• iTunes connectivity – it already hooks into the iTunes Music Store via wifi, why not allow it to browse and playback music from shared iTunes libraries on the LAN? I would love to be able to access my music or friends’ music when I’m visiting and don’t have a laptop around. Syncing tunes wirelessly and sharing tunes would also be fantastic additions.

It was probably the feature I most wanted back then, and the last one to arrive. This pleases me.

There was one other item on the list that never made it, and that’s having access to the radio channels in iTunes. That feature’s largely been supplanted by the availability of 3rd party radio apps. Just as well too, since Apple hasn’t really done much with their radio channels and I’m honestly surprised they’re still in there. Now hopefully Apple can keep itself from killing off third content providers entirely.

What do I want next? Here’s a short list:

• “Lossless” music downloads in the store. Even better would be HD audio, DVD-A or SACD quality music. Unlikely given how uninterested the recording industry (and, I guess consumers) seems to feel about it.
• Multiple encodings. Like video, it’d be neat if I could store a lossless version of a track and a lower-quality compressed version for carrying around on my ‘pods. iTunes can do it with video so audio should be easy.
• Alternate formats. WAV, FLAC, WMA, OGG. Unlikely at best.
• Separation of services from the core of iTunes. App, Music and Movie Stores, Ping (I predict Ping’ll disappear altogether in a year or so), Books (?), TV and Movies…

iTunes has gotten hugely complicated and is the cause of many slow-downs and beachballs during the course of the day. Most of the time, I just want a music player. I never actually watch movies or TV in iTunes preferring other players. I only use it to get video onto my iP*ds but I’d much prefer not having to clutter up my computer’s storage with the extra video copies. Hell, while I’m thinking wishfully, maybe it’d be nice if Apple would let me play AVI/XviD, WMVs and WebM video while we’re at it to save me the trouble of transcoding.

I won’t hold my breath. All signs point to Apple locking down iTunes even tighter (and bloating it even further). Talk of removing optical drives on all future Macs and forcing users to buy everything through the iTunes Store is not that far-off considering some of the recent money grabbing. Then again, maybe they’ll get broken up for anti-competitive practices. I give that a couple of years at their current rate.

On the surface, this would seem to be the easiest of the different streaming types to achieve. In iOS 4.2, we have “Airplay” streaming to connect to an Airport Express or Apple TV. It works fairly well, but I get occasional glitches causing drop outs in the audio. Less than ideal. I’m not sure if this is because of network issues or because the devices themselves are too resource constrained to provide a continuous stream of bits.

Airplay is even worse if you want to try playing a video game to your home stereo. I was getting lag of around 2 seconds while playing Orbital. Stick with headphones or plugin directly to some speakers if you want big sound.

For streaming music, I usually use the Remote app on my iPhone or iPad to send music from my home machine to the Airport and it works much more reliably.

But what if I want to use my headphones? I could sync the music that I want through iTunes, but that’s slow and annoying. I’d still like to be able to browse my home machine and stream music directly to my device like I can in OS X. We keep hearing rumours that Apple’s working on building a cloud storage service for your music. With nearly 200GB of music on my network and limited upstream bandwidth, this would be impractical. I’m fine with keeping a limited selection of music on my devices when I’m out in the world, but having full access to my music when I’m on my home network from all of my devices would be awesome. Using a feature like “Back to my Mac” to be able to stream from my home collection when roaming would be great for bonus points.

Apple’s never really done much with their built-in streaming radio service in iTunes either, and I’m a little surprised it’s still included at all, given their push towards moving everyone into the iTunes Music Store. I still use it and have a few channels I still listen to regularly (hello GrooveSalad!). It’s surprising that I need to install a 3rd party app to do this, and to be honest, I’ve never found one that I actually like. I’ve tried Fstream and a couple others whose names escape me, they were so underwhelming. Dedicated channel apps like CBC are great for individual radio streams, but are of varied quality and fill up my home screen with multiple, redundant apps.

One feature I never looked for but now have access to is AirPrint. Apparently with a few select HP printers, I could print directly from my iPhone to a networked printer. Even if this feature worked with printers I actually own, it’s not something I could see myself ever using. I am so close to being a paperless being, I think I only ever print things when dealing with government agencies and insurance companies. For printing photos, I need a real computer with a calibrated monitor and gamut-proofing tools.

Having used iOS 4.2 for a couple of months, I’m happy to say that it’s a big improvement over the 3.2 OS that the iPad shipped with. Multitasking makes the iPad feel more like a real computer, though app switching is somewhat awkward. I love the brightness control in the little “iPod control area” in the multitasking … app bar? dock? I don’t know what to call that area — in the left-most area. I still have no idea if keeping many apps open eventually bogs down the operating system or not. I tend to scan through this area every so often and close down apps that I’m not using. On the iPhone, the differences are less noticeable, but an incremental improvement nonethless.

Tilt to Live

Prod mentioned this to me this week on IM. A single line message that read “tilt to live”. I was all, “wtf is that? What are you talking about?” I believe he replied tersely, “iPod”. So I did the search, found the game, saw that it was on-sale and said, “why not?”.

And I’m super-glad that I did. This has become my latest “I’ve got 5 minutes to burn” game on my iPhone. After starting, the pace gradually picks up until you’re tilting for your life (as the title suggests), your little arrow-ship being pursued by an ever growing and evolving field of red dots. Gameplay is basic. You have a number of floating power-ups to help you defend yourself against the red swarm. Music is a jazzy little number reminiscent of a Ren & Stimpy cartoon that is pretty amusing, though if you’re like me, you’ll eventually just turn it off or listen to your own tunes. The motion sensing is excellent and fluid.

What really makes this game stand out is some of the online features from AGONline(?). Built-in awards and social networking features keep things interesting. The awards themselves are pretty funny.

highly recommended.

Orbital

My previous “5-minute” game is the surprisingly strategic Orbital. I learned of this game when I saw tech journalist Andy Ihnatko mention it in one of his iPad reviews. I looked it up and thought it seemed interesting.

And it is! Gameplay is simple, you fire a projectile that bounces around the field until it slows to a stop at which point, it balloons into a disc that expands until it touches a wall or another disc. Said discs need to be struck 3 times by your projectiles to be removed from the board and giving you a point. If your projectile comes back to a “death line” and touches it, you die and it’s game over.

There are three different game-types, but you’ll really only want to play Gravity mode where the discs cause your projectile to curve around them as if affected by a gravitational field. The grid background warps in a pleasing way to indicate where the gravitational pull becomes strongest.

It sounds simple, but there’s a real art to surviving for any length of time. As in all good games, it’s quick to learn but takes awhile to master. It’s challenging enough that you can keep going back and enjoying subsequent games.

Doodle Jump

The game that keeps on giving. You really gotta hand it to the developers of Doodle Jump: They keep adding value to this awesome accelerometer powered platformer. It’s incredibly simple. Your doodle-dude jumps on platforms. You tilt to move side-to-size to position him over the next platform. You try to get as high as you can. Various power ups like jetpacks, propeller beanies, springs and trampolines help propel you to new heights. There are monsters that you can shoot with your doodler’s nose.

It’s 99¢ and if you don’t have it, just go get it. Come back when you’ve made it past 30k points and we’ll talk.

Uniwar

This is another new title (to me) that may have been around for awhile. I’m a sucker for turn-based strategy games and this is basically a straight copy of the online game WeeWars. I never really got into WeeWars not knowing anybody else who was playing it for very long, so kind of forgot about it. There’s something to be said for having a game like this on a portable device as you can play it anywhere.

It comes with a stand-alone campaign and an online component. The kicker here is that they’ve done a great job of implementing both push and email notifications so iPod users can still get notified when it’s their turn.

I’ve only played a couple of games so far, and would like to see a couple of new armies added to flesh things out a bit. And maybe a map editor so you can roll your own games. Still, the implementation is so well done that these are minor quibbles.

Sword & Poker

This is a weird one. I logged quite a few hours playing this through to level 28 or so. The premise is pretty simple. You have a 5×5 grid with the inner 3×3 populated with playing cards. You have a set of 4 cards with which to make a hand of 5 in any of the rows, colums or two diagonals. These poker hands do “damage” to your opponent who you’re fighting in a kind of pokemon-esque battle to the finish. You have shield and a weapon which determines how much damage your hands do. And there’s magic. And you’re in a dungeon fighting monsters.

If it sounds weird, that’s because it is. But it’s surprisingly fun and really well put together. Very addictive and the various weapons and shields you can buy keep you progressing against the steadily tougher enemies you meet in the later levels.

I’ve got a bunch more games installed, including some of the biggies by NGMoco and others. But these are the games that I keep coming back to and playing. What are your favorites?

Watched some of the live stream from Engadget on the iPad announcement today. It was, as expected, a tablet shaped like a big iPod. It comes with wireless and it can hook up to a 3G network if you buy the big one. Notably, for me, were the things it didn’t do:

• No camera (!)
• Poor battery life
• Limited storage
• Multitasking?
• iPhone OS

It’s kind of neat, but honestly, I can’t see myself using this thing very much. It seems tailor made for air travel, when you want to watch a movie on a decent screen or maybe type up some notes. Pretty-much exactly what Andy Ihnatko wrote for the Sun-Times. I travel a fair bit, but certainly not enough to warrant adding yet another gadget to my collection. It won’t replace my Kindle with its awesome battery life and relaxing screen.

As a gaming device, it may become compelling at some point, but as the iPhone has proven, accelerometers are great for one type of game: Doodle Jump. Virtual controllers through touch are not a great control mechanism.

The lack of any mention of multitasking is even more worrisome, making this not very good for communications. I can’t run an IRC client and a messenger client in the background while surfing the web (on Safari, of course, there will be no Firefox for this due to their restrictive rules). Sure, there may be push notification, but that means leaving whatever I’m doing and launching the app before I can respond, possibly losing context. No video camera means no video chat.

In short, it’s a big iPod. I’ll wait and see how it does over the next year, but won’t rush out to buy one.

The fix was to turn off syncing of Contacts and Calendars in iTunes. Then turn off MobileMe syncing for Contacts and Calendars from the iPhone. Turn them back on and the you’ll be prompted to merge your contacts and calendars which you should do. When done, you’ll be syncing over the air, but not to your computer which should be syncing to whatever service you use anyway.

I was going to write a little thing about how fun the ngmoco game Topple was, maybe even with an accompanying screen shot, but the App Store is still ridiculously slow here.

Instead, I’m going to write just a little bit about monocultures and why they suck. When everything works, you can almost believe that owning an iPhone and using iTunes is the bees’ knees. “It just works” is a popular phrase bandied-about among Apple fans. Apple just posted a huge $1.6bn profit for their last quarter. Apple is on more desktops and in more go-bags than ever before.

But it doesn’t always work. Systems are bound to fail sometimes, and when a central one like the App Store is inaccessible, it can feel like your device is broken. Sometimes, that little badge on the App Store icon can remind you that you’ve got outdated apps that you can’t get to. There are a couple of apps I wanted to try out and even pay money for (mobile Colloquy for one, Rolando is another) but I can’t get at them. “Try again later” is the antithesis of the impulse purchase and that is largely what the whole iTunes Music/App Store is based on.

Fortunately, the internet came to the rescue and can at least provide some iPhone app shopping happiness even when the mothership is leaving orbit. App Shopper, which I believe I’ve mentioned before is a great web-based app-search system. It even lets you sort by price and view price changes. Right now, I conducted a little experiment, clicking on an App in the (finally loaded) App Store and then typing in and searching for the same name on App Shopper. App Shopper won hands down but clicking “Buy” still takes you to the iTunes store.

is listening to ‘Future In Computer Hell’ by Junkie XL from the album, ‘Saturday Teenage Kick’

PS, get well, Steve.

I’ve had my iPhone 3G for awhile now. When I first got it, I wanted to do a review of some of my favorite apps. Months passed. Summer turned to fall. There was still no review. But then, how could there be? I was still learning the territory, and there’s a lot to learn. iTunes for all its strengths and considerable weaknesses, is kind of a pain to use to find applications worth trying out. It’s slow. Recently, I discovered AppShopper which has greatly-improved my ability to find useful applications. There’s also 148Apps which lists and reviews the top 148(?) applications and was recently mentioned on LifeHacker.

Before I get into the meaty reviews, I should note that I haven’t paid for any iPhone apps yet. It’s not because I’m too cheap to pay 99¢ for a piece of software (honest!), I just haven’t found too many apps that I’d really consider necessary enough to pay for. There is one particular piece of software which I would love to buy, but haven’t yet because the developers haven’t released the final version of the desktop software yet. This is OmniFocus by the Omni Group which I use every day on my desktop but won’t trust the required beta software enough to make the jump to 1.1. C’mon guys, ship that sucker so I can give you some more money!

I think it’s also worth noting that the web, that much-maligned initial platform for application release easily fills the gaps left by software, and in many cases, makes stand-alone apps unecessary. I’ve played with Exposure (iTunes link) by Connected Flow and strongly-considered paying for it, but with flickr‘s recently-updated mobile site, the need for an external app is a lot less. Gtalk is another excellent example of a web application on the iPhone. There are many others I have on my homescreen.

Twittelator (iTunes) (free for Lite version, $4.99 for Pro)
by Stone Design Corp.

My favorite of the twitter clients, I’ve been a happy user of the lite version since my iPhone’s first week. It’s not without its quirks — location tweets are rarely on the mark though it’s not clear if that’s due to the GPS hardware in the iPhone itself or a software flaw. Hitting the “star” to mark a tweet as a favorite is hard to hit precisely, as is the reply button. It also includes TwitPic integration for sending pictures when you’re out and about, but the pictures often get oriented incorrectly, a problem I think is linked to the camera and accelerometers because I’ve seen it in other apps as well. If you’re not a twitter user, this is probably not that interesting to you. If you are, check it out.

Shazam (iTunes) (Free!)
by Shazam Entertainment Ltd.

Ever been in a bar or restaurant and heard something on the sound system and you and your friends couldn’t identify it? Now you can! Tap the “tag now” button and hold your iPhone up to a speaker and wait for a few seconds for it to listen to it. It’ll buzz when finished, briefly communicate with Shazam’s system and then tell you what you’re listening to. Honest. Excessive background noise confuses it occasionally, but the few times I’ve used it, I’ve had pretty good luck. Once identified, you have the option to buy the tune in iTunes (!), view related YouTube content (!!) or share the tag with your friends who might want to remember what it was too. Sharing sends an email with information like, “I’ve just used Shazam on my iPhone to identify Leif Erikson by Interpol. I thought you might like this track” including some useful links. Great fun, useful and cool.

AIM (iTunes) (Free!)
by AOL

There’s a real dearth of iPhone/iPod messenger apps, probably because of the lack of push support. AIM is pretty much a direct iChat clone for the iPhone. Works well, and if you leave it running in the background, you get buzzes or notifications when you receive a new message. Great for chatting with your friends when you’re on the road. I’d love to see a port of Adium/Pidgin to the iPhone, but don’t think that’ll happen for awhile. Maybe by the time Apple releases clipboard support. (Snide clipboard joke required for any and all discussion of iPhone applications. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on.)

Fring (iTunes) (Free!)
by fringland Ltd.

Speaking of messenger applications, I discovered Fring this week and gave it a quick whirl. I haven’t even tried the instant messenger applications yet, mostly because they’re implemented through a back-end service and I don’t usually like giving out my passwords to other companies. Especially ones that have 3 different EULAs for various terms of service – one for privacy, one for the terms of use and one for their license. I haven’t read them all yet, so that’s why I haven’t tried using the instant messenger parts. What I have read in their privacy page looks pretty innocuous and is there to inform the user that their IDs and information may be exchanged with the third parties running the services (e.g., Microsoft for MSN).

So why is this thing in my top five if I haven’t even used it fully? Because it includes Voice over IP support. That’s right, you can connect to Skype or another SIP network and use it for voice communications. With Skype-out credits (or a SIP connection) you can even dial out to land-lines. I tested this on our asterisk system at work and was able to talk to a colleague. Sound quality was adequate with only a bit of VoIP warble and latency. Definitely usable. If you’ve got wifi access, you’ve got unlimited voice minutes no matter where you are in the world.

Last.fm (iTunes) (Free!)
by Last.fm

If you’re reading this, chances are you like music. Do you wish iTunes had included streaming radio support into the iPod part of your phone? I know I do. So I was pretty pleased when I discovered Last.fm’s application. It lets you stream recommended tracks, tracks from your library or start a new station based on an artist, tag or user. You also have a somewhat limited view of your profile including your friends and recently played tracks. I’ve been enjoying Last.fm’s service more and more recently and started scrobbling my iTunes and iPod playback and building an online collection. It’s an interesting view into my own catalogue and has provided me with a few decent recommendations. Plus it’s fun.

Last.fm isn’t the only option for online streaming to an iPod/iPhone though. Pandora (available in the States) will hopefully  make it through their somewhat troubled recent months (and come to Canada). I also found an app called fStream which will play mms:// streams to your ‘pod. I don’t really have any good mms:// streams so I haven’t played with it much. If you have any good streams to recommend, please drop ‘em in the comments.

Big Endean
This is by no means a comprehensive list of available applications. I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface here. Considering the app store is … less than 6 months old, there are a TON of great apps out there and an enthusiastic and talented developer community. It’s really a huge accomplishment and Apple deserves lots of kudos for it. There have been some growing pains, but I’m hoping the worst of it’s behind us. I’ll post a follow-up with some of the other useful apps I’ve found in the near future. peece.

Currently listening to Changes Are No Good by The Stills from the album Logic Will Break Your Heart

And here’s why: They’re not just about the music, stupid.

Well, not anymore, anyway. Big Steve’s infamous sound-byte about why the iPod would never play video was proven false almost as soon as it was uttered. Since then, the iPod has transmogrified itself into a full-fledged portable computer. I think the response has been fairly unanimous in praise for the new format and capabilities. The App store is doing well and developers are enthusiastic. The NDA has been felled.

It’d be foolish to think that Apple was going to just stand around offering music players forever. If that were the case, the iPod would indeed be a passing fad. But as a portable computer, I see it only becoming more popular, and there’s no-one offering any serious competition to the iPhone and iPod touch devices, except maybe Blackberry. Though in my experience, they don’t really compare. The apps are often clunky, each one looking like it’s living in a completely different OS. They feel… Java-ey. The Nokias, though I hear good things, can’t provide the same multimedia experience of the iPods. Apple’s token drive-based iPod, once the flag-ship device, only has a single configuration now, and I can only imagine it’s going to be replaced altogether by flash-based devices within a year or two.

Woz’ prediction of the iPod fading from popularity would certainly be true if they’d stuck to the music, like they’d threatened to do over two years ago. But the platform is evolving and over the next few years, I’d be very surprised if the term “iPod” didn’t become synonymous with svelte, multi-media-capable, networked tablet computers. They’re from the future!