Linkstew

It's been a long weekend:

• Still no DSL at home.
• I was in LA all weekend for, among other things, an Eve 6 concert. -- it was good, though too short, but Max was in a weird mood (or on something), and they played too many songs of the new album (which meant I didn't know them, since the album doesn't come out for a month).
• If you're ever in Long Beach and you think taking Pacific Coast Highway is a better idea than taking the 405 to 101, holy christ you're wrong.
• As if it weren't obvious, I want one. The model I speced out for myself (including a 23 inch cinema display) came out to like $7,000. Boy I need a job... ;-)
• Thank god Panther will have Fast User Switching. Not a feature I personally need, but I'd been meaning to write a post for a long time about how important that feature was for homes with one computer. I guess I can cross that article off my todo list. Hopefully it comes out before November (so I can get a free copy under my student developer membership).
• And last but not least, I'm 500 pages into The Order of the Phoenix, and that's where I'm returning now.

As a person who may soon have the option of commuting somewhere where CalTrain would be useful, I admit I'm excited by the new Millbrae BART station (Or here's CalTrain's version of the story) that opens this weekend. Being able to transfer directly from BART to CalTrain will be a big deal going both ways, and this article discusses why it'll be more significant than the SFO connection that's part of the same package. Now that BART connects to CalTrain on the Peninsula, there's really no reason for them to continue expansion there.

By the way, still no (good) net at home, and I'm going out of town this weekend. Updates will continue to be ... nonexistent.

The iPod and iTunes both have a "Shuffle by Album" feature that I'm pretty fond of, because some albums just work that well as a cohesive whole, and the songs are that much better when there in place besides their brothers and sisters. But this is where the "but" goes, because why would I have bothered to write that first sentence if there wasn't one?

"Shuffle by Album" is a very nice feature, but both the iPod's and iTunes' implementations of the feature have implementational problems. iTunes' problem isn't that big a deal; it's just a minor irritation. The only way to switch between "Shuffle by Album" and "Shuffle by Song" is by opening the preferences, going to "Advanced," and switching the little radio box there. As problematic as the weird three state behave of the repeat button already is (it switches between no repeat, all repeat, and 1-song repeat), I think they might as well just make the shuffle button be another three state button that just cycles between no shuffle, shuffle by song, and shuffle by album.

The iPod's problem with Shuffle by Album is much more significant, in my opinion: Just like iTunes, the iPod only shuffles the tracks or albums in the current context. The problem is, if you "Browse by Album" with the iPod to select what album you want to listen to, the context is just that single album, so when the album is over, the iPod doesn't have any other albums to shuffle to, so it stops playing (unless you have repeat all on). To get it to actually shuffle through albums, you have to browse by song and then select the first track of the album you want to listen to. When you have 8,000 songs on your iPod, this is a little problematic (to say the least). I suppose you could just click on any song of the album, and then hit back a few times until you get to the first track, but that kinda sucks. Unfortunately, I don't think there's any way to present a consistent interface and make the Shuffle by Album really work. The best solution might be to introduce another setting for "Repeat" in addition to "Off," "All," and "Songs." The new setting would jump into your entire song library after it finished playing the songs in the current context.

The work-around I've been using on the iPod for the Shuffle by Album problem is this: I add the albums I want to listen to to my On-the-go playlist, and then it's a much simpler matter to find the first song I want to listen to. The only real problem with this solution is there's a bug with the On-the-go playlist. Once you start playing a song from OTG, it caches the context the OTG playlist was in when you started playing. Because of this, even if you add more songs to OTG, they won't get added to the possible songs that will be selected by shuffle until you manually go and select a new song under OTG. This seems like an obvious holdover from when the playlists on the iPod couldn't actually change. Hopefully they'll fix it soon.

Oh, another possible way to solve the iPod's Shuffle by Album problem besides another "Repeat" setting is this: Add a "Browse" feature to every "playlist" you can get to, so that if you select "Browse -> Songs," there will be a be another "Browse" menu that will preserve the context of "all songs" (or whatever playlist you happen to be in), but will allow you to select an album. This would closely mirror the way iTunes Artist/Album browser works. This would show up under everything, including anything already under "Browse," and any playlist you're looking at, including the OTG playlist. The only real problem I see with this is that the number of "Browses" deep you are could get pretty confusing pretty quick. But this would solve other issues I've had with being able to navigate some of my larger playlists, or with wanting to find the first song of an album in one of my "by artist" playlists. I think this is a reasonable idea, but the particular interface presented needs little more thought than I've given it here.

iTunes feedback goes here, and iPod feedback goes here.

Saw: Finding Nemo

It was good, but I felt like it was a little slow in places, and it was fairly formulaic, and it didn't really have some big message, or offer me very much to think about. I certainly enjoyed it, but I just didn't feel like it had as much for adults as some other Pixar movies have had. 5/5.

After I found out about the power of shift-space in most web browsers, I went and played around a little more and I found a few more things I didn't know about.

While space in Mail.app will pages down in the message you're viewing (until you get to the end of the message, at which point it goes to the next message), shift-space will go to the previous message. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually page-up first, and instead it just jumps to the previous message.

In iTunes, Enter (as opposed to return) will put the title of the currently selected track into edit mode.

And I found this one out a few weeks ago, and I really love it: In many apps (including Mail, Safari, and iTunes), command-option-f will select the "Search" (on in the case of Safari, the Google) search widget.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this one out, though, because I used to have command-option-f mapped to "skip forward 20 seconds in iTunes" using Key Xing (an excellent keyboard mapping tool). Which kind of makes me wonder if any of my other keymappings -- or even LaunchBar's command-space invocation -- are masking anything interesting.

PlayStation: Evolve, Multiply, Conquer

None of this is surprising to me, really at all, and it's exactly what I think Microsoft hopes to try, too. Nintendo, meanwhile, won't do anything like this, and they'll stick with their "we make games" line. Which is fine. I like games, and I like my TiVo, and I don't need one device to do both of those things possibly less well than my other devices already do it. Of course, if the PSX used TiVo technology, that'd be a whole different story...

I think the game and electronics industry is going to be a very different place two generations of hardware down the line.

Spring 2005 launch for next Nintendo console?

I really hope Nintendo has learned what Sony taught everyone with the PS2, and that the Gamecube's successor will be backwards compatible with the Gamecube. Hell, Nintendo itself should be aware of this fact thanks to the success of the GBA's backwards compatability features. And I think this is especially important for Nintendo because Sony will certainly do this, and I'm pretty sure Microsoft will also do this.

The second most important feature is probably built in network connectivity out of the box, and I remember reading somewhere that Nintendo is trying to figure out how to let gamers play online for free... That would definitely be good stuff.

Idiocy Imperils the Web

I don't know, it seems to me like the "there's nothing you can do to stop viruses" mindset is only really present among Windows users. Then again, I'm not in the "real world" yet.

I just accidentally hit shift-space in Safari, and it paged up! This thrills me, because this was one of my favorite features in OmniWeb -- OmniWeb mapped page-up to 'b' until they implemented type-ahead link search features, and I was sad when I thought it had been removed. Sure, you could argue that I could just use "page up," but on my laptop that's a two-handed operation. I wanted a one-hand (and more importantly, left-hand) solution, which shift-space just happens to be. And it turns out that shift-space works in lots of browsers (I just tested it in Safari, OmniWeb, Mozilla, Konquerer, and IE).

Well, I'm excited. Hopefully someone out there didn't know this.

And still no net at home, by the way.