confessions of a serial hobbyist

So for some time…atleast January of ‘07, I’ve been feverishly anticipating the new iLife and iWork bundles. Surely they would contain great new features that would change my entire life and how I work, play, and think about EVERYTHING. I mean, it’s going to be that great right?

Well iLife/iWork ‘07 never happened, and some months later the ’08s were released (albeit still in 2007) and the SAME DAY I ran to the store to get the upgrades. I mean I couldn’t put off having my entire life somehow magically changed by a few software upgrades, could I?

And so I got them, installed them, and began to play…
And here I am a few weeks later realizing how rarely I actually use ANY of that software…as in almost never…so why did I care so much? It’s something I go through often - something new, or cool, or sexy is released, and I want to need it so much that I convince myself that SURELY it will fill in some void and make me more productive…and so I get that thing…and nothing happens.

Pages is an improvement, and if I actually ever had to write a document I’m sure it would come in EXTREMELY handy. I like the improved UI and the ease of access to various formatting options via the context-sensitive toolbar. I love Keynote, but as of yet I’ve only had one time when I ever needed to make a presentation. Numbers…now there’s something. I had been looking forward to a new spreadsheet application to ditch NeoOffice and have a nice native application. So of course the first thing I did was convert the ONE spreadsheet I ever use (a list of our bills, debts, due dates, etc.) from the OpenOffice format to XLS, to import into numbers, and convert to a .numbers bundle. And now what? I don’t make spreadsheets all that often. I mean sure I could do all kinds of exciting…math…but that’s nothing I need in day-to-day use. Hell, long before the spreadsheet version of our bill tracking I just kept a tab-delimited plain text file, and it worked GREAT for me. So here I am, with a $99 “office bundle” that will be used maybe once a month (when in a single day I both update the bill spreadsheet for the new months due dates, and in that same sitting pay all the bills and mark them paid…). And yes I paid $99 for the family edition because for some reason ever since switching to a Mac I’ve been on a kick to be legit and pay for everything honestly…weird, I know.

And then there’s iLife. I’ve already posted about iMovie ‘08 and how it’s just not for me (not saying it’s bad…it’s just not for me). iPhoto is what my wife and I use for all of our photo management. Once I got past the annoyance of fixing the failed attempt to auto-separate all of our photos into events upon upgrading (a single day’s shots could somehow end up spread across 3 different events, while I had another single event that had photos from 5 MONTHS in there?) I realized that it changed nothing. I already had everything split up nicely - I used folders (or were they called albums, I don’t remember). And so now all I did was recreate each of the “old” folders, with “new” events, and instead of clicking on a folder on the left, I click on an event on the right. Revolutionary! iDVD is decent enough I guess…I’ve only ever made one DVD with it (a photo slideshow from my wedding for the wife) but it’s there if/when I need it, and I’m sure I will eventually. It does what I need it to - lets me throw some images together to make menus, and lets me throw some video to be played from the menus.

iWeb is another of the apps I’m not too sure about. I WANT to like it. I’ve even tried re-creating this blog in iWeb just to see how I like it. It’s terrible. If you don’t fit their templates perfectly you end up with something that’s just ugly and a pain to use. For example, if I didn’t WANT a photo at the header of each blog post, either I’d have a big empty space, or I’d have to go through and edit the page view of each blog post individually to make sure the next/previous links weren’t ending up somewhere in the middle of the text. Which makes me wonder - why is every post saved out separately? I get when exporting they all become .html because it’s for “simple” sites which can’t assume PHP or whatever, but why do they generate separately as I post (if I edit one’s layout I’ve had to go back and edit the rest of them by hand also)? And why can’t I get any of the positioning right (fixed-positioning etc.)? I’m sure it’s just iWeb layout stuff that I could learn…but something is VERY wrong if I find it easier to write the HTML than I do to drag stuff around when it comes to getting a decent and consistent looking website. All that being said, I continue to play with it here and there…maybe I’m just secretly hoping that it will click one day and all make sense…

And lastly in iLife is GarageBand. A decent enough editor that I’ve long since replaced with Logic Express and not looked back. The inability to export composed tracks to midi is all it took…

So there we have it, the utter realization that after nearly a year of waiting, and $200 spent, I’m not really much better off than I was before…because I just bought the hype, and bought a bunch of software I’ll rarely ever use…

and I’ll do it again next year

Obviously now, being the Apple whore I am I had to get iLife ‘08 and enjoy the now 10gigs in my .Mac account. Even better is the personal domain support that’s going to be easy in iWeb ‘08 (even thinking of moving this blog to iWeb…just because I could)…or maybe not.

So I went to look at what it takes to setup iWeb ‘08 to publish to a personal domain, and am either frustrated, or just annoyed at how the support was implemented. You can’t have it upload to your current website. You can’t setup an FTP to upload to. What can you do?

Well, you click on the handy “Set Up Personal Domain” option in the File menu of iWeb, and it takes you to .Mac. You enter your domain, and all is well so far (though why do I need .Mac to publish to my personal domain?). Well the answer’s obvious - because they don’t want you uploading to your server - they want you to pay to use theirs! Even worse, once you punch in your domain, this is what you see:



Now that makes perfect sense to me…I get the concept of A records, and CNAME records and what not…but is that really Apple’s target market for iWeb users? People who have setup BIND or other DNS servers in the past? Aren’t the same people who know what a CNAME is, the same people who would likely have their own hosting already?

And this doesn’t even bring up the fact that if you have a DNS server that you can edit to set up a CNAME record, don’t you probably already have a web server you can use?

I’m sorry…but Apple, you failed on this one…

I was recently given an invite to try out joost - an internet streamed TV service that actually manages to get real TV content on there. Personally as soon as I heard they had episodes of I Hate My 30’s from VH1 I knew I had to try it out. Watch the show - it’s fantastic (any TV show that name-drops Mr. Belvedere is alright with me).

So, I grabbed the client, logged in, and fired it up. At any point clicking on the screen will bring up the overhead menu, from which you can pick the Channel Catalog to pick what you want to watch. The channels are a combination of old TV shows, made-for-joost content, and TV shows offered up from current TV networks.

On top of the TV at any point you can turn on a number of Widgets (solely for the sake of being buzzword compliant I’m sure) that basically just block portions of the video you’re supposedly trying to watch - I don’t see the point and turned all of them off pretty much immediately.

All of this isn’t bad, and the interface is something anyone with about 10 minutes of playing with could get to the point where they can pick what they want to watch and watch it. This is good. What’s bad is the streaming. I’m on a 3 mbit DSL line at home, and wasn’t able to make it through a single episode of I Hate My 30’s without a number of pauses and delays for buffering. And there’s the killer. That right there keeps it from being usable as a main entertainment source. Buffering before a show starts is acceptible - buffering while the ads play (hint for joost, if you pre-download the ads the client, you can then use commercial breaks to get a jump-start on buffering the remaining portion of a show) is even better, but having my watching experience constantly pausing for buffering made for a frustration time. I couldn’t sit down on the couch with the wife and watch a show on joost because of this. I tried at three different times of day - early morning (7am), midday (1pm), and later in the night (11pm) and all three times had the same problems with pauses.

I like the idea, I like some of the content, I just wish I could sit down and watch a show and forget that I’m using a computer program (this will be KEY in the future of moving video through a computer to the TV).