Symphonious

Chris Pirillo has an intersting list of Ten Reasons Your Next PC will be from Apple. Some of them are the typical, run-of-the-mill reasons you hear everytime Mac vs PC comes up but some of them are really interesting, compelling reasons.  My favorite would be:

4. Knowledge. Don't let platform bigotry get in the way of understanding and appreciating good technology. We all are better for knowing more, and that's something you should look forward to doing - not avoiding at all costs. Bury the hatchet if you think that this still is the Mac you first saw in 1984.

This is the reason I have a Windows machine and a Linux machine to complement my main OS X laptop - it lets me be knowledgeable about the three OS's and to be able to readily make the decision about which is best for a specific tasks, particularly because swapping OSs for a single task is straight-forward. Of course, if you're a Mac user, this is an excellent reason why you should should put a Windows box within easy reach and preferably something like Linux, BSD or Solaris as well.

Following a Jobs keynote there's always a ton of complaining about Apple, along with a lot of lusting over the new goodies. For my part my complaint with Apple is one that has been growing since the release of OS X - I'm sick and tired of Apple trying to make me buy stuff through them.

In fact, this started with the introduction of QuickTime Pro and the nagging to upgrade. In OS X we started seeing the addition of things like Buy Printer Supplies (which I'm sure used to be in Print Center but isn't anymore - score 1 Apple), requesting a .Mac subscription during initial configuration, print photo books from iPhoto and since the advent of the music store, a ton of different links to it scattered through iTunes.

iTunes isn't so bad, I can turn off the music store and it all goes away, .Mac is really starting to annoy me though. I'm a geek so I like to have my own server that I can tinker with however I like. I'm also a bit of a productivity nut so I like to have things work seamlessly when I'm not in tinkering mode.  Thus, I'd like to have the iApps and synchronization work with my server and work well. It frustrates me no end that this is difficult or impossible to do.

It frustrates me that most of the stuff that Apple wants me to buy is US centric or only available in the US - iTMS for ages, are photobooks available in Australia yet?

I like the fact that Apple make money and I'd like them to make more money - when they have more money they can invent more cool stuff and invent it faster, at least in theory. I don't like when their attempts to make more money make their products and users suffer. At the moment it's not too bad but I'm concerned that it's going to keep getting worse.

Dave Winer complains about Apple's photocasting RSS being broken and while I'll agree that it's a shame Apple didn't put more effort into interoperability, it's also a shame Dave had to end with:

Assuming their intentions are good and they’re not trying to kill RSS, why don’t they put some of us under NDA and let us help them get the bugs out before they ship.

As if Apple have any reason to kill RSS when they're going out of their way to leverage and promote RSS. How about letting the plain facts be enough criticism instead of having to tack on insinuating comments just to beat up the story?

It's not just that line either, Dave jumps to the assumption that Jobs is lying about them using industry standard RSS - most likely, Jobs just has no idea there are bugs in the implementation that cause it to differ from the technical specification. He was told it was RSS and that RSS is an industry standard (in this case de-facto) format for syndication, that's what he repeated. CEOs of big companies rarely have time to fully test the software they have to talk about and promote so they assume the software meets the requirements spec that was drawn up for it. The spec for Apple's photocasting almost certainly includes something the effect of "adheres to RSS spec" and "interoperates seamlessly with all the most popular feed readers". Those features were specifically mentioned in the keynote and even the page you get when you go to the example feed in Firefox sates the photocast works with "other photo-compatible RSS reader[s] for Mac, Windows, and other operating systems".

There's more to this story than first meets the eye and probably some technical limitations that Apple are trying to work around to provide a seamless experience.  Just because they screwed it up doesn't mean that was their intention.

Update: Changed the title to actually be relevant.  My first reaction was substantially different to my final thoughts on what to write about.

I've been subscribed to Digg's front page RSS feed for a few months or so and more and more I'm just skipping over all of its articles. It seems that as Digg's popularity grows, the quality of the content drops. This probably shouldn't come as a surprise - as more people enter the community, the community's interests vary and the signal to noise ratio for a given person probably drops.  Even when the community's interest doesn't spread too wide, just the increase in the number of articles is likely to mean that readers skip articles more often.

So it is that I'm starting to seriously consider unsubscribing from Digg and just picking up a few of the common sources of the articles that interest me. For the most part I find myself far more interested in the individual blogs I've subscribed to than the news aggregator type sites like Digg.  Memeorandum never managed to interest me, Newsvine is clean and well thought out but seriously boring with the same rehash of content that's flowing through everywhere else. None of these sites, which are often touted to help people find interesting new content, actually find anything new. Digg actually does the best at that with its constant stream of tutorials to do stuff that people have found, but unless I currently want to do that I really don't need to find a tutorial for it.  When I need to know, I'll google it.

What I'd like is for my RSS reader to tie in with Technorati or Feedster or someone, analyze the entries that I actually read (not just the ones that come in - I skip over more than half the crap that comes through my RSS reader) and suggest or automatically subscribe new potential sources of information. If it can filter out the stuff it knows I'm going to skip anyway that would be a bonus.

Then again, maybe I don't need to find more sources anyway - the more stuff that comes through my RSS feeder the more of it I have to skip because I don't have time.

It's amazing how unobservant people can be at times. A while back Technorati notified me of a new link to my blog from "Pete the programmer from the sink". I didn't have time to investigate but figured I didn't know a Pete from the sink so wasn't too concerned. As I passed by the Wordpress Dashboard again today though it was reporting that link to me again so I decided to check it out. I failed to realize that the user "peteroyle" might just be my friend from uni - Pete Royle and missed the hitcity.com domain where Pete works. Finally just as my curiosity was satisfied and I was about to close the tab, I noticed the gem of a photo Pete has as his blog header and thought - hey, I know him!

I know, sometimes I'm really slow….  Now, to find a decent photo for my site since I don't have one.

Update - Now I do: