If you play guitar, you’ve probably tried the various tab and chord sites out there. I recently discovered Chordie.com and it has quickly become my favourite.

One thing I often do is look up chords for songs I’m listening to in iTunes. I do it so often that I decided to put together a little script to make it a bit easier to do.

Head on over to my Projects page to download Search Chordie and to find out how to use it.

Download Search Chordie

Search Chordie is based on Search Wikipedia by the fantastic Doug Adams – check out his other iTunes scripts at DougScripts.com.

Thanks also to Chordie.com – if you play the guitar, you’re going to love this fantastic resource.

• Consumers that don’t own a DSLR see these new cameras as an attractive compromise offering DSLR quality with a consumer-friendly interface and lower cost
• Prosumers that already own a DSLR see them as a great alternative to their bulky DSLRs that they can take out and about

Which models are on the market?

Until now, Olympus and Panasonic have been the only two companies offering cameras in this space, so they have generally been referred to as “Micro Four-Thirds” cameras – after the joint standard those two companies established together.

However, Sony have recently announced their “Alpha Nex” series, which uses a larger APS-C sized sensor, that should give the Micro four-thirds competitors a run for their money.

Is it a DSLR? Is it a Micro Four-Thirds? No, it’s…

With Sony entering the fray, a new term is needed to describe the cameras within this category. In the interest of keeping things simple, I’m just going to refer to them as “Micro DSLRs“.

Latest Developments

So what has happened since the release of the original Olympus E-P1 that kicked everything off?

• Olympus have followed up with the overpriced E-P2 and the lower-end E-PL1
• Panasonic’s GF1 has been established itself as geek’s camera of choice
• Sony have dialed their shrinking machine to eleven and introduced the tiny Alpha Nex-3 and Alpha Nex-5 models

If you’re in the market, it’s probably worth waiting until the new Sony models are released in July, but it’s definitely turning into an interesting year for Micro DSLR fans.

I should have a chance to take a look at a few of these new models in the upcoming months, so stay tuned.

But OS X has gone through a lot of changes since Transmit 3 was first introduced and the app is starting to show its age. Enter Transmit 4!

This latest update adds a completely new user interface, innovative new features like Transmit Disk as well as a slew of customisation options. I was fortunate enough to be a beta tester for version 4, so I’ve had a few weeks to play with the new version – here are some of my thoughts.

New UI

Panic is know for their sleek user interface design and attention to detail and Transmit 4 is no exception. First off, the biggest change of them all: A NEW TRUCK!

But the logo isn’t all that has been refreshed: The entire app feels brand new. Most UI elements have been given a 2010 update and the interface feels a lot tidier.

You start off with a list of your configured servers that uses a sleek black look that was made popular by apps such as Pixelmator, CoverScout 3 and SongGenie (disclaimer – I work for equinux).

Selecting a server puts you into a familiar file browsing mode – more on that below:

Buttons and features are usually exactly where you would expect to find them and unobtrusive animations and pretty icons round out the package and give the app a nice touch of Panic personality. Here are a few bits of eye candy I noticed during testing:

File Browsing, Places & Quick Look

An FTP client fundamentally has two jobs: show me my remote files and allow me to move files between my local and remote storage. To accomplish that, an FTP application has to replicate a lot of the functionality of a regular file browser, so users can browser their local files as well as their remote files.

Transmit 4 offers single and dual file-browser layouts, (rearrangable!) tabs and the icon, llist, column and cover flow viewing styles you are familiar with from the Finder. But it also has a few additional tricks up its sleeve, that you won’t find in the Finder.

Here are some of the more interesting file browsing options:

• Folders above Files changes the sort order, so that folders are always displayed before your files in a view
• Quick Look makes it easy to see a file’s content and even works with remote files stored on your FTP server
• Places can store shortcuts to your most frequently used folders, so they are just a click away. You can also drag files to a Place shortcut.

Places is really useful, but the way you add locations by dragging them to the breadcrumb area is a bit unconventional. Once you’ve figured it out though, it quickly became one of my favourite Transmit 4 features.

Transmit 4 offers enough view options to suit almost anyone’s preferred file browsing style. Whether you perfer to work with multiple windows, tabs, split layouts, column view etc – Transmit 4 has got you covered. While it’s debatable whether most users need so many options, file browsing habits are usually so ingrained that it was probably a good idea for Panic to include as many options as they could.

DockSend, Droplets, TransmitDisk and more…

Most of the time, I find myself uploading files to the same place over and over again. Transmit has a number of ways that give you an easy way to send a file to your FTP server straight from the finder:

• Drag it to a custom droplet you can create in Transmit 4
• Enable Docksend and you can drag it directly to the Transmit 4 icon in your Dock
• Turn on TransmitDisk…

TransmitDisk is a nifty new feature, that uses MacFUSE to allow you to mount your FTP server as a volume that the Finder can see. Once mounted, you can interact with your FTP folders like you would with a drive on your local network.

In my experience this worked fairly well, but occasionally felt a little bit more sluggish than using Transmit’s own file browser – but your mileage may vary.

Conclusion

Overall this is a great upgrade to an already very useful application. The new features are well thought out and make working with your FTP server a lot easier and faster. While this isn’t a revolutionary upgrade, it is solid enough to make it worth your while.

You can buy or upgrade to Transmit 4 in the Panic Online Store.

But there are a few areas that feel a bit crummy, when compared with the rest of the experience. Considering how many apps Apple had to completely overhaul for the iPad’s presentation in January, it’s no surprise to find a few rough edges, on the otherwise fantastic device.

File syncing

I understand why Apple is hesitant to add any kind of file system to the iPhone OS, but considering how much emphasis was placed on the iPad apps at launch, you would think that they would have come up with an elegant way to get documents on and off your iPad.

Unfortunately, in reality it’s a huge pain. Ted Landau took the time to document all the steps it takes to actually get a document into iWork on your iPad, none of which are particularly intuitive. Plus you then have the hassle of managing revisions and tracking multiple copies of the same file.

The iPhone app SimpleNote and Notational Velocity on the mac show how document sync can be done right. Some apps are also adding Dropbox support, which gives you an idea how file sync in general could be improved. Given the fact that Apple has already done a lot of the hard work by creating the MobileMe and iWork online services, one can only hope that we’ll see seamless, cloud-based file syncing added sooner rather than later.

Safari caching

If you open multiple tabs in safari on your Mac, switching between them is instantaneous. In mobile safari, you can never be sure whether the tab will open immediately, or whether it will need to be reloaded over your wifi or 3G connection. On the wifi-only iPad, where users can’t be sure they’ll always have access to an internet connection, webpage persistance is particularly an issue. The fact that Offline Pages (iTunes link) is currently one of the top free iPad apps in the App Store would seem to underline this point.

Mobile Safari’s limiting caching abilities are most likely due to the limited amount of RAM in the iPad, which has just 256MB, however as Rentzsch has pointed out, it should be possible to offload pages to the solid state drive as a workaround, although it’s not a trivial problem.

Calendar event creation

Making event creation in calendars difficult seems to be one of Apple’s favorite UI slip-ups. The calendar app on the iPad is gorgeously designed and it makes browsing through calendar entries a visual pleasure.

But the interface for adding entries seems to have been cut & paste directly from the iPhone version and doesn’t make any use of the additional screen real estate the iPad offers. You get the impression the designers spent all their time working on the rest of the UI and simply stuck the editing controls in there at the last minute.

Consistency between the two platforms is of course a good thing, provided it doesn’t slow the user down unnecessarily. I would argue that you could better use the iPad’s screen real estate to make a much more efficient and intuitive event creation UI.

The problem is feature overlap: if a netbook can do some, but not all of the same things a notebook can do – why not just take the notebook? You’ll need a bag to carry either, so there’s only a slight difference in size and weight to consider. Smartphones on the other hand can do some of the same things a notebook can do, but have a clear size and weight advantage, as well as a telephony features that a notebook doesn’t offer.

The iPad might suffer from the same problem as netbooks. It offers a lot of features offered by both other device categories, but it also presents these features in a new, multi-touch interface. But is the new interface and compact form factor enough to convince users to ditch their smartphones and notebooks for certain tasks?

Browsing some of the initial comments about the iPad, most users are initially very enthusiastic, as you would expect with most highly anticipated new CE devices. However, some users are already reporting that the initial excitement has worn off:

Jeff Jarvis tweets:

“After having slept with her (Ms. iPad), I am having morning-after regrets. Sweet and cute but shallow and vapid.”

Update: Turns out Jeff is actually returning his iPad:

[...] “(I) simply don’t see a good use for the machine and don’t want to spend $500 on something I’m not going to use.”

Funemployed entrepreneur Nat Friedman posts on Facebook:

“24 hours later, I must admit I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be using this thing for. The charm is wearing off.”

On a more anecdotal note, I recently had a few friends over for a party and they were playing with an iPad borrowed from work. Most of them were fascinated by the device and wanted one, but couldn’t really see much use for it apart as a “toy”.

Unlike the iPhone, which you always carry with you anyway, the iPad is something you need to actively seek out and use. With many people purchasing iPads without a clear idea what they’ll be using it for, it’ll be interesting to see whether Apple’s latest can win a permanent place in user’s day-to-day lives, or whether it will be yet another gadget collecting dust somewhere. My guess is that it’ll be the type of gadget you use regularly – just not as often as your phone or notebook.

What are your thoughts? Are you starting to get bored of your iPad – or has it already become indispensable?

iPhone vs. Mac app quality

If you compare a typical Mac app with a typical iPhone app, you’d probably have to agree with David. I’ve experienced far more issues with some fairly popular iPhone applications than I have with popular and successful Mac applications, despite the lack of any sort of approval process.

David argues:

Only good stuff in the App Store: Ha! The App Store has some 140K+ applications. I can guarantee you that the bulk of that is less than average. There are some 100 fart apps for christ sake!

[...] In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can’t easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don’t release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.

His argument, as I’ve understood it, is basically: there are shitty apps on the App Store because updating an app is so cumbersome and slow, so developers can’t iterate as often.

I think that’s an oversimplification though. A large number of developers on the App Store are probably new to Objective-C programming and its pitfalls. The iPhone’s limitations also mean that apps are more severely affected by problems that wouldn’t affect a desktop app (memory issues for instance) – another reason that iPhone app quality is lower than Mac applications.

There are definitely other reasons as well, but I think those go a large way towards explaining why so many apps on the App Store are pretty mediocre, when compared with desktop Mac apps.

Newbie developer + extremely limited hardware resources = poor software quality.

If the App Store didn’t have the approval process, you’d still have a lot of crappy apps.

But what about “real developers”?

But let’s ignore the shitty apps on the App Store for a second; Does the approval process improve the quality of apps made by respectable, experienced software developers?

In my experience, it does.

On the Mac, built-in update mechanisms (such as the excellent, ubiquitous Sparkle framework), make it easy for a developer to push out a release and fix any issues almost instantly.

An iPhone app doesn’t have that luxury, precisely because of the delay caused by the approval process. Instead you’re stuck with 7-14 days of angry customers and lost sales due to poor reviews.

So “real developers”, with a reputation to protect, are forced to test and review their own apps more extensively before submitting them to Apple for approval.

In that sense the approval process is a blessing and a curse for consumers: it forces developers to test their apps more thoroughly, but it also means that if a bug does slip through the cracks, you’ll be forced to put up with it for quite some time.

So is the approval process a good idea?

Assuming the approval process forces developers to test more and therefore does improve the quality of apps – is it beneficial overall for consumers?

I’d still argue it’s not. Every piece of software has bugs. The approval process means developers spend a large amount of time hunting down the million and one things that could go wrong – time that might be better spent adding new features or polishing another area of the app.

And when an issue inevitably does crop up, the artificial delay means your paying customers will be stuck waiting 7-14 day for a (probably tiny) fix that a Mac developer could have pushed out in an hour or two.

I think one solution would be for Apple to insist on a very thorough review for initial releases, but then only quick reviews for updates and fixes.

equinux blog: Goodbye Macworld

• Why doesn’t it seem to have the Weather, Stocks, Clock or Voice Memo apps?
• Why is there space for a camera?
• -insert latest techcrunch rumour here-

For what it’s worth, I believe it’s entirely possible Apple might be holding back certain features so there’s something new to announce around the time it’s actually due to ship. In fact, there’s a precedent for this.

Shortly before the original iPhone was scheduled to launch in 2007, Apple announced two major (supposedly last-minute) improvements.

The first was a battery life upgrade (which was probably achieved by software improvements), the second was that they were “upgrading” the display to a glass screen – which seems like such an integral part of the overall device that it would have to have been planned all along.

My guess is that we’ll see one or two minor iPad announcements in March, but it probably won’t include a camera.

1. Times

This fantastic RSS reader is already multi-touch aware and is a dream to use on MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads. You tap to read full articles, 3-finger swipe up to return to the overview or 3-finger swipe left and right to switch between sections. The gorgeous UI is the closest thing to reading a real newspaper on your Mac and Times could be a perfect match for the iPad.

2. CoverScout

The coverflow-esque UI in CoverScout is a perfect fit for the iPad: You can swipe through your albums, double-tap to start a search and then drag a cover from your search results to an album to apply it.
The search results bubble introduced in CoverScout 3 is also very reminiscent of the new popover list UI element introduced for the iPad.

Whilst you can certainly argue whether this is the type of application you would use on the iPad, the interaction style seems as though it would be an ideal match.

3. Djay

If there’s one application that would really work well with a touch-screen UI, it’s Djay. Being able to use a MacBook multi-touch trackpad as your DJ controller is nice, but a 9.7 inch touchscreen control would offer a much better, hands-on experience. Currently it looks as though access to the music on your iPad will be restricted though, making a real port of Djay unfeasible.

2010

It’ll be interesting to see which Mac applications will be turned into iPad versions and what level of sophistication iPad apps have. Will they stay simple and iPhone-esque? Or will we see Mac application developers come out with truely desktop-challenging versions of their products? 2010 should be an exciting year for developers…

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But I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve showed friends and relatives how to import their audiobook / spoken word CDs properly. It was also one of the questions I was most often asked whilst working at an Apple retailer. There are a ton of tools and tutorials on the net that also address this issue, which seems to suggest people continue to struggle with this problem.

By default, iTunes imports CDs as individual tracks and adds them to your “Music” library. To rip something as an audiobook in iTunes 9:

• Select all tracks
• Choose Advanced > Join CD tracks
• Select Import Settings and choose “Spoken Podcast”
• Import CD
• Select imported tracks, File > Get Info
• Under options, select “Media Kind: Audiobook”

To make things easier, I would suggest Apple add a simple option screen, similar to the one they currently show if you select an empty media category.

This is a mockup of what it could look like:

With millions of iTunes users out there, I’m sure this would help a fair number of people, without being troublesome for other users.Comedy CDs and childrens stories continue to be popular on CDs so it’s not just audiobooks that could be ripped with this option. One could even envision some of the other import options being exposed this way, e.g. a “Import losslessly” option.

Anyway, food for thought.

Image credit: Audiobook icon by Splasm Software, Inc.