On The Radio

So after writing laboriously to cover nin:access a month or so back… Trent Reznor has announced that he’s pulling out entirely from social networking sites… Twitter, Facebook and most likely his own forums at nin.com, although considering his heavy involvement there in the past, I can’t imagine boycotting his own forums would be a permanent thing… One way or another, Trent says he’s “tuning out of the social networking sites because it’s now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result… Idiots rule”.

Trent’s issues become easily recognizable to any of us that have spent even the least bit of time on forums or social networking sites… In a nutshell, there will always be people that have the sole intention of ruining things for everyone else. Apparently Reznor has a few people registered to the NIN forums that send him 50-100 messages a day filled with “delusional, often threatening nonsense”. Any attempts to delete their accounts just results in the offenders re-registering under a different email address and continuing on… Just handling my non-celebrity data flow when it comes to social networking can sometimes be daunting… I can’t imagine what it must feel like to try and have a ‘real’ presence when your forum has a quarter of a million registered users… I wouldn’t wish that on an enemy.

One way or another… NIN has been broken… a guy that went way beyond the call of duty in terms of online engagement just can’t take it any more. The godfather of goth angst has actually been brought to his knees by a few select shit birds… so thanks guys, time to move on to your next target as you continue not to live your own lives choosing instead to make other peoples less fun…

You know who you are… we know who you are… you suck.

Read the complete Trent kiss off here.

Fun With Apps at the WWDC

One fact that temporarily eluded me as it pertains to this years WWDC was that this has historically been a conference for developers that wrote software for the Macintosh… This year that focus appears to have shifted in large part to App Developers for both the iPhone and iPod Touch… with the lure of low start-up costs and potential windfalls if your App ends up catching on, legions of developers have retooled a bit and are giving the App Store a shot.

To this end, Apple figured out a stunningly cool way to both showcase their new technologies (slated for Snow Leopard this coming September) while at the same time visually illustrating how popular the App Store has become. They set up an installation of 20 synchronized 30″ Cinema Displays blanketed with over 3000 icons representing the App Store’s most popular apps… In real time (albeit a 5-minute delay), every time an app was purchased on the App Store, its associated icon would kerplunk and then ripple on the pond of icons. The whole thing was programmed in Quartz Composer using new OpenCL API’s and was powered by 20 Mac Pro towers running OS X Snow Leopard.

Plus a pretty cool set of still pictures can be found here.

Is Conan a Hater Too?

Got this one from friend of the show Mike Reid. Married to that U.S. 30 Dragstrip vibe, this one emphasizes the hype and shines a light on a concept destined from birth to jump the shark… if you’re finding value in Twitter, all the power to you… I find the occasional nugget perusing it as well… But at the end of the day…

Bro’s a no-no for coco… Easily inside the 140 character limit. Such a small space to be clever in huh?

The annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, currently being held in San Francisco, was the forum back on June 6, 2005 when Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be transitioning from PowerPC to Intel processors over the coming two years. Today, 4 years later, Apple announced Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which in the absence of support for non-Intel Macs, officially marries OS X to the Intel processor.

Apple replaced its classic 68k operating system (1984-2001) with OS X 10.0 Cheetah in March of 2001… from there was the incremental 10.1 Puma (09/2001), 10.2 Jaguar (08/2002), 10.3 Panther (10/2003), 10.4 Tiger (04/2005) and now the current 10.5 Leopard which debuted in October of 2007 and is currently at version 10.5.7. When asked to compare OS X to Windows, I maintain that this consistency of over-haul updates that average every 16 months, interspersed with significant interim automated updates, is one of the major contributing factors to what makes OS X superior, so brilliantly stable and practically pain-free.

The problem is though… to the casual user of the personal computer, those that choose to not get involved much with what’s going on behind the scenes, the value of a stable operating system is often overlooked or taken for granted… but in reality, the OS provides the very key to your computer turning on at all… without it, your computer, be it Mac or PC, is just a dumb, lifeless collection of electronic sculpture… As we’ve talked about on the radio, Mac’s and PC’s are for the most part made up of hardware produced by the same vendors; Intel processors, Seagate hard drives, RAM, USB and Firewire circuitry, etc.

Which is why the operating system becomes the all important place to start when deciding what computer is right for you.

With that I present some of the highlights of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which was officially announced today and will hit the streets this coming September. As described by Bertrand Serlet (Senior VP for OS X) at the WWDC today, a big part of what Snow Leopard represents is a thorough refinement of its predecessor… Apple feels, and correctly so I believe, that the current OS X 10.5 is pretty awesome as it is… so as a response to that they’ve chosen with this release to use a large percentage of their development time completely re-writing the underlying code for 90% of the OS… making it leaner while at the same time preparing the OS X architecture for what they feel is ‘around-the-bend’ technologically.

Some cool new stuff coming with Snow Leopard…

Installation time has been cut almost in half… installing Leopard took about 3 hours if I’m remembering right… so this was a feat… another benefit reaped upon installation is that Snow Leopard needs 6GB less space than its predecessor… evidence of the underlying re-write transitioning to modern, lighter code structures. So right from jump street you get 6 gigs of space back… works for me… that’s the opposite of bloatware my PC-lovin peeps…

Safari 4, which was released today for Tiger, Leopard, XP and Vista is now arguably the worlds fastest browser… it also lays claim to being among the worlds most compliant browsers with a perfect 100 score on the Acid3 test, the benchmark for compliance… this compared to a score of 21 for IE 8.

Come September, Mac users will enjoy an even bigger browser speed boost running Safari 4 within Snow Leopard as well…  Safari, like all other core system applications of Snow Leopard, will now run natively in 64-bit. Safari on Snow Leopard will also feature compartmentalized crashes, a feature introduced by Google Chrome that prevents a crash within one tab of the browser to affect other tabs.

To round things out, Safari 4 tracks your most visited sites and offers these up in icon view within the browser window… it also indicates those that have updated content since your last visit with a blue star… the browser will also let you view your browsing history in Cover Flow view, which to see it work is truly impressive. You can also search your browsing history using Spotlight which includes all the text within the web pages archived. Amazing.

When it comes to the new Quicktime X… not only was the code re-written from the ground up, but the appearance and behavior of the Quicktime Player on-screen has changed significantly as well… When invoked, the player opens full screen with the controls fading away after a couple seconds (as DVD Player now works). Quicktime has been finely tuned to eek out every last bit of hardware acceleration performance and can now be tied directly to ColorSync profiles… and as it applies to the web, Quicktime X introduces HTTP streaming coupled with h.264 compression as standards allowing it to work on 93% of the worlds web servers, including Apache obviously…

Quicktime X now also has an embedded simple editor that allows you to view a visual timeline for any movie… set a start and end point, save a trimmed clip and then post that clip to an email or any of a number of online social sites... all without leaving the Quicktime Player… As I consider the ‘delivery’ technology of Quicktime coupled with the editing prowess of Final Cut Studio… I salivate at the possibilities… Windows Media Player? Really?

Without getting into too much detail… some ultra-cool enhancements for our old friend the Finder… The dock is now more 3d… how Stacks work has been refined and they can now handle a ton of files efficiently, which makes it simple to keep your desktop clean… Finder windows in icon view now allow you to scale the size of the icons in real-time… if you’re looking at the icon of a multi-page .PDF, successive clicks on the icon step through the pages of the document. A click on a movie icon, plays the movie (within the icon)… and for those of you that are fans of Expose (the system utility that allows you to step back from the desktop and see all your open documents and windows), it has now been integrated with the Dock in the most natural, intuitive, amazing way. Wait until you see this…

Getting back now to 64-bit software coupled with multi-core processors… the key to increasing a computers speed in 2009 is not upping the clock speed of the processors, as has always been the case… but rather it involves increasing the number of cores. The trick to realizing speed increases is in getting all those cores to work together in the most efficient manner. To address this, with Snow Leopard Apple introduces Grand Central Dispatch, a comprehensive system utility that monitors and manages the flow of computer code to the multi-cores of the Intel processor freeing up resources back to the system in a much more efficient manner. Over the range of applications you may have open at any given time, this change amounts to an even more responsive system, fully taking advantage of the multi-threaded, multi-core architecture.

So we’ve covered a lot of ground… and I could keep writing here deep into the night… but before I sign off this time around I’d like to cover just one more Snow Leopard addition… one that could prove to be the tipping point for those of you who are using PC’s at work but may really want to get a Mac for home… You already have Microsoft Office on the Mac as well as the ability to run Windows natively using Boot Camp or Parallels… now comes the final piece in the puzzle if you ask me…

Microsoft Exchange integration has now been built in to the three main Mac communication applications; Mail, iCal and Address Book. Simply enter your email address and the associated password… and you’re set up in all three apps. Connect to the Exchange server at your office and view all your Exchange content, on your Mac, with access to all of the OS X technology… Search your Exchange data with Spotlight, view all .XLS, .DOC, .PPT content using Preview (whether or not you have Microsoft Office installed) and view your Exchange contacts in concert with personal contacts, Exchange calendar events with personal calendar events… again, yet another reason to take the leap and I’m guessing this will entice legions of converts for whom a lack of Microsoft Exchange integration was a deal breaker.

So this post turned out longer than expected… but I get excited when feasting on a new version of OS X… Apple has never failed to impress… and for all of you already using a Mac and running Leopard… one last morsel for you is that the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard will only be $29 this time around, so that’s awesome… but also know that Snow Leopard will only run on Intel-based Macs… so for those of you without… Leopard is as high as you will go on your current machines… but Apple’s track record shows that they will continue to support Leopard for at least another couple years… plenty of time to save your pennies for that quad-core…

If you’d like to watch the WWDC keynote, do so here… if you’d like to read more about the refinements in Snow Leopard, do that here… and if you like to bone up on the more hard core technology, do that here…

All for now… and if there ever was a time… now is the time to consider a Mac running OS X… I can virtually guarantee you’ll never look back… why would you?

My personal countdown to Snow Leopard will now officially commence!

I’m not asking you to throw away your email address… abandon your Twitter, your Facebook, your Linked In… jettison your digital cameras, mp3 players, bluetooth accessories, smart phones or… god forbid, your internet connection… I know I won’t be… but I am asking you to consider the following random thoughts that have been running through my brainosphere of late…

For those of you who have at least reached your 30th birthday… do you remember postal mail? Film cameras? Cassette walkmans? Pay phones? That’s right, in retrospect they were cumbersome, slow-moving pains in the butt… but how that translated to everyday life was that we were much less likely to have them with us everywhere we went so as to perpetually be able to document and share with the masses everything we were experiencing.

Good or bad? Probably a little of both… but what’s on my mind is what I’ve always thought of as recall memory. You know how a certain smell, or song or place will always remind you of a happy memory or experience long since passed? I don’t know about you… but I enjoy the hell out of that particular symptom of the human condition.

This phenomena happens to me all the time… and I attribute it to a life well lived… which is sort of the gist… I was lucky enough to be born in a time that permitted me to live my life as opposed to constantly feeling an obligation to archive, document and share it. How many of those recall memories would I now be without if instead of living those experiences… I was busy photographing them, tweeting them, posting them to my wall on Facebook or even worse yet… I was on the phone at the time…

Just some food for thought… at best I’m conflicted on the subject because all these technological marvels are very much a part of my everyday life here in 2009… but the artist within me… the essence that’s perpetually in search of a muse… would suggest a modicum of moderation… stay aware of what you may be missing at any given moment of your day… and sometimes, literally, stop and smell the roses.

First things first… this post is worth reading whether you’re a fan of Nine Inch Nails or not… Distilled down, this is about technology first and foremost, the latest tools in the hands of artists and innovators. Personally, I’ve been a fan since that cold, dark Halloween night back in ‘89 when I listened to Pretty Hate Machine for the first time… and as revolutionary as that album was at the time, it’s amazing how far Trent Reznor and company have come since then.

Most notably, every move they make these days can be considered nothing but extremely “fan friendly”, altruistic even… and as a big fan of both live and recorded music, unprecedented in my experience. NIN has shed any ‘major label’ affiliation, has given music away for free while making other offerings available digitally far below current market pricing… they’ve gone out of there way to keep ticket prices down and out of the hands of brokers… and on their current tour, which starts this Friday (05/08) in West Palm Beach, FL, have instituted a “relaxed” policy regarding cameras and audio recorders that I’ve simply never heard of before…

But that’s not what this post is about… Instead, what I’m interested in here is the recently released nin : access free application for the iPhone, which I’ve been playing around with since it came out mid-April and find totally intriguing… not just as a NIN fan… but for the possibilities it both implies and inspires.

nin : access is really an application in two parts. The first side of things, although cool, isn’t that revolutionary… it merely serves up nin.com to the iPhone in a consolidated interface independent of Safari… which is nice because it’s pre-optimized for the small screen… But what Reznor was really interested in trying to engage were the quarter of a million registered users of the nin.com forums in the context of taking his band on the road this Spring/Summer… this leads us to the second half of the application which is where the innovation really takes flight.

Apparently the idea was born last Summer when Reznor was backstage before a show fooling around with his iPhone and noticed that fans outside waiting in line were posting photos of the scene to the nin forums… in response he started posting photos from backstage. The awesome interactivity of this experience got him thinking… what would it take to put an interface on this process? The result, less than a year later is nin: access, a mobile window into all things nin: music, photos, videos, message boards and even, thanks to a GPS-enabled feature called Nearby… the fans themselves.

Nearby is “kind of like Twitter within the Nine Inch Nails network,” says Rob Sheridan, Reznor’s long-time collaborator. “You can post a message or a photo by location, and if you’re at a show you can see conversations between other people who are right there.”

Check out this Wired video if you’re interested in a tour of the application from its creators… the first half of the video covers the more garden-variety features of the application… the explanation for the really cool GPS-enabled features start at the 3:20 mark…

What ends up being the coolest aspect of the nin : access approach to me… is that the entity is not trying to control the experience of the masses. They’re more or less simply harnessing existing technologies and API’s… and allowing the legions of dedicated fans to converse, populate, market, influence, etc… It’s Trent Reznor’s vision of where popular music is headed… and I’ll be damned if he’s not on to something… I know he’s making me more of a fan… I’m happy.

And last, you don’t need an iPhone to check out how this all works… it can be experienced right on the web at access.nin.com… although you will need to download and install the Google Earth plug-in… and your home computer is most likely not GPS-enabled, so you’ll also have to pinpoint your location on the planet to hone in on local conversations… but those two things will just take an extra few minutes and are well worth the result… I’ve tested this on Safari and Firefox within MacOS and all works fine. I’m sure a suitable experience will be had by our PC brethren as well.

Check this out if you have the inclination… GPS-enabling could easily turn out to be a significant part of where social networking is headed. I’d write about some of the ideas I’ve been having… but currently, patents are still pending Enjoy!

As I continue to try to find redeeming value in Twitter… this particular video sort of sums things up in terms of how it’s still feeling for me today… It was also reported today that 60% of those giving Twitter a try are dropping out within a months time… which is completely understandable…

Anyhow, with no further adieu… real life Twitter… can you say jumpin’ the shark?

As the world continues the Facebook love fest… I thought I’d explore the other side of things… those things that get under your skin about Facebook… not necessarily something wrong with Facebook itself… but rather in how people choose to use it…

And as there’s a lot of ways to experience Facebook beyond the way I do… I thought I’d leave some room for everyone else to add to my list… I’ve seeded you with the first 15… read ‘em, and if you have one that I haven’t covered… post it to the comments… I’ll grab the best ones and add ‘em to the list.

The disclaimer here is that much of the following is written with tongue-in-cheek (I’m laying it on thick with the wise-crackin’)… so keep the hate mail to a minimum… especially if you find yourself falling under more than a couple of the following categories…

1 > It’s called Facebook. So why use an underexposed, poorly focused picture taken from across the room of you with 4 of your BFF’s? In this age of a free digital camera when you open a new checking account, is it really that hard to produce a decent picture of yourself? If someone searches for you, they need to have a reasonable chance of recognizing you from the photo you’ve posted… That’s the point right? Maybe it’s just me…

2 > And continuing that theme… posting a picture of something “not” your face… although sometimes funny and perhaps descriptive of your existence in some meaningful way… is still NOT your face… and to the next person who thinks how clever the ubiquitous Che Guevara icon would be for their picture… know that you’re about the 2 millionth person to have this thought… There should be a Facebook Group of Che’s…

3 > Virtual swag… flowers, chocolate boxes, easter eggs… what good is this stuff going to do me in tough economic times? Feel free to use that donation button though… My PayPal creds are available upon request.

4 > Those of you who are linking your Twitter feeds to your Facebook status updates… perhaps the original ‘tweet’ is serviceable… but then your replies to friends who comment on your tweet (which also post to your Facebook status) are just clogging up my news feed. Consider yourself a ’see less of this person’…

5 > Parents that set up a Facebook account just so they can see what their kids are doing… sounds noble… but I’m connected to some of your kids and can tell you with very little hesitation that you don’t want to see what they’re up to… Now I’m talking about college-aged kids here and I need you to just take my word for it on this one…

6 > Don’t “Rank” your friends… nothing good can come of this.

7 > Those that make their home address a part of their profile… believe it or not it’s a much scarier world outside your quaint suburban enclave… and they all have the internet too. Posting pictures of your adorable 5 and 7 year old’s right next to your home address is a recipe for disaster dont’cha think?

8 > Publicizing the ends of relationships… all that will do is open the flood gates for condolences posted to your wall… these are as public as if someone spray-painted them onto your actual wall. A quiet, simple change to your relationship status is all that is necessary.

9 > Write a small ‘personal message’ when making a friend request… how hard is that? If I haven’t seen you in 25 years and your maiden name has vanished… maybe I need a little jog of the memory to remember we were tight in Freshman year homeroom… plus, would you walk up to someone in a bar, nudge ‘em and grunt “be my friend?” Conversation is a dying art… Facebook is still a community. Communicate like your Momma taught you.

10 > If you de-friended me for 1/10th of a Whopper Sandwich… don’t be offended when I won’t take your dumb-ass back.

11 > If you’re on Facebook… never again complain about, or use the term “big brother” negatively… you’re likely more a part of the problem than the solution… but don’t worry about it… the world let that cat out of the bag quite some time ago….

12 > Those that post their phone numbers on their Facebook profiles… nothing good can come of this either… Believe me when I say that Facebook could care less about your privacy… post only your email address… and preferably not your primary email address… use an off-shore gmail or hotmail account that’s easily jettisoned if you ever get in too deep… that way, if someone needs to call you they can drop you an email for your cell number… seems like a reasonable filter in our mad, mad world.

13 > I agree that mobile updating is a pretty cool feature… but does the world really need to know that you’re stuck at an unusually long stop light? Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should…

14 > And on the same topic of status updates… if communicating the minutae of your day is what interests you… “I sooo wish work/school was over…” Isn’t Twitter the more appropriate tool for that? At least then I’d only see it if I subscribed to it (you)… The Facebook What’s on your mind? should have a higher calling I think… share something of value to the community with a link or a picture… or at least offer an observation or write something cryptic or clever… it’s not possible all the time I know… but I’m also not interested in the fact that your kids have been bickering all day.

15 > And in an ode to the title of this post… if something is making the rounds on Facebook that appears a bit narcissistic… it probably is… as my friend Patrick Crispen’s Dad taught him… if you don’t want to see it on the cover of the New York Times… don’t ever write it down… words to live by sho’nuff.

16 > From Badger > What’s that, friend? You’re throwing a party? Your band is playing a show? Here’s a thought…HOW ABOUT A PHONE CALL?!? Even an email would suffice… If you have an event you hope for me to attend, I recommend you make me aware in a manner more direct than bundling a FB invite in with myriad Lil’Green Patch requests that I already am bitter about having to constantly ignore.

(Editor’s Note; So despite my best efforts to solicit contributions… I was only able to harvest just the one visitor response above from Badger… You’re still free to comment below… I’ll fill in the remaining 9 slots as things come to me… give me something I can use and you’re in…)