John Zeitler

Last week, Macworld’s Jason Snell argued against iTunes’ continued existence as a monolithic, do-everything application, and for the implementation of its features as a suite of interconnected applications. He’s right, of course, and Apple knows he’s right. But it’s still not going to happen.

Some background is in order here. iTunes, as an application, was first introduced in January of 2001, for Mac OS 9. The 1.0 version didn’t support the iPod, mostly because that wouldn’t be introduced until October of that year (alongside 2.0). It was a somewhat lackluster media player, and it wouldn’t come into prominence as the main iPod “driver” software until the 2.0 version was released. The Windows version wouldn’t be out until 2003.

Flash forward to today, where it runs on Windows and OS X, and it’s still a lackluster media player, with godawful playlist support and worthless organization and randomization tools. It also has a metric assload of useless crap bolted onto it, including videos, podcasts, Cover Flow, the mobile App Store, books, and Ping. I honestly couldn’t tell you who gives two flying farts about Ping; no Mac user I’ve ever talked to does. And Cover Flow is pointless when the vast majority of a user’s library isn’t sourced from the iTunes Store. iTunes does everything, and everything it does, it does abysmally. I vehemently hate iTunes.

Apple doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot of fondness for iTunes as an application, either. When the Mac App Store debuted, it was its own application. On iOS devices, the individual functions that iTunes serves on those platforms are split out into individual apps (“Music”, “Videos”, “App Store”, “iTunes”– actually the music store, and “iBooks”). The trend has progressed on newer devices for secession out from a monolithic app. Meanwhile, the very next day, rumors arose that iTunes 11 would include a dedicated “iCloud” panel of some sort, in an astonishingly backwards move.

Unfortunately, there’s a very good reason Apple simply can’t break up the iTunes racket, and it’s one that got forced on them as the iPod took off in popularity: Windows. When an average user buys an iPod or an iPhone, they’re not going to want to have to install a dozen different applications just to get the thing to work. Apple recognizes this and has made overtures towards steering users away from iTunes; iOS 5 allows you to buy an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and get it going without it ever being connected to a traditional computer.

At the same time, though, iTunes remains the single point of entry for non-Apple-distributed music to get on your device, even with its iTunes Match service. Many genuinely useful apps like ProPlayer or Avid Studio are hamstrung by iTunes’ de facto gatekeeper role for files. On Windows, it’s a crash-prone piece of bloatware that I wouldn’t install even at gunpoint. Probably worst of all, though, it’s just old technology, and I would be honestly shocked if the internal code libraries that iTunes is built on haven’t been completely obsolesced; Apple can and has done much better in the intervening ten years.

I still think that iOS and the devices running it are good, and the fact of the matter is, I bet I’d have the same problem syncing stuff to an Android device, just backwards (as I’ll bet there aren’t many reliable Mac clients for those). But honestly, some of the sheen is starting to wear off of iTunes. It’s time to put the old dog down and work with our new technologies in new ways.

It frustrates my friends and family to no end when I start writing about stuff that’s going on “behind the scenes”, without actually referring to any of it. This is a problem that’s only exaggerated by my increasingly-frequent bouts of radio silence. The fact that I also dropped the bombshell of depression on you all earlier this year doesn’t exactly help to reassure a lot of you, either. The only thing I can really offer is that I am a very busy person, and that if I say something can’t be discussed publically just yet, there’s probably a good reason for this. The biggest one is because, as amazing as this may sound, I have learned from my many mistakes in the past.

Metal Rogue. The Deep. Caught!. Laura. Those are just four of the major projects I’ve announced publicly and then just kind of… dropped. That’s not even getting into the fact that I still haven’t written an ending to Frangible Time, because I honestly just want to re-write that from scratch. There are a ton of projects that, when I was younger, I would announce, start working on, and then just lose steam with until something else caught my eye. Eventually– and more recently than I would truly like to admit– I figured out that a lot of drama could be spared if I just said “I’m working on something” instead of detailing exactly what. Then again, when I’ve had successes, I’ve mentioned them. This is no different.

Last weekend, I made the decision to go back to eating meat, ending an almost five-year experiment with pescetarianism that, while not permanent, certainly shaped a significant part of my life. More importantly, it got me to re-evaluate certain things and to become more adventurous with my meals, which again came a little bit more recently than I would have cared. I’ve always said that it wasn’t borne out of an ideological thing, out of empathy for animals or latent sympathy with certain whackjobs. My decision to suspend eating meat was just something I wanted to try, to see if it was worth pursuing. For five years, it was. Now it’s not. I suggest that a lot of you try not to read too much into this, as there’s very little to it beyond “I wanted a Double Whopper” and “I learned what I wanted to know”.

There are, of course, more projects that I’m working on. Once I’m done with them, I’ll talk more. Some are small, some are bigger, and one is simply massive in scale– don’t expect too much news on that one for a couple years yet. What I can say is that every once in a while you can hear a few details now and again on my Twitter feed, and if you catch me in person I’ll usually talk your ear off about whatever I’m engaged in at the time.

More to come. There is always more to come.

Important Service Note: There are no referral links in this post.

Dead Winter is a webcomic by Dave Shabet, centering about a young waitress whose life suddenly turns for the worse once the city she lives in becomes infested with zombies on the same day that she loses her job and is dumped by her boyfriend. Luckily, she meets help in the form of a flatulent yet erudite plumber, an eager medic, and a remorseless hitman.

I think it should go without saying that it’s better than that paragraph makes it sound.

Zombies are pretty much getting to be the most commonly used disaster trope nowadays, which would be depressing if I didn’t live in Pittsburgh and hadn’t already been more or less inured to zombie overload already. However, Dead Winter’s approach is remarkably different: rather than focus on the mere physical survival aspect of the disaster, Lizzie (the waitress) is constantly worried that the disaster will change her personality and frame of mind away from her pacifistic and philanthropic baseline. As the story progresses, a lot of attention is paid to the psychological toll that the zombie apocalypse is having on the main characters. Black Monday Blues (the hitman), however, is developing in much the same way as Lizzie, but in the opposite direction. Initially part of a Most Dangerous Game-style survival sport when the infection spreads, he finds himself slowly and gradually questioning why he’s sticking up for these complete strangers, as both the unliving and the living line up to kill him.

The story wouldn’t work nearly as well without Shabet’s fantastic art style. Character designs are fluid and well-detailed, switching between different models within the pages in order to achieve a desired effect, either emphasizing the dramatic impact or highlighting the lighter mood. The zombies are almost always depicted in an abstract, almost cutesy manner, highlighting their unreality while downplaying their threat level– the story, at its core, isn’t even really about them. This is a series that takes as much of its visual cues from Dawn of the Dead and 28 Weeks Later as it does from Scott Pilgrim and Paper Mario. Probably most striking, though, is Shabet’s use of color. Only a few elements of the “main” story are colorized, and even then only in red, while intermissions set in Lizzie’s subconscious are gorgeously rendered in full color (and, surprisingly, aren’t at all patronizing about explaining her mental state at the time).

Every so often, Shabet puts up animated GIFs that detail the process he uses in creating a page of the comic (it updates on a semi-regular schedule, with a new page every handful of days or so). The one at the beginning of April is extremely telling, as it shows the tremendous amount of effort that goes into each panel. It’s an amazing look at someone who takes their work very seriously and has the utmost in professionalism. I’m certainly going to keep an eye on the series.

Over the last few years or so, I’ve come to rely on my smartphone for a great deal of my ability to stay connected, both socially and technologically. I’ve had it since 2008, and it wouldn’t be until ’09 that I really started to notice how much I was seemingly dependent on it; the few times that I did leave it home accidentally, I felt detached and uneasy. This isn’t anything new, really; the tethering to a device feeling really started when I first got a cell phone of my own in the first place.

The Shutdown Days experiment at the beginning of the month helped to ground me back in reality, and I’m doing more to try to leave the phone in the car or tucked away in my bag when I don’t need or want to be disturbed by it. It’s easy, however, to see the constant connectivity as a bad thing: I’m at the beck and call of a device no bigger than a deck of cards. It’s not the case– not really, anyway. I can see how it would be taken to an unhealthy extreme, and I’m doing what I can, within reason, to curb that tendency.

Still, it’s not for nothing that these technologies were developed, and I dare say that they have even helped to make me more productive. Between the smartphone and the tablet, I’m able to turn unproductive cycles– like waiting for an order at a restaurant, or sitting in a theater before the lights dim– into opportunities for either accomplishing something or reducing stress. These are devices whose purpose is to do anything, everywhere, with every amount of time. It’s foolish not to use them for those purposes.

That said, there is something rather wonderful to be said for leaving the phone in the car and simply waiting for my food, calmly drinking in the atmosphere of the place. We cannot constantly be doing many things. Every once in a while, it helps to simply do one thing, and put your whole being into doing that thing.

Thoughts on the weekend past are coming on Thursday, as per what is becoming my usual idiom.

Way, way back in the early days of the World Wide Web, back before there was more to the internet than just the WWW, the concept of a “home page” was a necessary conceit that stemmed from the medium’s predominant usage in campus computer labs. Browsers did offer bookmarks, but since you weren’t guaranteed to get the same computer each time, there was little point in saving bookmarks. The home page began as a way for a user to store hyperlinks to their most favored sites, for easy access when they weren’t at “their” computer. My first few web sites were dedicated to this effort, and I made tremendous strides in learning HTML and Javascript so that I could have an easy, no-thinking-required morning link list.

Nowadays, nobody even uses the term “home page”; the idea itself is outmoded as browsers offer bookmark syncing capabilities and browsing session restoration. There are huge services dedicated to keeping your bookmarks completely accessible, thus obviating the need for you to learn HTML and have hosting space set up. Personal hosting sites are vanishingly rare since the collapse of GeoCities, their purposes having been melded into social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter; their most common use case even at the end– a weblog– is now handled far more elegantly by services like WordPress and Blogger.

I maintained a links page on my old site for just shy of about nine years now; it went live at 7p on Thursday, April 24th, 2003. At some point this month– likely by the time you read this– that will have ended, as I’m migrating my bookmark list to iCloud. The Links page on the old TFO.net site, which remained an open-secret since the 2009 move to this domain, will be deleted, as it doesn’t serve any purpose anymore and is prohibitively difficult to maintain. I’ll talk a little bit tomorrow on why that is.

Folks, I just wanted to give you a heads up about what happened yesterday, before I get into writing today’s post. I had scheduled some Bailout for yesterday, but for some reason it didn’t show up on time and was instead sent to the drafts folder. This perplexes me as it’s the one time I intentionally set up Bailout. Anyway, the post has been recovered and placed in its rightful point in cyberspace-time, so there’s that.

A longer post on today’s topic is forthcoming, I hope– if not, it can wait until tomorrow.

I’m actually a little surprised that I haven’t had a post tagged for Warhammer 40,000 in over a year. I’ve been tinkering with it here and there during 2011, and I played a handful of matches, but unfortunately I also slacked off greatly on my original plan of being able to play more often. See, I love to play the game. It’s the preparatory work that I really don’t much care for, and by preparatory I mean “painting”.

I am not terribly artistically gifted. I have a general sense for what colors look best together, and in terms of technical ability I can paint my miniatures up to be serviceable, if not gorgeous. I’m not looking to win the Golden Demon here, but at the same time I certainly would like to make it easier for me to see where I am on the board versus just having the bare gray plastic. I have no problem putting in the time, as I find building the models to be a lot of fun. I just realize that I can’t really paint on the level of the other players.

That’s part of it, but not entirely. Games Workshop hasn’t exactly been doing its players any huge favors lately, either, especially by clamping down on the rumor mill for when new products and codexes will be released. I have been waiting for about a year and a half now for the new Tau Empire codex to be announced, let alone released, and the continued and oppressive silence had made wanting to work on my Tau army a chore with no reward in sight– the old codex just doesn’t stack up very well against the more recently-updated threats like the Necrons or any random flavor of Space Marines, which discourages me from wanting to play them. And let’s not even get into how ridiculously overpowered Chaos Space Marines are; at Legions they’re the most commonly encountered army simply because they have any number of ways to rip apart everyone else.

I also still have a couple thousand points of Imperial Guard to paint up, and I’ve been sitting on an equal amount of unassembled Orks, on the theory that “well, once I get done painting the Guard, I can turn my attention back to the Orks.” Don’t get me wrong– I got into 40K primarily so that I could play the game. But there’s a lot more satisfaction for me in playing an army that I’ve fully painted up, even if it’s not perfect. I set forth a rule that I’m not going to buy more than I can paint, and that was at the beginning of 2011. I have bought incredibly little since then and have painted even less.

This past weekend, though, I finished up the last of the Tau (almost– I still haven’t put together drones, mostly because I don’t know how many I want to put together) and made some serious baseline progress on some of my Guardsmen. I’m also dedicating a couple of hours each weekend– likely Saturday morning– solely to painting, in addition to doing some painting when the mood strikes me during the week. I did a little one evening this week, too, just to wrap up what I wanted to do Sunday (when I fell asleep instead), and already I’m feeling more confident and far more motivated than I had before.

The first goal I want to set, really, is to have a 1000-point list for each of my factions painted and ready to play, to help me get over being stuck in a rut playing the same army over and over again. I have plans for that, and am slowly but surely grinding my way through to the next phase of readiness for it even though it’s likely to take a bit longer than I had initially anticipated. Still, this past week has shown that I can make progress on that, and that eventually, the rewards will be worth the trouble, particularly once Sixth Edition comes out later this year. As that release gets closer, I’ll talk more about it.

By the end of the 30 Days project, I was starting to get significantly burned out on interactions on the internet. This may have shown through a little bit as I got, well, testy in certain circles. This wasn’t something that had snuck up on me, either– I had needed to take a day off of being connected for a good long while, but I simply didn’t have the opportunity to. That, fortunately, was fixed this past weekend.

Back in 2007, when I first participated in the worldwide Shutdown Day project, there was a lot of interest in how I managed it, and to tell you the truth the only thing I really remember about it was that I spent a lot of time reading manga. In the years since then, the worldwide project lost steam and eventually wasn’t ever really repeated. However, I really liked the idea behind it and decided to keep it in the back of my mind for future days when I’d be stressed.

Of course, that was five years ago, and I didn’t repeat the project until just this past weekend, long after the point when I could be considered “overdue” for it. The other problem was that in that time I had somehow “flanderized” the concept into being a day where I don’t use any advanced technology at all. If I had taken a look at the post I wrote for the 2007 day prior to starting this one, I would have seen that television and radio were okay, and I wouldn’t have felt nearly as bad about spending most of my time doing those things.

Still, unplugging from the net was a good thing to do. We live in an age of constant communications, and because of that we can sometimes conflate the importance of a message with its immediacy. An e-mail or a tweet or a facebook tag can sometimes be made to feel more important and less deferrable than a letter, or a phone call, or a face-to-face meeting. It’s also worth noting that once in a while, it helps to remind yourself of just how much you really rely on the global information hive-mind; to remember information for yourself, as opposed to having to Google it constantly. Granted, knowing that someone out there knows it and can share it is certainly a good thing, but there are some things you need to remember, too.

Anyway, I enjoyed the experiment and the outcome of it– I got a bit more done than just sitting and watching television, though that certainly was part of it. I also found that, absent the constant pressure to stay on top of certain things during the weekend, I have a bit more free time than I originally thought, and I’m probably going to put that to better use in terms of some ongoing projects that had fallen by the wayside over the last few months. I’ll get into that more in the coming days and weeks.

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We live in an increasingly decentralized society. Talk of “the cloud” permeates a lot of technology these days, and the increasing size of our data files means that devices which seemed roomy and unfillable a few years or even months ago now feel cramped and restrictive. Take my own portable-computing dilemma, for example: I have an iPhone with 32GB of space and an iPad with 16GB. As I’ve worked with both devices, I’ve found that I really need the inverse– I want more space on the tablet and need less space on the phone. In some cases, this is because I want the same files on both devices but don’t want the hassle of constantly syncing them.

Dropbox is a way around that, and one that I’ve been using for about two years now. It’s one of the oldest and most well-respected “cloud” file services in business, and it’s also one of the most economical. The free service offers you 2GB of online space that can be synced to a mobile device (iOS or Android) or a desktop computer (Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux). Paid services bump that up to 50GB or 100GB depending on your outlay, and referrals allow you to expand your capacity– if you refer someone, you get 1GB added on permanently, while the person who you referred gets half that. This even works for free accounts.

On desktops, the process is completely transparent– Dropbox sets up a folder that’s automatically synced to its servers as long as you’re online. Mobile usage is where it really shines, though, and this is due in no small part to the fact that mobile devices are becoming far more robust. I can only speak to the iOS client, but even that has strong integration to other apps such as the Elements text editor. Recent additions allow the app to accept files for upload, making it a great tool for collecting content on the go. Moreover, you can use your Dropbox account to share large files with friends (though certainly I would use some restraint in doing this for certain types of files).

Overall, I like it quite a bit over Apple’s iCloud service; even though iCloud support is “baked into” iOS and a number of apps are starting to embrace it, Dropbox is still a better deal in terms of flexibility and expandability. It might not replace having a USB stick on hand at all times– many workplaces clamp down on its use due to security reasons– but it’s still worth free.