I sleep pretty well, as I did my part well. The projects since where I've had more control of the interface have been much less ugly; attractive even. As I said in my earlier post, we were constrained by the insane cult of skins. When not debugging, I used the plain vanilla skinless theme and that worked fairly well.
And the internals of the Mac version were pretty well done. It was difficult getting skip-free playback under Mac OS 9, and even more difficult debugging it. I worked hard to get the database fast for a reasonable number of songs, and to have little overhead on the equalizer. It was a work in progress and given time would have become a solid product; it was certainly more cleanly coded than the PC version.
However, we had nobody on staff, in a position of authority at least, who had Steve's sense of esthetics, software design or UI design.
If MusicMatch had such a person on staff, maybe they'd have cost Yahoo some serious money when they were bought out.
Steve's Value is in Cutting Away the Unnecessary
on
The Real Story of Audion
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm writing this because I too am part of the small fraternity of Mac MP3 application developers. I was part of a three man team writing MusicMatch Jukebox for Mac OS when iTunes was released. And soon afterward I was out of a job.
I know that iTunes would have crushed all competition anway, but Steve Jobs is the guy who saw through the stupidity of skins. WinAmp had them, so every MP3 player has skins. You can read in the article about the incredible amount of wasted development effort spent on improving the skins-giving them transparent corners and whatnot.
At MusicMatch we spent a third of our time developing the skinning engine. And what did we end up with? A lot of ugly, non-intuitable windows designed by graphic artists with no concept of UI design, windows that docked in some skins but not others, and with list views that couldn't expand because of the surrounding bitmapped edges. If we'd have settled on a standard interface and just worked on getting the music database, radio streaming, and audio playback working we'd have finished much, much faster, and given the user a nicer experience to boot.
Steve saw what was valuable in a music player and told the SoundJam guys to junk everything else. Simplify. Simplify. And the result is the preeminent digital music player.
The Panic guy writing the linked article even now doesn't admit the wasted effort, and why he couldn't come up with a list of reasons why Panic 2 was better than iTunes 1.
Stuart Buck says that Fox was always very clear in saying the photo with Fonda and Kerry together was fake. He put together a fairly definitive case about it http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2004/09/kerry-photo s.html which indicates that The New Republic was pretty sloppy in reporting otherwise.
Look at the specs for the optical drives, notice they are on the slow side for modern drives:
Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW): reads DVDs at up to 8x speed, writes CD-R discs at up to 24x speed, writes CD-RW discs at up to 16x speed, reads CDs at up to 24x speed
SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW): writes DVD-R discs at up to 4x speed, reads DVDs at up to 8x speed, writes CD-R discs at up to 16x speed, writes CD-RW discs at up to 8x speed, reads CDs at up to 24x speed
For instance, the current eMac has a SuperDrive which burns DVD-R disks at x8. This one burns at x4. I think this is the price for putting the optical drive at an arbitrary angle (usually not quite vertical), in fact, I bet all the "up to" language above means the drives will work best at certain angles.
I'd still want one though. I'm sure I could use it as a TV with the proper firewire input box.
I remember watching the introduction of the current "desk lamp" iMac. Steve Jobs was emphatic about the computer built into a flat screen monitor was a bad idea. He gave the example of taking an original iMac and removing the CRT; the optical drive wants to be horizontal; the monitor wants to be vertical. If you wanted the whole unit to be flat, you had to mount the optical drive at a severe angle, which drive technology at the time would not allow while maintaining full speed and reliability. Good design required keeping the intrinsically horizontal separate from the intrinsically vertical.
Now, if there has been advancement in vertically mounted optical drives, in that there are drives available which are fast while spinning at any arbitrary angle, then this whole calculus changes.
Presumably, in the case where Mac OS ran out of file descriptors, it returned the error tmfoErr instead of dskFulErr. I guess we've all been in the situation where we don't enumerate all the possible things that could go wrong with a file operation.
I'm guessing, whoever wrote the file handling code used something along the lines of:
OSErr err = FSOpen(...
if(err != noErr) ThrowError("Disk Full...")
All of us could have done that sort of thing. However, it is incredible to me that it would take months/years to track down a bug like this. I've often needed to debug things without a debugger, and while it is annoying it can be done.
I know that people who sell software want to believe this. They hear about King Gilette and "give away the handles and sell the razors," so how do we convert our customers into a steady stream of income and we can sit back and let it roll in.
Why do the online music stores want to sell you a "service?" Because they figure that if you buy your music one track at a time, you will spend maybe $5 a month, while if you subscribe to a "service" you will spend $13 forever. They hope you either don't notice the large increase in your music spending or the added volume of music is worth the added cost. But you know, I would prefer to buy Fulsom Prison Blues only once.
In the current model, I choose whether I want to upgrade a product, or not. For instance, I have a text editor, BBEdit, which I've owned a copy of for over a decade. In that time, I've felt it worthwhile to upgrade twice, paying out around $150 total. If I had been on a subscription model, for, let's say $50 a year, I'd have paid out $500 for nearly the same value to me.
So, yeah, I'm sure you will find a lot of sellers who would love to sell to a steady revenue stream, but they might find fewer buyers than they'd think.
While they did get quite warm. I believe the orignal Airport hubs Achilles heel was a pair of substandard power capacitors which tended to fail within a couple of years. I've repaired a couple of them myself, and the repaired hubs have worked for 2 years with only the occassional restart. There was some talk this was the result of a shady parts manufacturer making cheap knock-off capacitors but not quite getting it right.
When and if that happens in five years you'll just have to spend half an hour getting used to a new browser. If you can't spend half an hour every five years improving your security, the Russian mafia deserves your money.
The poster I was replying to had tried to differentiate Mr. Moore from Ann Coulter by saying that she was an extremist while Moore was not. I thought this was a good example of how Moore does not belong in the political mainstream (i.e. he is an extremist). I feel it's safe to say that the mainstream response of the typical American is if you hit one of our cities you hit all of us.
I was living in San Diego at the time, and my response was anger against our enemies and solidarity with my fellow Americans, I gave no thought whatsoever as to the political affiliation of those being killed, and I even started having warm feelings towards Rudy Guilianni who I'd always thought of (and still do) being anti-libertarian.
If people on your side of the argument want to make this kind of person your representative, well that's just kind of sad.
Michael Moore as quoted on his personal web site in the days after the destruction of the World Trade Center.
"Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"
A bit off topic, but I worked at a company, sonicdesktop.com, which sells software to add background music to videos along with hundreds of CDs filled with royalty free music. The value added is the software which can rearrange the music to fit a given length of video. Much more professional than trying to fit a clip of music from your CD collection into 5 seconds of video and have it make sense. And you aren't violating anybodies copyright.
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I sleep pretty well, as I did my part well. The projects since where I've had more control of the interface have been much less ugly; attractive even. As I said in my earlier post, we were constrained by the insane cult of skins. When not debugging, I used the plain vanilla skinless theme and that worked fairly well.
And the internals of the Mac version were pretty well done. It was difficult getting skip-free playback under Mac OS 9, and even more difficult debugging it. I worked hard to get the database fast for a reasonable number of songs, and to have little overhead on the equalizer. It was a work in progress and given time would have become a solid product; it was certainly more cleanly coded than the PC version.
However, we had nobody on staff, in a position of authority at least, who had Steve's sense of esthetics, software design or UI design.
If MusicMatch had such a person on staff, maybe they'd have cost Yahoo some serious money when they were bought out.
I'm writing this because I too am part of the small fraternity of Mac MP3 application developers. I was part of a three man team writing MusicMatch Jukebox for Mac OS when iTunes was released. And soon afterward I was out of a job.
I know that iTunes would have crushed all competition anway, but Steve Jobs is the guy who saw through the stupidity of skins. WinAmp had them, so every MP3 player has skins. You can read in the article about the incredible amount of wasted development effort spent on improving the skins-giving them transparent corners and whatnot.
At MusicMatch we spent a third of our time developing the skinning engine. And what did we end up with? A lot of ugly, non-intuitable windows designed by graphic artists with no concept of UI design, windows that docked in some skins but not others, and with list views that couldn't expand because of the surrounding bitmapped edges. If we'd have settled on a standard interface and just worked on getting the music database, radio streaming, and audio playback working we'd have finished much, much faster, and given the user a nicer experience to boot.
Steve saw what was valuable in a music player and told the SoundJam guys to junk everything else. Simplify. Simplify. And the result is the preeminent digital music player.
The Panic guy writing the linked article even now doesn't admit the wasted effort, and why he couldn't come up with a list of reasons why Panic 2 was better than iTunes 1.
Stuart Buck says that Fox was always very clear in saying the photo with Fonda and Kerry together was fake. He put together a fairly definitive case about it http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2004/09/kerry-photo s.html
which indicates that The New Republic was pretty sloppy in reporting otherwise.
For instance, the current eMac has a SuperDrive which burns DVD-R disks at x8. This one burns at x4. I think this is the price for putting the optical drive at an arbitrary angle (usually not quite vertical), in fact, I bet all the "up to" language above means the drives will work best at certain angles.
I'd still want one though. I'm sure I could use it as a TV with the proper firewire input box.
I remember watching the introduction of the current "desk lamp" iMac. Steve Jobs was emphatic about the computer built into a flat screen monitor was a bad idea. He gave the example of taking an original iMac and removing the CRT; the optical drive wants to be horizontal; the monitor wants to be vertical. If you wanted the whole unit to be flat, you had to mount the optical drive at a severe angle, which drive technology at the time would not allow while maintaining full speed and reliability. Good design required keeping the intrinsically horizontal separate from the intrinsically vertical.
Now, if there has been advancement in vertically mounted optical drives, in that there are drives available which are fast while spinning at any arbitrary angle, then this whole calculus changes.
Presumably, in the case where Mac OS ran out of file descriptors, it returned the error tmfoErr instead of dskFulErr. I guess we've all been in the situation where we don't enumerate all the possible things that could go wrong with a file operation.
I'm guessing, whoever wrote the file handling code used something along the lines of:
OSErr err = FSOpen(...
if(err != noErr) ThrowError("Disk Full...")
All of us could have done that sort of thing. However, it is incredible to me that it would take months/years to track down a bug like this. I've often needed to debug things without a debugger, and while it is annoying it can be done.
I know that people who sell software want to believe this. They hear about King Gilette and "give away the handles and sell the razors," so how do we convert our customers into a steady stream of income and we can sit back and let it roll in.
Why do the online music stores want to sell you a "service?" Because they figure that if you buy your music one track at a time, you will spend maybe $5 a month, while if you subscribe to a "service" you will spend $13 forever. They hope you either don't notice the large increase in your music spending or the added volume of music is worth the added cost. But you know, I would prefer to buy Fulsom Prison Blues only once.
In the current model, I choose whether I want to upgrade a product, or not. For instance, I have a text editor, BBEdit, which I've owned a copy of for over a decade. In that time, I've felt it worthwhile to upgrade twice, paying out around $150 total. If I had been on a subscription model, for, let's say $50 a year, I'd have paid out $500 for nearly the same value to me.
So, yeah, I'm sure you will find a lot of sellers who would love to sell to a steady revenue stream, but they might find fewer buyers than they'd think.
While they did get quite warm. I believe the orignal Airport hubs Achilles heel was a pair of substandard power capacitors which tended to fail within a couple of years. I've repaired a couple of them myself, and the repaired hubs have worked for 2 years with only the occassional restart.
There was some talk this was the result of a shady parts manufacturer making cheap knock-off capacitors but not quite getting it right.
When and if that happens in five years you'll just have to spend half an hour getting used to a new browser. If you can't spend half an hour every five years improving your security, the Russian mafia deserves your money.
The poster I was replying to had tried to differentiate Mr. Moore from Ann Coulter by saying that she was an extremist while Moore was not. I thought this was a good example of how Moore does not belong in the political mainstream (i.e. he is an extremist). I feel it's safe to say that the mainstream response of the typical American is if you hit one of our cities you hit all of us.
I was living in San Diego at the time, and my response was anger against our enemies and solidarity with my fellow Americans, I gave no thought whatsoever as to the political affiliation of those being killed, and I even started having warm feelings towards Rudy Guilianni who I'd always thought of (and still do) being anti-libertarian.
If people on your side of the argument want to make this kind of person your representative, well that's just kind of sad.
Michael Moore as quoted on his personal web site in the days after the destruction of the World Trade Center. "Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"
I've been out of work for coming up on 6 months.
I'll put The Simpson's and other high points of American culture against any other "culture" past or present.
A bit off topic, but I worked at a company, sonicdesktop.com, which sells software to add background music to videos along with hundreds of CDs filled with royalty free music. The value added is the software which can rearrange the music to fit a given length of video. Much more professional than trying to fit a clip of music from your CD collection into 5 seconds of video and have it make sense. And you aren't violating anybodies copyright.