Reid Dossinger

There's a lot to process on Apple's iCloud Super Fun Happy Jamboree kEyNoT_E™ from yesterday. It all happened with Apple's usual boasts that they're doing something totally new (they so aren't) and with the excitement that only Apple can generate in not doing something new: they almost always seem to do it better. Here's a bunch of poorly thought-out thoughts on it all: A pretty good chunk of iCloud seems just like Mobile Me with a different name and a little cleaned up and optimized. But with the weird restrictions (photos are stored for 30 days?) and the 5 GB of space, I'm not really sure this is the service that's going to move the average user to device independence and "change the way we use computers". The part I'm most interested in is the iTunes in the cloud, and their "one more thing" of iTunes Match. Basically, this service is what Lala did: recreates your library in the cloud. iTunes Match promises that if it will only ...

After thinking a little more about  the post I wrote on Saturday  about how Apple's deals with the major labels aren't really that much of an advantage, I started thinking about what Apple could do with their cloud music offering that would truly make it immediately and obviously superior to what Google and Amazon have to offer. Any conversation I have with like-minded music geeks about music in the cloud always ends up the same way: that the products so far are interesting, but aren't really worth our while. Too slow, too inaccessible, not enough storage, not worth the cost.  But what features could Apple offer that would trump Amazon and Google, and just as importantly, actually make it worth spending money on? Make it sync exactly with iTunes Deals with the major labels will only do so much. Apple needs to figure out a way that your cloud iTunes library looks exactly like your desktop iTunes library. I'm one of those music/Apple geeks that The Onion  made ...

When iTunes first rolled out their iTunes DJ feature, I was unimpressed. I thought that the "DJ" part was a misnomer; implying that you could play music for a party in the same way that a DJ would off other laptop software. It was really just a glorified shuffle, I thought. I hid it from my leftnav. Over the last couple of years, I've been making increasingly complex smart playlists based on ratings and tags (which I put in the "Grouping" field), and would shuffle those depending on mood and situation. But the standard shuffle has it's flaws. If I change the rating while a song's playing (which I frequently do), the song immediately falls off the playlist. Plus, if a song comes up that I'm not in the mood for (which happens often when I'm playing my playlist of songs rated 3-5 stars), I have just hit the forward button, which is kind of a mood killer in and of itself. Lately, I've discovered that the iTunes DJ software that I'd dismissed ...

When I'm home at my parent's place in North Carolina, I become tech support for the various problems my parents (mostly my dad) have had since the last time I visited. I like the role (especially when I can fix the problem), and it lets me learn things that I wouldn't encounter otherwise. This Christmas, my dad brought me a problem I'd never had before: the smart playlists on his iPhone wouldn't sort the songs in the way they were sorted in iTunes on his Windows machines. No matter the order it showed in iTunes, the iPhone only ever showed them in an order decided by some criteria I could never figure out. After some Googling and reading through long, long threads on the Apple forums, I finally got the workaround to fix it. It's kind of a ridiculous fix, in that Apple needs to fix it permanently, but it works. It's simple: Open up the properties of the playlist (File > Get Info OR right-click > Edit smart playlist) Add a new condition to the playlist: ...