The state of enhanced podcasts

▼ A long time ago Apple introduced "enhanced" podcasts. These are audio podcasts with chapters, where each chapter optionally has an image and/or a URL. It's a very nice idea, but enhanced podcasts never gained much traction, probably for three reasons:

• Few people care, you typically listen from start to finish without looking at your computer/phone/iPod screen
• The audio needs to be in MPEG4/AAC format rather than MP3, so there are one or two players that are incompatible
• There are no good tools to create enhanced podcasts

David Jackson thinks they're lame. I've never had a podcast of my own, although I've thought about starting one many times. But I have recorded a few presentations over the years and then added images of the slides I used as chapter images, like on the one I did last week.

I can see Jackson's point, but I disagree. First of all, I'm pretty sure that even outside the Apple universe MPEG4 audio is now so widely supported that it's not really necessary to have a separate MP3 version. And because I also value the ability to listen to podcasts while doing other things, I really don't like video podcasts, which require you to sit in front of your screen. Enhanced podcasts provide an extra visual channel without getting in the way.

It's too bad that enhanced podcasts are one of those things that Apple has let slide as they focus on other things. They used to have a "chapter tool" for creating enhanced podcast on the command line, but it no longer works. All podcast support was removed from Garageband, but I disliked the previous enhanced podcast support anyway because Garageband only allowed for low resolution images.

I did find a very useful web service that lets you make enhanced podcasts, though: Auphonic. I recorded the audio for my presentation with my iPhone through the headphones microphone using the built-in Voice Memos application. Keynote (on the Mac) can also record your presentation as you're delivering it, but unfortunately you can then only export it as a (very large) QuickTime movie, not as an enhanced podcast.

As for playing back enhanced podcasts, the new iTunes 11.1 doesn't support enhanced podcasts. Update: that's not completely true. Even though iTunes 11.1 doesn't display the images attached to chapters in any of the places where you normally see album artwork (such as the MiniPlayer), when playing an enhanced podcast iTunes has a "chapters" menu in the menu bar that you can use to navigate the chapters of the enhanced podcast and there are menu options with keyboard shortcuts to skip to the previous/next chapter in the "controls" menu. Also, the title of the current chapter is displayed in the main iTunes window during playback.

The QuickTime Player and Safari do, though. And the AppleTV plays the really well, but as far as I can tell only when streamed from the iPhone. The Podcasts application on the iPhone does support enhanced podcasts, but the text on my slides is really too small to be legible because the landscape slides are displayed in portrait, and when selecting chapters the chapter names are missing. And many but not all third party iOS podcast playing applications support enhanced podcasts.

If you want to see enhanced podcasting in action, subscribe to the Macworld Podcast.

Permalink - posted 2014-01-15

The free will paradox

▼ Do we have free will or not? I just watched this video on Youtube: Sam Harris on "Free Will".

I was somewhat dismayed to hear Sam Harris reject the notion of free will so easily. (He did get in a few good jokes at the expensive of religion, though.) Dismissing free will seems to be in vogue these days, based on the issue that it's hard to square free will with a deterministic universe and also with experiments that can predict what subjects are going to do before they're aware that they've made a decision.

The paradox is that if there's no free will, why do we torture ourselves trying to make good decisions? It certainly seems that we have free will!

This is a fascinating topic that resists easy answers. It starts with defining what free will really is. Intuitively, it seems to have something to do with conscious decision making, opening the door towards the problem of consciousness, an even tougher nut to crack.

We certainly do have free will in the sense that it is possible for us to farm out some decisions to our consciousness. (Although a depressingly large part of our decision making happens subconsciously.) For instance, suppose we want to invest € 3250 for a year. There are two options: one with a 3% return and € 50 costs, while the other has a 4% return and € 85 costs. Most of us will not be able to determine which investment has a higher net return without consciously doing the arithmetic. So if we decide to go for the best return, we have to do the calculations to determine that the first one pays out € 47.50 and the second € 45 and then we can select the first option. In this case the timing of the whole process is irrelevant.

Could it be that this is why we have consciousness and that we feel anxious about making important decisions: we need the consciousness to run algorithms that our subconscious is incapable of, and the anxiousness is simply the (deterministic?) trigger to get us to spend the time and energy to do so.

Permalink - posted 2014-01-11

The best way to use iTunes: the MiniPlayer

▼ The MiniPlayer is the best thing about iTunes 11, especially if, like me, you enjoy looking at high resolution album artwork. Here's how it works.

Although I like the "up next" feature in iTunes 11, I went back to version 10 pretty much immediately because I disliked pretty much all other changes. But as of iOS 7, you need iTunes 11 to sync your iPhone. Which I need to get music on the iPhone.

Aside: in this week's episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, John Siracusa talks about his 2013 todo list for Apple. The seventh item on the list is resurrect iLife and iWork. "They did that. But they kind of did it Pet Sematary-style." I was riding my bike when I listened to that and I laughed hard enough to get some strange looks. If, like John's cohosts, you don't know the Stephen King book or movie, the premise is that there's a pet cemetery and if you bury a pet there, it comes back to life. But it's not quite the same as before. John, Marco and Casey continue with a discussion about the state of Apple's application software. Spoiler: it's not good.

With that out of the way, I'm ready to focus on the positive. One of the things that I missed in iTunes 11 is the artwork viewer. Although the album artwork shows up throughout iTunes now, there's not a nice, big view of it anywhere in the main iTunes window. But you can get one through the MiniPlayer.

You open the MiniPlayer using the Window menu or option-command-3 (open/close the MiniPlayer window) or option-command-M (switch between the regular iTunes window and the MiniPlayer). By default, the MiniPlayer does its name justice:

Controls show up when you hover the mouse pointer over the window:

A MiniPlayer in this vein has existed for some time, and it's useful when you want to be able to control iTunes playback with the mouse/trackpad, because you can click the back, forward and play/pause buttons without activating iTunes.

But what you (well, I) really want is the different UI for the MiniPlayer that you get by clicking the artwork. Then you simply get a square window showing you the album artwork:

To get the optimum "retina" experience, through some trial and error I was able to resize the MiniArtworkPlayer window to make the artwork exactly 600 by 600 pixels on the high resolution screen of my MacBook Pro. This is the size of the artwork embedded in songs bought from the iTunes Store, so that artwork will be displayed with a 1:1 pixel mapping. I really enjoy looking at the high resolution artwork this way. (But if you think this is high resolution, find the matching LP album and prepare to be depressed.)

The maximum window size is 660 by 660 high resolution pixels (330x330 on low resolution screens I assume). I would have used 640x640 for all of this as 640 pixels across is the size of the iPhone screen, but nobody's asking for my opinion.

Like the smaller incarnation of the MiniPlayer, the MiniArtworkPlayer shows more controls—and more info—when you hover the mouse pointer over it:

The speaker icon allows you to change the volume and switch to AirPlay speakers:

I was really impressed when I selected multiple speakers for the first time: even though output to the Apple TV has to go over the network and thus incur a noticeable delay, the audio that comes out of the Apple TV and that that comes out of the computer's built-in speakers is completely in sync. Also note that with AirPlay output selected, the speaker icon changes to an AirPlay icon.

The little chevron in the top right corner brings up a menu to rate the song, play it next, add it to Next Up and add it to a playlist, amongst other options.

Speaking of Next Up: the icon between speaker/AirPlay and search in the lower right corner toggles the Up Next list. Each song it that list has its own little chevron that appears when you hover over a song, along with a close button to remove it from the list. You can also drag songs up and down. The clock icon switches between Up Next and a list of recently played songs.

Last but not least, you can search your music directly from the MiniArtworkPlayer:

You really don't need the main iTunes window all that much anymore; you can even do command-I from the MiniPlayer to change a song's properties. The main things I use the main iTunes window for is to start music playback from a different playlist, and to manage podcasts. Unfortunately podcast episodes are not allowed in Up Next.

But I just can't take my eyes off of that high resolution artwork.

Permalink - posted 2014-01-05

The Mac Pro needs 10 Gigabit Ethernet

▼ AnandTech has a great review of the new Mac Pro. The past decade every new model looked virtually identical to the previous one, even when Apple migrated from PowerPC to x86 CPUs. Apple seems to be overcompensating for that stagnation now. The old Mac Pro was the only machine that was still expandable internally: it had tons of room for many drives and PCIe cards. With the new one, you'll have to use the external Thunderbolt and USB ports instead. I think that's not unreasonable for the most part, but the way I see it, the new Mac Pro really needs an internal 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) interface.

Yes, without PCIe slots you can't put any HDMI capture cards and the like in a new Mac Pro. That's annoying right now, but this problem will go away fairly quickly as these applications move to Thunderbolt and/or USB 3. This is a much bigger market anyway, because all of Apple's computers now have Thunderbolt and USB 3.

I can see why Apple wanted to get rid of the drive bays. Those take up a lot of room. Perhaps moving to 2.5" drives rather than the traditional 3.5" ones would have helped, but 3.5" drives are still cheaper for the same capacity, and I assume also faster. Only having two 3.5" drive bays or only 2.5" drive bays would have meant that many Mac Pro users would have had to use some external enclosure for big, fast storage anyway, and this way Apple gets to build a super small system, which seems to be their goal in life.

The AnandTech review shows that using USB 3 for external storage isn't great, as the bandwidth to the USB busses is limited. And of course Thunderbolt is 10 or 20 Gbps while USB 3 is only 5 Gbps. A Thunderbolt-connected RAID array is great if you only have a single Mac Pro, but what if you're a business that has a number of them? Having separate RAID arrays for each Mac Pro is not a great solution: it would be much better to use network-attached storage. But that's not really an option over the Mac Pro's built-in Gigabit Ethernet ports. These only provide 10% of the bandwidth that Thunderbolt provides.

With the older Mac Pros, you'd simply put in a 10GE card. With the new Mac Pro, you have to use one of those cards with a TB-PCIe converter or a TB-10GE adapter. Both solutions require and additional (beefy) power supply.

10GE cards aren't cheap. Perhaps Apple didn't want to increase the cost of the Mac Pro. But as it is right now, it's a typical v1.0 product: amazing in many ways, but lacking one or two crucial features. I hope that in the next iteration, Apple puts in 10 Gigabit Ethernet. A good way to do this would be with an SFP+ interface. Currently, there are many different fiber SFP+ modules, and hopefully there will be UTP SFP+ modules in the future.

Permalink - posted 2014-01-03

About that third-party lightning cable for my iPhone

▼ Last month I posted a picture of the lightning cable I got for € 6.29 at my local super market—a third of what Apple charges.

At first, it seemed to work well except for this warning that pops up when I connect it to my iPhone 5:

Then Apple released an iOS update and after that, I thought the cable didn't work anymore: when I connected the iPhone to the computer using the cable, nothing would happen. Fortunately, it wasn't quite that bad: retrying a few times, especially when switching USB ports, will eventually make the charging and syncing work. Although sometimes the charging just stops after some time.

So it looked like I had a just-barely-functional cable on my hands. But then I used it with a non-Apple USB charger every day for a week, without any issues at all. So it looks like using a third-party lightning cable with a third-party USB charger works a lot better than using the cable with a computer. Just so you know.

Permalink - posted 2013-12-16