Vinh's website Subtraction.com, and my favourite, Virb.com (specifically the styles used in the default user profiles).

This first design I attempted was strongly influenced by the subtleties of the Facebook design.

After having difficulty establishing a style guide with my first design, I tried to add a little pzazz with my second design (i.e. layer blending options), but ultimately had trouble nailing down the perfect colour-scheme.

After really falling in love with the simplicity of the CNN and TED designs I came up with the following design, which actually went live for a short while.  The real cool idea I had with this design was covering the logo with a loading graphic until all the widgets on the home page loaded.  This idea ended up making it to the current design.

I ended up being unsatisfied with the confined nature of my white-boxes-on-grey design and went for a similarly boxy approach, but with a much more unique colour-scheme .  However, I still couldn't get passed how boxy everything seemed, which led me to my fifth design.

In this fifth design, I kept the same colour-scheme, but removed the boxes in favour of lines; thousands and thousands of lines.  I came really close to pushing this design live, but had a lot of trouble coming up with a hyperlink colour.  I was trying to keep the design based on a two-colour (and white) colour-scheme, but the green was just too close to the dark grey I had chosen.  This made hyperlinks blend in too much with the surrounding text.  I also had trouble with the header; it just didn't look right.

So I dropped the green I liked so much and found blue I liked just as much; after all, blue is the universal colour for hyperlinks.  My favourite aspect of the new design is the consistency.  All the headers look the same; all the lists look the same; all the links look the same.  Even the buttons adopt the same colour used for the hyperlinks.

You will see subtle changes made to the design over time, but nothing as drastic as the redesigns I made in the past.  Welcome back.

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Sucks to be Canadian

After the $200 price drop on the 8GB iPhone last week, Steve jobs wrote an open letter to the people of earth declaring that he would offer $100 gift certificates to anyone who bought an iPhone before the price drop.  What-a-guy.

This morning, that promise came to fruition.  However, like most things in life, this rebate doesn't apply to Canadians:

Customers may not redeem their store credits:  (1) at any iTunes Store in the United States or elsewhere...(7) iPhones registered to customers whose addresses are outside the United States...

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