My thoughts on today’s announcements…

I decided to take in today’s keynote in Caffe Macs, on campus, since today’s the last one I’ll see as part of Apple.

Some keynotes are important, some less so. It seemed, today, that the entire campus was electric leading up to the event. People showed up early, people showed up in large numbers — it was crowded and full of anticipation. Even Apple employees seemed to feel this was something special about to happen.

Then steve arrives, and it goes quiet.

New iPod: nice evolutionary upgrade. Some of the new features are very nice — the gapless encoding especially, but the search functions were a nice tweak. the games — most of them are really retro, but retro is hot, and I’m amused when I see bejeweled hauled out as the prime game again; of course, it’s the ONE game I put on my Treo….

New Nanos. Really nice upgrades all around, especially the $149 price point for the new capacity. and colors. god, do I go for 4gig’s in blue, or 8 in black? choices, choices…

and the new shuffle. I fully expected the shuffle’s to be sent to Buffalo and the style retired; at $149 for the low end Nano, is there still a price point for them?

Well — yes. it’s one to give heartburn to other manufacturers, especially a place like sanDisk. Beyond that, it wasn’t just doubling capacity, it was a complete redo of the exterior. I gotta say, the new, femto-sized device is just, well, cute. Very well done, and at the price, hard to beat for what you get.

iTunes 7: I really like the new looks. been playing with it a bit, and it’s nice.

I’ve found one bug I need to report. I have a smart playlist, named “never played”. It is, (duh), songs who’s play count < 1. I then have a 2nd smart playlist, “nano never played”, which uses a selector of the playlist “never played”, and a selection out of it by random of size N megabytes (where N is adjusted based on what else is on the nano to fill it up). That way, I have a place to get my hands on stuff that’s been in my library so I can go through it. Once I catch up (about 400 songs to go, mostly my swing CDs I encoded), I’l replace it with something based on least-recently played, or smallest play_count.

Anyway, under iTunes 7, this playlist is flagged as being dependent on a missing playlist. the Nano is filled out properly, it’s purely cosmetic, but it surprised me. Evidently because the original is based on a playlist that isn’t copied to the nano (“never played”), itunes is confusing itself. anyway, for folks who do similar things, be aware, and it’s not you.

One neat new feature (that some of us have been clamoring for for a long time): skip_count and last_time_skipped. new fields that track if you’re skipping past a song. So you now have a way to create a smart playlist based on your pushing “next” when a song starts playing, so you can hen exclude those songs from other playlists… VERY nice.

Movies: about waht I expected. the ugprade of resolution is very nice. Only thing I find missing: iTunes 7 will upgrade my album art, but any video I downloaded in the old, smaller format, there seems no way to update it to the new, larger size. ohwell. there should be, folks.

new machine syncing is nice. means I’ll be able to sync my nano to my other macs, and use them and leave the nano in the car most of the time.

Will I buy new nano’s? buying an 80 gig for laurie while I have the discount. My nano is what I need, so I’m going back and forth on upgrading.Access to games would be fun. so would be the ability to use it as a photo wallet for my tripes, but that’s a minor one. Right now, I jus buy more compactflash (whenever i go out, I carry about 1000 images worth of memory these days. that’s enough)

It’s real late, been a long day. I’ll talk about iTV tomorrow. (well, later today). now, gotta crash. but: iTV changes a lot of things. I’m impressed as hell. and when it was announced for Janaury I turned to someone I was with and said “well, our FCC didn’t come thtough in time, did it?” — and he just rolled his eyes. In anyy even, I’m already on the hook for two….

and it really changes, and messes up the fight for the living room for other companies. obut more on taht later…

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