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Apple Releases iTunes for Windows
Billy_D_Goat writes "Today at a special media event, Apple Computer released their acclaimed iTunes Music Store and stand alone player for Windows XP and 2000. They also announced a partnership to sell music on AOL and give away songs with special bottles of Pepsi. You can learn more and download it from here. "
Apple also released several new accesories for the iPod. They include such things as turning the iPod into an image tank for CF cards and the much-rumored voice recorder.
No
THis really really rocks :
Allowance accounts and gift certificates Now you can give your kids a legal way to download their favorite songs with music allowance accounts, which give them access to the store without requiring a credit card and set a limit on how much they can spend. It's easy to set up recurring allowances which refresh every month, and you can establish different allowance accounts for each of your children. You can also buy music gift certificates -- just the thing for your favorite college student or birthday friend. A counter in the iTunes Music Store shows how much credit is left in allowances and gift certificates.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I've been playing around with the Windows version for the past half hour or so. It's very well done -- and feature complete:
1) The Rendezvous stuff for sharing the tunes works well. I can now share 80GB of music with my wife's IBM Thinkpad.
2) My CD drive was recognized without any problems. I can rip and burn without any problems at all. Goodbye CDex, et. al.
3) The response time on the store seems to be pretty good. The uptake on the new Windows version will probably be a lot slower than it was for the Mac version (hundreds of thousands of the Windows faithful are NOT waiting anxiously for Steve to say "it's available today".)
4) It's kinda weird seeing the Aqua UI controls and metal skins in a Windows app, but it supports my theory that iTunes is a lead in for both iPods & regular hardware. Get them used to the way things are in the Mac world, and then get them to switch.
Well done Apple. I'm impressed!
"Hell Froze Over"
That's the best laugh I've seen in a long time
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I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
Reading this comment reminds me of exactly why Apple has such great mind share with average home users and Linux doesn't. In a word: innovation.
Now, before you start flaming me, please listen to my intent:
Apple: puts out uber-cool, lickin' your chops iPod, but makes it only available on Macs (to start). Puts out actually workable online music service and makes is only available on Macs (to start). People love both of these things and buy them in hoards. Mac users have status and coolness as they're the only ones that can get this awesome stuff... at least for little while.
Linux: Can we run this on WINE? In other words, can we take this cool stuff from another platform and try to make it work on ours. You probably can and probably will, but meanwhile you have to wait for some point in time AFTER everyone else has it. Let's face it, cool is very often about being first... about having something others don't have.
What Linux needs is innovation. They need something that only they have (at least for a little while) that everyone else wants. That is how it will build mind share, not by saying "look, we can do it too (if you're only willing to wait a while)"
TW
The Mac OS and the QuickTime APIs have no concept of a "Multiple Document Interface" as Microsoft calls it. MDI is a Microsoft Windows exclusive concept that how MS originally got around some of Apple's early "look and feel" litigation. There is also some historical reasons for why Apple never adopted this kind of interface.
When Multifinder was introduced to an earlier Mac OS, it was considered desirable for a user to see content from windows between applications. Macs previously used "desk accessories" to approximate multitasking before, and this UI decision helped smooth the transition. Letting applications only have window scale control, rather than the full screen, eventually allowed Apple to discontinue the DA concept in favor of microapplications.
In addition, as the Mac OS developed, Apple started advocating drag-and-drop data manipulation. This requires that both the source window and destination window be visible for a drag operation to occur; this continued emphasis is why OS X now has the trash can in the Dock and Panther includes an "Expose" feature to make all windows visible at once.
Mac users are accustomed to bouncing between applications readily while most Windows apps seem to be designed for exclusive, one at a time use. Other interface quirks, like floating verses anchored toolbars and the global menubar, are extensions of this differing emphasis in multitasking.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Hmm, yes and no. The philosophy of Mac OS X (and quite a few other operating systems, especially Unix-like ones) is that you should use as much RAM as you can. RAM access is usually much faster than hard drive access, so why not fill up RAM with stuff that you might possibly need from the hard drive at some point.
Memory management in Mac OS X goes like this: boot up, take up a good percentage of available RAM and place system stuff in there. Every time a window is created, make a backing store for faster and smoother access. If the user runs a program, load as much stuff related to that program as possible. If the user quits a program keep most of it in memory anyways, they might want it a minute later. They access the hard drive? Read into memory the next few sectors beyond what the user asked for simply because they may want them next.
All of this fills up RAM pretty quickly and makes the operating system look bloated. Actually though, it's highly efficient. It's usually much quicker to free up RAM then it is to fill it. Even in the case where you need to page out memory (store it back on disk to make room for something else), it's still not much slower than having the memory empty in the first place. This is why having more RAM makes Mac OS X faster, it uses the extra space to be more efficient.
To show you what I mean try launching Internet Explorer (or any other large program). Time how long it takes to launch, then quit it and start it again. Time how long it takes to launch for the second time. For IE I got 4 seconds for the first launch and then 2 seconds for every launch after that. This is because IE is now cached in RAM and doesn't need to be loaded from the hard drive to be launched.
So again, you are perfectly right in that Mac OS X takes up a lot of RAM. However this is actually a feature. After all RAM is pretty cheap now and I think most people would trade off a few bucks to have their system more responsive. On the other hand I do know that Mac OS X does cope decently with low-RAM situations. It can run just fine on a machine with 256 megs of RAM but it will seem slower than a similar machine with 512 megs of RAM. I'd say that 512 megs of RAM works well with Mac OS X, any less you see slowdowns, any more and you don't notice much improvement under normal use.
Sapere aude!