Here’s a strange little video that blends two obsessions for me. John Gruber, uber geek Mac pundit, describes software design by giving a lecture on Auteur Theory.
Archive for the 'Mac' Category
Remember that paper clip that would pop
up in Windows every now and then, to say helpful things like “It looks like your trying to write a letter. Would you like me to point out the obvious and slow down your computer as you go?”
I always though he was slightly vaginal, but that could just be me.
Anyhoo, that wasnt the point of this post. Point was i stumbled across the story of a guy who’s iPhone had broken down, and was sent a replacement model by Apple.
When he got his new phone, he realised to insert the sim card he needed a paperclip to open the hatch. Thats when he discovered this:
On the back of that card, like the back of every Apple product, was the line
“Designed By Apple in California.”
Found a great new widget here, that checks out your apps and sees which have been updated.
Great, Just what the web needs, another damn iTunes Smart Playlist guide. But before you leave, I promise you, this is the best damn iTunes set-up you’ll ever need. I know thats a big call, but read on my friends.
A few weeks ago i lost my iTunes library file.
I was devastated. 60gigs and about 13,000 songs had lost the ratings and playcounts I had spent the last few years creating. But you know what? It was the best thing that could have happened to me. God thats pathetic. I mean it was the best thing that could happen to my iTunes/iPod experience…
You see, when I first discovered the power of smart playlists designed by ratings, it was about two years ago. The problem? A 4gig iPod with (at the time) 20gigs of music. At first i thought, no problem, I’ll just fill my pod with all my favourite tunes. But as anyone who has a smaller pod will tell you, your fave tunes start sounding pretty old after a few weeks.
So i started rating my songs and making smart playlists based on those ratings. (The Smart Playlists were designed to cycle through my songs- ie Last Played was not in the last month). This seemed great for a while, but as my iTunes library grew it became very lopsided. I had about 1000 songs rated 4 or 5 stars, and 12,000 songs with no ratings. Soon my iPod was filled with about 50% of the same old faves, and about 50% of stuff i didn’t even know or like. Credit where its due, my first Smart Playlists were based on suggestions from iLounge, Smart Playlists, and 43 Folders. I thought each method was pretty good, but every few weeks i had to tweak the playlists because i was getting bored with them. That kind of defeats the purpose of a “set it and forget it” playlist.
It sucked. My pod was soon used only for Podcasts, because the thought of trawling through my music collection seemed too painful. Thankfully, I then experienced what the Chinese call “Crisitunity”. I destroyed my iTunes Library file. I believe thats where you came in…
So there i was, 13,000 virgin songs. I thought about how i was going to tackle re-rating 13,000 tracks. 5 stars was easy. A song had to be damn near perfect to get 5 stars. But what about the rest? I thought for a while and here’s what i came up with:
5 Stars = Damn Near Perfect
4 Stars = My Favourite Bands/Albums that don’t classify as 5 stars.
3 Stars = Artists I Appreciate, but don’t necessarily love.
2 Stars = Guilty Pleasures and One Hit Wonders.
1 Stars = Shit I Cant stand, Ready for the bin.
0 Stars = Undecided.
First, i went through my library and selected all the artists and albums I loved the most. Using the Browser View of iTunes, you can do this relatively quickly by holding down the command key while clicking. How do you do it on a PC? Fucked if i know, and fucked if I care. Get A Mac. Soon I had selected The Beastie Boys, REM, Radiohead, Pavement, Massive Attack, De La Soul etc etc. Then you hit Command I to edit the info (PC users, at this point you probably need to hit control-alt-delete) click Yes when iTunes asks if you want to edit multiple files. Then give all these artists 4 stars.
Next create a smart playlist that looks like this:
Then go into that playlist and search through the artists to find the Damn Near Perfect Songs of those artists. Every time you rate a song 5 stars, it will automatically be removed from the playlist, so you dont get confused. (By the way, you can hit command B to bring back the Browser View to make this process faster. PC users, “Your computer may already be infected with Spyware, so you should probably click on that lovely pop-up window at this point).
So there you go, two stars already accounted for. Next, we go back to the library, and using browser view select all the artists you have that you appreciate, but don’t necessarily love. For me it was artists like The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, Blackalicious, etc. These are the kind of bands I would never sit down and listen to a whole album of, but i certainly respect them, and could never delete them from my library. Command I again and rate these bad boys 3 stars. Then set up another Smart Playlist like the one above, only this time for 3 stars. Enter this playlist and find the gems from each artist. (Tangled up in Blue by Dylan, A Day In The Life, The Beatles, God Only Knows, The Beach Boys etc) and give them 5 stars.
Phew, you’re almost done. Now make a smart playlist that is set to :
This will ignore all of the stuff you’ve already rated. Now go through your library and find all the little gems like Things That Make You Go Hmmm, Girls On Film, Ice Ice Baby, etc, and rate those 2 stars.
All of this should take you maybe 20mins to an hour depending on the size of your iTunes library. But hang on, i hear you ask, what about 1 star? Well, 1 star is for you to zap a song you didn’t know you had but you really cant stand. Why is it not Zero stars then? Because in iTunes you can’t rate a song Zero Stars if its already been rated before…
OK, I promise you’re almost done. Now make new smart playlists limited to 50 songs each based on a star rating, like this:
Finally, create a smart playlist that feeds off the playlist you just created, like this:
I call mine *Radio Pod, i use the asterisk so the playlist will always be the first playlist alphabetically in my list. But you can call yours whatever the hell you want. (In this example, “Guilty Pleasures” are 2 Stars.
The final Playlist you keen eyed kids might have spotted is a regular (or dumb) playlist called pod. I have that playlist so i can drag any songs i want onto my iPod while still keeping my pod set to Automatically Sync.
So there you go. A geeks guide to iPod lovin’. And if you don’t believe how good the mix is, check out what my iPod served me this week:
And Since I’ve been using this new playlist overall:
• 
Enjoy,
Pete.
Here’s a little thing I’ve wanted to do for ages, create a tshirt based on the most hated site on macs, the unexpectedly quit dialog box. Since this site is mainly about the idea of quitting your day job and following your passion, or atleast about slacking of on you day job and thinking about your passion, I’ve tweaked the dialog box a tiny bit…
and a close-up:
a full range of tshirts, mugs and clocks are available at cafepress
And So It Begins… Macworld is only a few days away and The Jobs Army are preparing to be dazzled. If you read my earlier post about The Perfect ITunes Setup, you may have noticed I’m a bit of a Fanboy. I’m not a rabid fanboy (unless it’s to piss of my friends), but in my short life every computer I loved had an apple on the cover.
My first computer, going way back to my tenth birthday, was a little green screened Apple IIc. We didn’t have much money so that little guy had to last me all through high school, and it did. Unfortunately the computer industry jumped ahead of the IIc in those eight years, and it became harder to find 5.25 floppies or any printer that was compatible with it. Finally, after years of being “incompatible” with my school computers (and envying friends computers that had colour screens, cd-rom drives and all those other amazing features) I got myself a pc.
The machine was for uni, and the year was 1995. Not a good year, or decade really, for the little company from Cupertino. The thought of buying a Mac then never crossed my mind. In fact, i didn’t even know where to buy one, of if Apple were still in business. And dammit, I wanted Word for my essays and Cinemedia for the hell of it. There was nothing exactly wrong with the pc, but there was nothing right about it either. I was a big ugly thing running Windows 95, that crashed during so many essays, and completely died at the end of my degree.
After uni, i got my first half decent job, and i promptly spent my earnings on cigarettes and alcohol. But i received an ok tax return, and suddenly i could afford to buy a new computer. The year was 2001, and Apple had slowly popped back up on my radar. Steve had been back at Apple for about 4 years, and the brightly coloured iMacs were hard to ignore.
By this stage all my geeky friends had grown up and landed real jobs in IT. They all convinced me to stay with PC’s. Windows was a hell of a lot more stable than it once was, and besides, you couldn’t get any games on a mac. But unlike my friends, I was still holding onto a ridiculous belief that i was a film maker (sadly, i still believe that), and Apple had just released “iMovie,” which looked pretty good. After months of agonising over the decision, i bought myself an iBook G3.
My first few months with the iBook were pretty painful, and i regretted the decision. The iBook came preinstalled with the brand new OSX, but for those first few months i stuck with 9.2, because there was no OSX version of Outlook! How could I live without Outlook!. Six years later there is still no Outlook for OSX, and all i can do is laugh that i once cared. Six years later I’m on my third Mac laptop (Intel Macbook), and i can’t imagine ever switching back.
Perhaps using the Apple IIc for so long prepared me for being “on the outer” of the great PC divide… Perhaps my new Macs reminded me of my childhood with the IIc… More likely its the superior operating system, Final Cut Pro, the amazing virus free shareware community, the iLife suite, the superior design, and the excellent service I’ve received thats turned me into the fanboy I am today.
What I do know is that i can’t wait for Stevefest. I’ll be brewing a cup of coffee and staying up til 4am (Melbourne Time) to hear what the next 30 years could bring!
Oh, and one more thing…
You Guys