Setting up iTunes Match

Setting up iTunes Match was a breeze since nearly everything is automatic. If you’re running the latest version of iTunes, you should see a new “iTunes Match” option in the left sidebar. This page will explain the service and provide you with a link to purchase the annual subscription. Once you sign up, iTunes will scan your music library and gather data about your collection. The matching is done by using an audio fingerprint which can identify the track regardless of the metadata you have in the ID3 tags. It took a few minutes to “match” my library of 21,737 songs. Amazingly, 19,651 of my tracks were matched! The final step in the process was to upload the remaining tracks that could not be matched. In my case, I needed to upload 2,083 songs and plenty of high-resolution album art that I have associated with most of my albums. This took a few hours on my good (30/5 Mbps) internet connection.

Once you’ve completed the initial match and upload process, your entire library will be backed up in iCloud! Any new music that you add to iTunes in the future will be automatically processed and added to iCloud. If you’re interested to see whether a song was matched or uploaded, you can add the new “iCloud Status” column to your Library view. For songs that are listed as matched, these songs will be available as a 256 kbps AAC track. This is fantastic for those old 128 kbps albums you might have in your library from the 90s. However, if you have a 320 kbps album that gets matched, it will only be available in 256 kbps bitrate for your other devices which do not actually have the original mp3 file. This seems like a fair trade-off to me.

Stream your music from other Mac OS X (and Windows) computers

My absolute favorite aspect of iTunes Match is the ability to have my entire music collection replicated perfectly to my laptop at work, without having to copy any of the files! iTunes Match syncs all of your iTunes Library metadata including playlists, play counts, “last played” information, comments, and full high-resolution album art. On the Mac, you can stream all of your music from Apple’s servers without ever downloading the music. If you want to download an album or song, you can do so by clicking on the little cloud icon. I’ve had fantastic playback this week with albums streaming almost instantly and without any stuttering or buffering. If you routinely use more than one computer and love music, this functionality is incredible.

Using iTunes Match on iOS

Most people don’t have two computers that they use on a regular basis, so it’s more likely that you will use iTunes Match on your iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV. Once you enable iTunes Match in the Settings app on the device, you’ll see a message telling you that the music on your device will be replaced with music from iCloud. Basically, you can’t have both iCloud music and locally-synced music from your Mac on the device. I’m optimistic that Apple could remove this limitation in a future software update, but for now, it sucks.

Once your device is configured to use iTunes Match, you’ll have your entire music library available. You will see a cloud icon next to albums that are in iCloud but not yet on your device. To listen to a song, just tap the song and it will begin to download to your phone. Once part of the song is downloaded, you will be able to start listening to it. iCloud on an iOS device is different from the Mac because you aren’t able to do pure streaming from iCloud. Anything that you listen to will be downloaded and saved on the device. Practically speaking, this makes sense since downloading over 3G uses a lot of data and can be slow. It seems logical to utilize the available disk space on the device to save songs that you frequently listen to. Luckily, the device is smart enough to manage available disk space and will delete the least-recently-played tracks once the device begins to fill up. It’s still a bit unclear how this works, but for now we can hope that the smart engineers at Apple made the right decisions.

Overall, I am less impressed with the iOS portion of iTunes Match. I’ve found that my Music app on the phone is quite sluggish with my huge library. For the first time it’s possible to have 1800+ albums in the Music app because the actual files don’t need to be on the device. Hopefully these performance issues will be resolved in a future update. iTunes Match is currently beta software, so some issues like this are expected.

Despite these issues, there are definitely many bright spots. For example, if you begin to play an album or playlist, the next song in the list will begin to download while the first one is playing. This means that once you buffer the first track in an album, you can pretty much listen to the entire album without having to wait for each song to buffer individually. I love that I can create and manage a playlist on my Mac and pull out my phone to see that the new playlist and songs are added almost instantaneously. Because there’s no need to sync the actual music files, everything stays in sync very quickly.

Wrap Up

I’m extremely impressed with iTunes Match so far. The benefits on the desktop are astounding and the iOS support looks promising. If Apple can allow access to both iCloud music and manually synced music on the iPhone, this would be perfection. It’s great to have another copy of my music collection safely backed up in the cloud and it’s pretty much absurd that this great service is available for only $2/month! I don’t see why anyone would pass this up.

Siri is fantastic. The main reason I decided to upgrade from the iPhone 4 to the 4S was because of this new technology. I could probably pass up a faster processor, or an improved camera, but when something like Siri is announced, I just have to see how it works! It’s akin to when the first iPad was released. Siri feels like a game changer and I don’t want to miss out on the action. There have been a lot of reviews about how Siri works, so I won’t go into that too much, but I would like to discuss the future impact that Siri could have in both our lives and the tech industry.

Many iPhone users are frustrated that Apple restricted Siri to the iPhone 4S instead of including it as part of iOS 5 and allowing iPhone 4 users access. There’s been a lot of speculation around why Apple decided to do this. Some people are suggesting that the dual-core performance of the 4S was needed in order to support Siri. Others say that Apple restricted Siri to the 4S in order to sell more hardware and push curious users (like me) to upgrade. Another theory is that Apple used the 4S as a way to limit the number of Siri users during this “beta” period. I absolutely agree with this theory. Apple announced that they sold over 4 million iPhone 4S during the first weekend of sales. That’s a lot. However, when you compare this to the total number of iOS devices sold thus far (250 Million¹), it’s a small fraction. Let’s conservatively assume that 20 million of these users are on iOS 5 after the first week or two. That’s 5x the load on the already struggling Siri servers and network. By limiting Siri to 4S only, they can slowly increase load as they sell more devices. If they feel confident that they can scale, they may open up Siri to everyone in a future software update.

Siri works by streaming your voice to Apple’s servers as you talk and then, once you’re finished, converting this speech to text and performing the natural language processing to understand what you mean. It sounds complicated, but it works extremely fast as long as Siri’s servers are humming along. (The first few days after the 4S was released, Siri was seeing considerable load/traffic and would often respond that she was unable to connect to the network. I have not seen this error in the past few days, so the situation seems to be improving.) One drawback of always sending everything out to Apple’s servers is that you cannot use Siri when you are offline. So, if you’re traveling in another country without data roaming, you can’t use Siri. Practically speaking, this isn’t a huge issue… but it would be nice if a subset of the commands worked locally on the phone.

More importantly, streaming everything out to Siri’s datacenter provides some massive benefits. Apple is able to keep a huge database of every request ever sent to Siri. Over time they will be able to extract a massive amount of information about “the world’s questions”. In addition to gathering all of this data, Apple is able to update Siri’s brain without requiring iPhone users to do a software update. As far as we know, Siri could have updated 36 times since Friday’s launch. Apple could use all of this request data to gradually add functionality into Siri. For example, they could sort all of the requests that Siri was unable to answer and begin to support them. If 100,000 people asked for sports scores this weekend, maybe that should be the next area to focus on? Siri provides Apple with incredible access into the tasks and questions that millions of users around the world are trying to accomplish. This is huge! If this sounds familiar, it’s because Google has been doing this with their big search box for years.

There are some major parallels between Google search and the functionality enabled by Siri. The difference is that Siri has access to your email, location, text messages, calendars, contacts, and other information. And, just like with Google, privacy and trust issues will certaintly come up with Siri. She knows a lot about us, and it’s important that we can trust Apple with this information. Personally, I am so much more inclined to trust Apple than I am Google. Google makes their money by selling advertisements. This means gathering a lot of information about the user so you can display better ads and make more money. In contrast, Apple is in the business of selling devices. The software and services are just icing on the cake to help lock in customers and drive hardware sales. Apple has not shown a lot of interest in pushing ads or violating the user’s privacy. I feel pretty confident that Apple will keep my personal data private.

Right now Siri only knows about a limited amount of information. Siri is able to access the data on your phone as well as information from Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. If Siri does not know the answer to your question, she offers to Search the Web (Google) for you. You don’t need to spend too much time using Siri before you get a decent grasp of her knowledge. I don’t ask Siri about sports scores or current events. I don’t ask her to tweet for me (although, it is possible). Over time you could imagine that many more services could be added to Siri which would provide a lot of value to users. Siri learns more about us as time goes on and should be able to improve her results and understanding. I’m thrilled to be living in a time where this kind of technology has become a reality. I think Siri’s future is bright.

1. 250 Million. Source: This is My Next

I first heard about Pool Party after reading a TechCrunch article about it at the end of June. The service sounded pretty interesting, so I decided to request an invite in hopes of getting a chance to check it out. A month passed and I had completely forgotten about the service until I received an email with my invite. I created my account and was immediately impressed with the application. The main feature of Pool Party is the ability to create “pools” and then invite people to be contributors to the pool. Basically, it’s like a shared photo gallery with a bunch of photographers adding photos, comments, and likes. If you’re hanging out with a bunch of people who are all using the app, it turns into an amazing time.

If you follow tech news closely, you might recognize that this sounds awfully similar to the Color app that was released a few months ago (and with $41M in VC funding). Pool Party is definitely similar in the sense that you are collaboratively creating a photo album, but I found Pool Party to be MUCH easier to use. Color doesn’t explicitly have the notion of friends, but instead relies mostly on location. It automatically creates albums based on photos taken near each other. So, if you’re out for dinner somewhere, you might start to see photos from strangers showing up alongside photos from your friends. With Pool Party, you and your friends control who is invited to the pool and only those users have access to the photos. Location does not play a part in the pool, so you can include people who are halfway across the country. I think this approach is much more logical and new users are immediately able to understand how it works.

For an early beta, the application is quite impressive. It did seem to crash occasionally during heavy use, but overall it worked pretty well. After the first day of heavy use, I received an email summary of the previous day’s activities. It included a “Top Photos” section based on the most commented/liked photos of the day. It was pretty cool to see the recap. (Note: normal day-to-day activity does not generate these emails. I guess it was just since we had a day of heavy activity in our pool that we passed some activity threshold.) I also like how you can view your pools on the Pool Party website. The website provides a few more features and settings that are not (yet) included in the mobile app. The website is a bit ugly, though.

The most fascinating thing about the application for me has been the rate of engagement. It’s probably because the application is pretty agressive with Push notifications, but it seems like within 5 minutes of a photo being posted, nearly everyone in the pool has seen it. This would not be totally surprising if it was just a bunch of tech geeks always on their iPhones, but i’m seeing this kind of engagement from friends who take an hour to reply to a text message. That’s impressive! There’s something addicting about a photo being added to the pool and when that Push notification comes in, I feel compelled to check it immediately. The downside of this is, obviously, that things can get out of hand pretty quickly if there is a lot of activity in the pool. Luckily, the application offers controls so you can disable Push notifications for certain pools.

The invite-only Pool Party application is available free on iOS and Android. If you need an invite, let me know or you could request an invite. I encourage you to go check out the app and invite some friends. It really is addicting!

UPDATE: Apparently, Google is killing the Slide projects, including Pool Party. So, it’s probably not worth your time signing up. :(

The first thing you see when you begin to use lion is a new login screen. It looks pretty cool and gives you additional details in the top corner such as wifi connection, battery percentage, and the time. After logging in you’ll see a dialog titled “Scrolling in Lion”. As you may have heard, Lion essentially inverts the scrolling so it behaves more like the iPhone and iPad. This is probably the most talked about thing in Lion simply because it’s such a drastic change to something we’ve been using for over two decades. I’ve been using the new scrolling for a couple of days now and my brain is mostly trained. If you have an iPad or an iPhone, I would highly recommend sticking it out and learning the new scrolling method. After a week or so, I think it will feel completely natural.

I don’t want to go over all of the new features in Lion, since there are many good reviews (and some long ones) already out there. However, I did spend some time yesterday going through Apple’s 250 New Features page and I made a list of some of my favorite new additions. I tried to pick out some features that I hadn’t seen covered in the other reviews. Many of these features are minor annoyances in Leopard and Snow Leopard that are finally fixed in Lion. I think it really exemplifies the refinement and polish that has gone into Lion.

Quicktime Screen Recording

Introduced in Snow Leopard, Quicktime screen recordings are extremely useful. However, they always felt like they were missing something by forcing you to record the entire screen. This was especially noticeable on very large displays which lead to unnecessarily large video files. Quicktime now allows you to record only a portion of the screen and the new UI for choosing an area of the screen is excellent.

Preview

Preview has to be one of the best applications to come pre-installed on OS X. Lion brings some new capabilities to open iWork and Microsoft Office documents. Don’t forget, the other flagship feature in Lion is the ability to sign PDF documents by taking a photo of a signed piece of paper using your FaceTime camera.

iChat

iChat is one of my most frequently used applications. Lion finally brings some critical features such as a Unified Buddy list so that you can see your Google Chat and AIM buddies in the same window. Unfortunately, iChat is still missing a lot of features. In Snow Leopard I would use the excellent Chax plugin to add these missing features. Chax is currently broken in Lion, however.

iCal

There is a great new feature called “Quick Add” which allows you to easily add new events using natural language. So you can enter “Board meeting on Thursday at 8pm” and iCal will handle the event creation for you. If this sounds familiar, that’s because the wonderful app Fantastical released the same functionality for iCal a month or two ago. It’s still nice to see this feature baked right into iCal.

Finder

File this one under the “Windows and Linux have had that feature for years” category. Finder is finally able to handle merging folders. Previously if you tried to combine two folders with the same name, Finder would overwrite the contents of the existing folder. Now it’s smart enough to sort everything out and merge them into a single folder. Finally.

FileVault 2

I’m excited to see that Apple has made drastic improvements to the disk encryption feature FileVault. I started using this feature yesterday on both of my machines and so far I have not noticed a performance hit. Everything works just like it did before I enabled it. FileVault now has an Instant Wipe feature which removes the encryption key from your Mac and then performs a completely disk wipe. It’s still not clear how you initiate the wipe… if anyone knows, please add a comment!

Quick Look

This is another feature I use all the time. Hit the spacebar when you have selected a file in Finder and a modal dialog will pop up to give you a preview of the file. In Lion, the Quick Look dialog will stay visible even if you switch out of the Finder application. For example, now you can Quick Look a Mp3 in Finder and switch to Safari while the song continues to play. This used to drive me crazy! Additionally, Quick Look now works in a multitude of new places such as Spotlight results, links in emails, and more.

Time Machine

If you have a portable Mac, Time Machine will now keep some “local snapshots” of your files so that you can have backups of your files even if you are traveling and do not have access to your Time Machine drive. I’m not sure if it backs up every file, or how it manages disk space. But, I can confirm that it’s working on my MacBook Pro and I can see two days worth of backups when I enter Time Machine with my drive disconnected.

Wrap Up

These are just a few of the 250 new features in Lion. I’ve been extremely impressed with Lion so far and highly recommend updating if you have a recent Mac with one of the new trackpads. The old plastic MacBooks have the old trackpad which doesn’t allow 3+ finger gestures. This could be a problem as Lion is highly dependent on multi-touch gestures. I am using the Magic Trackpad on my iMac and it almost seems like a requirement for Lion.

I’m glad Lion is finally here and I can’t wait to see how my workflow improves with all of these new features!

Spotify on the Desktop

The above screenshot shows the Spotify landing page. This page shows you the latest popular albums and allows you to begin streaming them for free. With the Premium account, you can listen to this on your mobile device and even download the tracks for offline listening. I also like how this section provides a “Top Charts” section similar to iTunes music. You can stream all of these tracks right from the charts.

The most impressive feature so far has been the ability to import my iTunes library playlists into the Spotify app with a single click. This doesn’t really provide any useful features on my iMac containing the iTunes library. However, on my MacBook Pro at work I can now stream a huge majority of my iTunes library from Spotify without needing to copy gigabytes of music to the laptop. This is essentially the same feature that iTunes Match promises, except that Spotify allows you to stream the music instead of re-download it. This is MUCH more useful to me.

Full iTunes library synced and available for streaming from other devices.

Spotify claims to have over 15 million tracks in their library. This is very apparent, and a huge majority of my music collection is available in Spotify for streaming. They have basically every new release and an impressive collection of older albums from many artists. Apparently, Spotify will also get some exclusive albums for streaming before they are released to the public. Cool!

My main gripe with the Spotify Desktop application is the “missing features” compared to iTunes and Songbird. I haven’t figured out how to add Year or Genre view options to the Library or Playlist views. There’s no ability to sort by Date Added or even see track numbers in the Starred playlist. It’s possible that I’m trying to use the service in a way it wasn’t intended, but hopefully some of these features will come in a future software update. It seems like only 10% of potential features have been implemented yet, which is actually kind of encouraging for the future.

Spotify Mobile

Spotify is available on the iPhone and many (although not all) Android phones. The iPhone app is pretty cool and offers access to your playlists and allows you to download music to the phone for offline support for airplanes or road trips in the mountains. The application seems a bit limited compared to the desktop app, but most of the critical features are there. We have pretty solid AT&T 3G service here in Raleigh, NC and I’ve been streaming at 320 Kbps while driving and sitting by the pool. It works pretty well, but not perfect. I’m still planning to keep some local Mp3s on my iPhone. When compared to iTunes Cloud, I think Spotify still wins big here since they provide the ability to stream high quality music without requiring the tracks to be re-downloaded and stored locally on the device.

Social Features

There are some impressive social features included with Spotify. Unfortunately for me, many of those features are closely tied to your Facebook account. Since I quit Facebook nearly two years ago, that leaves me with a bunch of awkward and sometimes broken social features. For example, I can’t set a profile photo or easily find other friends using Spotify. I think this is something they are planning to change in the future. It shouldn’t affect too many people since nearly everyone has a Facebook account.

Spotify includes a cool “Public Playlists” feature where you can choose to make your playlists public for other Spotify members to see when visiting your profile. You can Subscribe to other users’ playlists and even create “Collaborative playlists” which can be curated by your friends! Right clicking on an album or track gives you the ability to share the track on Facebook, Twitter, or with other Spotify users. Once shared, your friend will see an incoming message in their Inbox containing the shared track. This is awesome!

Listen and Subscribe to your friends’ public playlists

Share tracks with your friends and listen to shared tracks via the Inbox tab.

Going Forward

It’s only been a few days, but I’m really loving the Spotify desktop features. The ability to stream a huge portion of my music library on my Macbook Pro at work is a killer feature. Beyond the iTunes playlist sync, I have full access to the huge selection of music on Spotify and I’m excited to explore new music effortlessly.

I’m not sold on the Spotify iPhone app, yet. It doesn’t work perfectly with my car’s USB connection and the 3G connection is not flawless when streaming. I have a pretty good system for syncing my iTunes music to my phone, so I’m not very tolerant of bufferring, skipping playback, or lower bitrates. It’s still a neat feature to have but I can’t see myself relying on it as my only source of mobile music.

I definitely recommend checking out Spotify. I do have a few invites. If you would like one, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do. I would encourage you to check out the Premium or Unlimited plans if you are really interested as these plans provide the “true” Spotify experience.

Get Streaming!

“While on the topic, if you’re not using 1Password (or similar)—and you can afford it—then you’re an idiot. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but there just isn’t any excuse.”

Not a user of 1Password myself, I was unsurprisingly a bit offended by the “idiot” remark.¹  Especially because I consider my password management skills to be quite sufficient. Sure, I’ve heard of 1Password and KeePassX before. Many of my friends and coworkers use these type of password managers. Prior to this weekend, I had made a concious decision NOT to use this type of software. I had considered it on many occasions before and had always decided it wasn’t for me. Well, the above quote got me thinking and I decided to spend a day or two revisiting the topic.

I began by trying to compile a list of the “problems” with 1Password (and all password managers, to be honest). My number one issue with 1Password is the notion of a single master password that can unlock every other password that I have stored. I try to avoid a single point of failure, and this sure seems like a big one.  This master password is actually used to encrypt all of your password data using 128-bit keys. The nice thing about this is, if you have a really good master password (which you should, obviously), then it makes your password database very secure. My other security-related concern is the notion of storing the password database in Dropbox. This is an optional step you can take which makes using 1Password across multiple devices significantly more convenient. However, the tradeoff is that your passwords are now stored out in the cloud. This is not always the safest approach. While this might seem crazy, it’s actually not as sketchy as it sounds because the password database is still encrypted when stored in your Dropbox. So even if somebody was able to access the database, they would be unable to read it without your master password. If you decide to go this route, make sure you have a good, unique password for Dropbox!

The other issues I have with 1Password are mostly from an annoyance standpoint. 1Password encourages you to generate a unique (and very complicated) password for each website you visit. This is one of the best aspects of a password manager. The issue with this is that you will no longer have any idea what your passwords are. A typical password will look something like this: HBcTH2}pbnx0cBItEaMO. There’s no chance you are going to remember something like this. This means that you’ll need to have 1Password installed on every machine you access that website on. So, you’re not going to be able to use a public computer (or maybe even your mobile device) to access these websites. (Note: 1Password does have iOS applications for iPhone and iPad, although I haven’t had a chance to try them out yet.) As you can imagine, this will require a little bit of planning and it’s likely that you will get burned occasionally.

As I found out this weekend, it’s also a bit of a pain to get started with 1Password. Sure, you could just start filling out all of your usernames and passwords… but the big security gains come from generating a crazy new password for each website. The only problem is, this means changing your password on many, many websites. What a pain! Interestingly enough, this also provides a good deal of lock-in to 1Password since it would be equally annoying to change all of these passwords again after my trial is over.

Once you have migrated your website passwords over to 1Password, it is a brilliant application. It is able to automatically log you in to websites with the “Go & Fill” feature. It also provides good tools for organizing your sites into folders and tags. I was quite impressed with the Setup wizard when it asked me if I wanted to add the 1Password extension into all of my browsers. With a single click, I was able to get Safari, Chrome, and Firefox extensions installed with no effort whatsoever. Nice. Using these extensions, you can pretty much avoid copying and pasting your crazy password into login forms. The extensions are capable of doing the heavy lifting for you. In fact, there’s even handy keyboard shortcuts for filing out login forms for sites already in your password database.

After using 1Password for two days now, I can honestly say that it makes logging into websites a breeze. I’ve found it especially useful for websites that I don’t access very often, like my electric and cable companies’ websites. Furthermore, there’s no arguing with the fact that having a completely unique password for every site is extremely secure. I currently use close to 10 different passwords, but I often share the same password for websites of the same ‘class’. For example, my credit card and banking websites would share my most secure password. 1Password allows me to take this to the next level with individual (and complicated) passwords for every site. I am a bit skeptical though, that a good 8-10 character password (with a special character, numbers, and capitalization) is practically any different than a 25 character password. Once you get to 8-10 characters, the time required to brute force a password like this is already long. So, I don’t think the “super complicated” password is as important as the unique password.

I’ve decided to continue using 1Password for the majority of my passwords. There are some valid security concerns, but I think it comes down to balancing risk. By keeping a “local” password manager, I’m able to ensure that every website password is unique and secure. Most of the security incidents that occurred in the last few years have been websites getting hacked and usernames, passwords, and email addresses leaked out onto the web. If this happened to one of my 1Password sites, this would be a non-issue. It seems less likely that my machine will become physically compromised. If it does, hopefully my OS X password lock & 1Password master password will be enough to keep my passwords encrypted forever. I’ve decided to keep a few of my “key” passwords (such as Gmail, Twitter, etc) out of 1Password. The main reason is because I use these accounts often and don’t want to rely on always having 1Password available. Furthermore, your email password is the most important password you have, so make sure it’s very secure and never reused.

1. In Ben’s defense, he did post a follow-up clarifying the statement and explaining his reasoning a bit better.

When the Mac App Store was originally announced, I was completely taken by surprise. At first the App Store didn’t seem like such a great idea. Why do we need an App Store for the Mac? It’s easy enough to search for applications, download, and install them the traditional way. Or so I thought, until I used the new store. Just like iOS, Apple makes installing and updating applications extremely easy from the new store. It has motivated me to install (and even buy) more software than ever before.

The "Featured" section of the Mac App Store

The Mac App Store has a few key components that really make it great. First of all, app discovery. Before this store existed, there wasn’t really a good way to find out what sort of applications were available for OS X. Sure, Apple had a “Mac Software” section on their website, and even another section dedicated to Mac downloads. However, I don’t think many customers were aware of these listings. Now that the App Store exists, customers are able to browse categories, charts, and featured applications to see all of the amazing software that’s available.

Top Free and Paid Charts, just like iOS

Similar to the app discovery improvements, the store is able to provide a familiar user experience for those users who are coming from iOS devices like the iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. This is a huge advantage for Mac OS X app developers. Customers have become accustom to browsing the App Store on their phones whenever they’re bored and looking for something new and interesting. The ease of one-touch downloading has largely contributed to the great sales numbers that many apps are seeing on the iOS App Store. This same user experience has been ported over to the Mac App Store where users can purchase apps using their iTunes account with a single click. Once you purchase an application, it begins to download and will jump into position on the dock. The user is able to immediately find the new application, and can begin using it right away. It’s so simple. Oh, and once you purchase an application, you can install it on all the other Macs associated with that iTunes account. This is big!

Easily installing application is important, but so is updating the applications. Before the App Store, users would need to rely on each individual application to handle updates. Many of these applications are set to automatically check for updates, but this still required some action by the user. The Mac App Store has assumed the responsibility of managing updates for the applications. Fire up the App Store application, and it will notify you of any applications that have pending updates. You can click “Update All” and all of the applications will be updated. Again, the user experience is exactly the same as iOS.

The App Store has motivated me to purchase more software lately. The prices for applications in the store seem to be a lot cheaper than before. I’m not exactly sure the reason for this, but it could be related to the iOS App Store bringing down the overall prices for consumer software. People are used to paying $0.99 or $4.99 for applications on their phone, why should they suddenly pay 5x that much on the Mac? You’ll notice that prices are definitely higher than they are in the iOS store, but the software is generally more complex.

Carousel is a great new application for Instagram

I’ve seen a few bloggers speculate that Apple may eventually try to push the Mac App Store as the way to install applications for the Mac. Things definitely appear to be heading in this direction as it’s rumored that the next version of OS X “Lion” will be delivered via the Mac App Store to existing Snow Leopard users. There’s also a big security gain by encouraging users to only download software from the App Store rather than random DMG files from the internet. I don’t see Apple blocking installation of internet applications any time soon, though. The iPad and iPhone are limited to the App Store, but I’d like to think that the Mac platform will continue to remain “open” to alternative ways of installing software.

The combination of truly reasonable prices, dead-simple installation and updating, and comprehensive reviews and ratings has dramatically changed my initial impressions of the Mac App Store.

She gave me a call and asked if I would log into Find My iPhone on the iPad to see if I could locate her phone. I pulled up her account and it began to locate her phone. Before long, an error appeared above the phone that said “Location Services Disabled”. Uh oh. I have been using Find My iPhone for nearly 2 years now (we have a MobileMe account) and I have never had an issue locating a device before. At the time, I wasn’t sure if the Location services were actually disabled, or if this meant that the phone was simply turned off.

Since I was unable to locate the phone, I tried to use the “Send Message” feature. This feature allows you to send a message and play a beeping sound on the phone. This sound plays until you retrieve the phone and dismiss the notification. I sent a message (with sound) that said something like “Lost Phone. Please call ###-#### to return it!”. The Find My iPhone website seemed to indicate that the message was displayed properly on the device, and later Caitlin received an email confirming this. Great.

The next thing I tried to do was send a “Remote Lock” request to the phone. Caitlin did not have a passcode lock on her phone, which means that the thief could have easily disabled settings like Find My iPhone location services, WiFi and 3G data, etc. I was hoping to quickly install a passcode lock remotely before the thief had a chance to lock things down. I submitted this request and the website said that the “Remote lock request is pending”. Hummm, that doesn’t sound good. Caitlin (who was still on the phone with me at this point) confirmed the fact that all of the calls to her lost phone are now going straight to voicemail. It seems like we may have annoyed the thief with all of the calls and messages/beeping.

Things were not looking good. The phone had nearly 100% battery and would easily last a few days on standby. It was at this point that we realized the phone was probably not lost, but stolen. It’s unclear if the phone was simply turned off, or if the thief was savvy enough to remove the SIM card and turn off WiFi. The restaurant staff was not terribly helpful, and Caitlin suspects somebody there may have taken the phone. Feeling quite defeated, she gave up and made the drive home.

That night I refreshed the Find My iPhone site over and over in hopes of seeing an update about my remote lock request. The following morning, the request was still in the ‘pending’ state and it appeared as though the phone was not going to come back online any time soon. I decided to send the “Remote Wipe” request which erases all of the data on the phone. Once you send this, you lose the ability to lock, track, or send messages to the phone. This is basically the “I give up” button. The problem with this is, like the remote lock command, it will not work unless the phone has an internet connection. Now I have both a Remote Lock and a Remote Wipe pending on the phone.

A few days passed and the pending status did not change. It would appear as though the SIM card was removed from the phone and/or it was completely restored via iTunes. The phone was gone.

So, what lessons can we learn from this story? Well, I think the first lesson is to ensure you have a passcode lock set on your iPhone at all times. It should be a fairly agressive lock that locks after 1 minute (or less) of inactivity. Any longer than this, and you might defeat the point. This will buy you some time to track the phone and will prevent a thief from disabling the Find My iPhone features. Additionally, if you suspect that the phone may be stolen instead of lost, it’s probably not a good idea to call it repeatedly or send messages with beeping. Annoying the thief with loud sounds and phone calls will probably force him/her to turn off the phone quicker. If the phone is off, you have no chance to track it.

Find My iPhone is a great feature of MobileMe and you should definitely set up your iPhone with the [now] free service. Just remember, it’s not foolproof and if you don’t enable some of the additional security measures, it might be no help at all.

One of the ads that really irks me is this “Power” ad that has been running on TV lately. The tag line is: “The new Blackberry Playbook, it runs all of this… at the same time.” The video starts off by showing a Thor movie (trailer?) and then the user multitasks to a racing game, and then to a music video, and finally to a snowboard movie. I’ve seen demos of the Playbook before, and it is quite impressive that it’s able to stream all of those things at once. Don’t get me wrong. But, what I don’t understand is why a customer would want/need to do this. You can only watch a single video stream at a time… why would you want other 1080p videos to be running in the background on your tablet? What does this do to the battery life? Here’s the commercial:

Another example of the confusing marketing messages is this screenshot from the Playbook’s homepage. The tag line here is: “The world’s first professional-grade tablet.”

I’m not at all surprised that Blackberry is pitching this as a professional-grade, enterprise tablet. These are the type of users I would expect to be buying a Blackberry tablet. IT departments are looking to Blackberry to provide a tablet that integrates well into their existing security standards and presumably all of the Blackberry smartphones they have. However, this message becomes confusing when you pair it up with all of the other messages and ads showing the Playbook primarily as a media consumption device. Users are shown watching music videos and playing games, not banging out emails or working on PowerPoint presentations. It’s going to be hard for enterprise users to take this thing seriously.

Essentially, it all comes down to the fundamentals. A tablet commercial needs to convince people why they need the device. What does it do better than their laptop or smartphone? I don’t think that the Playbook commercials are really accomplishing this. “Look you can play 4 videos at once!!”. Great. But why? I don’t think the casual consumer cares about this.

Finally, let’s take a look at the Playbook’s biggest competitor, the iPad 2. What does the latest iPad commercial convey? The commercial directly addresses 6 different types of people/professions: parents, musicians, doctors, CEOs, teachers, and children. In the thirty second ad spot, Apple shows an example of a third party application which demonstrates the iPad’s capabilities for that type of person. This allows the iPad to appeal directly to millions of people who are able to closely relate to the demo. They’re hopefully thinking “Wow, I can definitely see myself doing that if I had an iPad.”

This is the emotional appeal that Apple marketing is so good at. They’re able to get down to the fundamentals and show people why they need the device.