greenthinks

The conventional wisdom about Apple’s announcements tomorrow says that Apple will be introducing some new iPods. Maybe a new set of higher end iPods and perhaps a pink Madonna iPod nano.

Some people have been talking about a video iPod, but most experts have poo-pooed that idea, saying that Apple would need to re-engineer its online store for movies and that bandwidth, and the deals with movie studios necessary for such an undertaking, are not in place.

However, today another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Every week on Tuesday Apple updates the Music Store with new music. This week Tuesday came and went with no new music, no newly released albums, no new additions from older catalogs.

So even if the more conservative prognostications are accurate, it seems that Apple is at least updating the iTunes Music Store as well tomorrow. It may in fact be more than that, however.

MacRumors reports that a new iTunes version may be released sometime soon. They guess it is 5.0.2, but I would put more money on 5.1. iTunes 5 was a typically underwhelming x.0 release (remember v4.0?) and now Apple probably plans to add all sorts of more interesting functionality in point releases over the next year or so.

It might even turn out to be more significant than that. Think Secret is now speculating that Apple will indeed release video iPods tomorrow and that the iTunes video store will debut. My take is that Apple will announce such devices without the vital functionality (vital according to Apple executives) of ripping DVD’s to one’s HD, but with big collaborations (e.g. BBC) and with a big push towards music videos and vlogging. The company will then attempt to use its iPod cache to exert pressure on the government and the industry to make ripping one’s own DVD’s for use on one’s video iPod a legal and feasible reality.

Well, here’s hoping…

Just a quick post to say that I tried using Jotspot Live tonight to help my college-age sister with a paper, and it kept throwing up errors everytime we both tried editing. They weren’t even English errors, just some jibberish about connection lost or something.

Ah well, we switched back to Writeboard and things moved quite well, though she has to learn the Textile system that 37sig uses (a post on that is coming real soon – I promise) and it does not support simultaneous editing, but at least its system does not behave like Alpha software.

James Rocchi, critic for Netflix, posted this from the recent Toronto Film Festival:

Oh, and the Press Office computers are Macs; wow, that’s awesome, because I want to deal with learning a whole new OS that doesn’t support Movable Type fully when I’m busy.

So I thought about installing Movable Type before posting this (since I’m a Wordpress user), but the install is way too work intensive for such a simple investigation. So, having not ever used MT before, I will venture a guess as to what Rocchi is talking about here.

Like Wordpress, MT probably has a WYSIWYG element in the post composition tool, which makes use of either MIDAS (Mozilla) or MSHTML (Internet Explorer). Safari (and Webkit) did not support either of those methods of in-page editing until version 1.3/2.0 (for 10.3 and 10.4 respectively). However, according to many of those involved in tools using those technologies, like the Writely guys and the TinyMCE guys, even the latest release of Safari cannot really support full use of those engines.

So James, it’s not that the Mac is incompatible with Movable Type. It’s that the WYSIWYG interface in MT is not supported at this point by Apple’s built-in browser. While this is a problem that Apple should be looking to address ASAP, it is certainly not a game ender, since most blog posts are just paragraphs of text anyhow.

Update: As Drew points out in the comments, James Rocchi has left Netflix. Shout out to Drew and his crazy awesome site from this NYC film student!

If you’re as much of a fan of 37signals as I am, you have devoured their lengthy multi-point essays about both Basecamp and Backpack. Now they have released Writeboard and there is no manifesto to be found. Have they lost their radical, youthful exhuberance?

So I tried Opera, and yes, it is super fast! On my mac there really is a noticeable difference between it and Firefox, which is even faster than Safari.

Scoble has blogged asking any of the Microsoft executives to make a Web 2.0-related acquisition. Everywhere on the web there is rampant speculation as to what company or group Scoble has in mind. Can you guess what is really going on?

There is no way that Microsoft would ever make an acquisition as a result of a public Scoble post. Why? Because it would give him way too much power. As he says, he is “seven levels down” in the corporation, and unfornately, as corporate politics go, it would be too dangerous to allow him to pull strings that way – especially with the whole world watching.

Scoble knows this, so what is he really doing? Simple. With a short paragraph on his blog he has gotten the entire tech blogosphere talking about Microsoft. Go check out Memeorandum and see what stories are ruling the web right now. For a week that will be heavily controlled by Web 2.0 properties and announcements, Scoble has successfully injected the decidedly pre-web MS into the conversation.

Good job, Scoble. Me? I don’t think there really is a company in mind here. Just a little bit of sly PR slight of hand on the part of the reigning king of web PR - Mr. Robert Scoble.

Dave Winer:

I love the new Yahoo mail. It’s rapidly becoming my primary mail system. Good spam blocking, great user interface, really works on all my computers/browsers. Gmail doesn’t. And the Gmail UI is looking pretty pale compared to Yahoo’s. Now we’re in a sweet spot, possibly a very sweet spot. Two great development companies competing for our attention, and neither of them is Microsoft. Come to think of it, neither is Apple. Yahoo!

Scoble:

Dave Winer says that Microsoft isn’t trying to compete with Google’s Gmail or Yahoo’s new (and awesome) email system. Um, Dave, that’s not true. You might want to watch this video about the new Hotmail that’s under development or this one about the new Outlook Express, now called Windows Mail, that’s also under development.

I have to disagree with Scoble here. The new Microsoft Mail web app that is shown off in that video is quite cool indeed, but notice that the one feature that Dave Winer was talking about in his brief post on the subject was “works anywhere”—which, for all you Microsofties who aren’t Sanaz or Steve or the rest of the awesome Start.com team, does NOT mean everywhere that runs Windows. When Scoble asks the new Mail team about other browsers, they say that “the majority of our [must be Hotmail’s] user base is on IE 5 and 6” (by the way, I love the use of version numbers of the SAME BROWSER to make it sound like they are supporting more configs). When Scoble then asks Scott Isaacs about browser/OS compatibility for these web apps, he says “it works on Firefox.” While not awful, Microsoft needs to get its act together. The WPF/E team showed off their wares on OS X running Safari, which after all is the default browser on the Mac. If Safari is a bit anemic right now, then Microsoft should approach Apple’s team (as I’m sure they’ve done in the past) and try to solve this. You cannot have a web platform (whether it be the MSN one, ATLAS, or WPF/E) if it only runs on Wintel Machines running IE. Firefox is really important and Safari is somewhat important, and this is what Google really understands, and what from what we’re hearing Yahoo is understanding with this new Yahoo Mail. It remains to be seen, but from what I’ve seen I would pick the Microsoft offering over the Yahoo one[who knows what Google is up to], but alas it probably won’t work on my Safari browser. Maybe next time, right Microsoft?