Stickybuffalo.com

dear steve:

i dig how iBooks will now serve up all my pdfs, and remember my place when i switch devices. thanks! this goes a long way toward compensating for the lack of a file system on the iPad, making it a hell of a lot more useful as an extension of my desktop. it’s reminiscent of the way stuff i buy in the Kindle store automagically appears on all my Kindle-reading hardware, which i also like. i like it a lot. frankly, i want everything to work this way from now on. and now that i’ve pretty much bought into the entire line of iProducts, i flat-out demand it from Apple.

some time in the next year i expect realtime wireless syncing of all user data — bookmarks, settings, playback counters, everything. especially content. i want iTunes to auto-push my music & video downloads to all my iOS devices. i want to be able to read an article at my desk and continue reading the same paragraph on my phone while i go for coffee, without doing anything more complicated than picking up the phone. when i come home from a bike ride, i want my mac to notice that my iPod has just joined the home wifi network, find out what i’m listening to, and seamlessly switch playback to my home stereo. is that so much to ask?

don’t try to sell me MobileMe, we don’t need to involve the cloud in most of this stuff. we don’t need to wait for the next-gen wireless data network to materialize. the hardware is already here. i’ve got my own little 802.11n mini-cloud on my bookshelf — as we used to say in the ’90s, i have the internet at my house — and i can do it all locally if you’ll just write the friggin’ software already. you know perfectly well this is a job for iTunes.

look, the iTunes platform is about to turn ten years old. when you rolled it out, the iPod didn’t even exist. the first version was native to OS 9, for god’s sake. you guys have put a lot of eggs in that basket since then, and the incremental version updates are struggling to keep pace. the sucker is overdue for an overhaul. i’ll be honest: this is the kind of hand-and-foot servitude i to expect if i’m going to continue paying for your shiny fetish objects and your fancypants content.

i get that it’s all about iOS 4 development these days, and you’re gradually phasing out your consumer-tier desktop line, but your whole vision of the multi-device Apple household depends on having a reliable brain box at the middle of it. you’re bored with OS X? fine. then iTunes needs to behave more like an OS, and less like a bloated media player with an identity crisis.
get on it! you owe me.

Remember the old stickybuffalo site, and how at one point it featured random selections from a database of quotes which someone had found interesting for one reason or another? Well, it did. (Unless history and/or my memory are misbehaving again.)

I’ve got my own quotes database, or at any rate a text file. I’m a big digital saver… I guess it’s better than hoarding physcal objects, unless one really wants to be on TV… anyway. Here are some selections to ornament stickybuffalo for a few days:

(more…)

wow, apple sold out its entire initial run of 600,000 iPhone 4′s on the first day and had to stop taking preorders. sounds pretty good on the face of it, but surely somebody can explain how it’s really a DISASTER…

“botched”… “a nightmare”… “glitches”… “snafus”… “struggles”… “a mess”…

oh noes! you mean there are people who weren’t able to buy a new iPhone yesterday, even though they can’t actually get one until next week anyway? well, they definitely won’t want one now. it’s all over for apple — better dump your stock while the dumpin’s good.

apple may have surpassed microsoft in market capitalization (whatever that means), but clearly the apple-doomsaying and hateration industry is bigger than ever, too. meanwhile, as AT&T’s brand is getting to be just about on par with BP’s, i’m beginning to see what apple gets out of that relationship: a reliable scapegoat for everything that goes, or is perceived as going, wrong with the iPhone. hence, while every headline above is about the preordering cockup, every story then goes on to explain how it’s really AT&T’s fault, and that if apple is guilty of anything it’s sticking with the forever-maligned carrier. i’m not defending AT&T, but it’s becoming clear to me that their cratering reputation has some short-term tactical advantages from apple’s standpoint.