As pointed out by the article the service isn’t available to all Netflix users yet. They’re slowly rolling it out. Since I’m both not a Netflix customer and a U.S. resident I can’t try them out for myself. The review gives us all a glimpse though.

So with Netflix offering instant gratification will we see a contender to iTunes? Don’t think so, not until they improve their instant watching catalog. At least that’s what I got from the review.

Post from: EveryJoe

Netflix Instant Watching Review

My dad’s boss was in town for awhile and while having dinner with him, he recommended that I try to see “Ratatouille”. I’ve seen most Pixar movies except for this one so I knew this was something I had to go and rent. So I clicked on the “rent” button for this movie and iTunes began downloading it. Another movie I’ve been meaning to see is “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” a classic. I saw it on iTunes and decided to download this one as well.

With the speed of our DSL connection or lack thereof, it took about a 8 hours per movie that I was downloading. I didn’t watch it as soon as it downloaded seeing that if I watched it, after 24 hours it would expire. I wanted my family to see it as well as to maximize the money I spent to rent it.

So we scheduled a viewing time wherein all of us can watch it. We finally did. Here are somethings I found out about iTunes Rentals.

1. The 30 day countdown starts from the time you download the movie. I lost a day already here since I didn’t know about this. I figured that the countdown would start after the file finishes downloading. So if you have a slow internet connection, tough luck that less time for you to watch it. However, I don’t see this as a very big issue since I think 30 days is enough time to watch the movies. If you still haven’t watched it after 30 days, you probably shouldn’t have rented it because you’re too busy.

2. You can’t access the Rented movies via Front Row or through another computer with access to your shared library. I thought that the rentals would work the same way as your purchased music or TV shows, you can actually authorize another computer and access your library through the other computer. The reason I found this out was because I lost my VGA to DVI adapter and I couldn’t connect my MacBook Pro to our LCD TV. My brother could connect his MacBook and so we wanted to watch it on the LCD TV through the MacBook. No dice. Luckily after hours of searching we found the adapter.

3. The quality of the video is good enough. Watching the movies through our 32″ LCD TV, the standard files of the movies were good enough. Close to DVD quality in my opinion although there were some parts of the movies that the gradients were still a little pixelated.

4. 24 Hours is too short of a time to watch movies. – While I find that 30 days is enough to start watching the movie, I think the 24 hour limit to finish it is quite short. There are times that you won’t be able to finish the movie for one reason or another, say you fall asleep or have something urgent to attend to, you only have 24 hours to finish it. My suggestion would be to extend the time to around 48 to 72 hours. Another alternative would be a finite time of watching the movies. Let’s say you can watch it 5 times in the span of a week or something like that.

5. You can’t move the movie to another computer and watch it from there. In trying out how to play the movies on my brother’s computer (initially that was the only computer we could connect to the LCD TV) I tried several things. Sharing my library and copying the files to the other computer. It wouldn’t play. Even if I’ve never played the movie on my computer when I copied the file to the other computer and signed in using my account on iTunes it still didn’t play. It’s said that it was only authorized to play on another computer.

6. I have to get an Apple TV. I wasn’t a big fan of the Apple TV before but now it seems like a good idea. Hooking up my MacBook Pro to the LCD TV every time I want to watch a movie is too much hassle. Plus the HD content is only available via Apple TV. So…

As a whole, my iTunes Movie Rental experience was ok. I’m sure as time passes and the selection of titles get better and wider, the rental service will pick up. I realized that for movies, the rental model will work better. Simply because people don’t want to watch movies several times over in a short span of time. Unlike music which we can listen to over and over, movies just aren’t made like that.

If you’re connection is slow, the rentals need planning. Rent your movies ahead of time and schedule a movie night with your family. I’m imagining getting an Apple TV and planning ahead of time for the rentals I want to make and making Saturday nights, movie night for our family.

Oh and one more thing that I’ve learned… Audrey Hepburn is one of the prettiest ladies I’ve ever watched.

Post from: EveryJoe

My iTunes Movie Rentals Experience

I read this article at Mac Talk discussing this very topic. This got me thinking too. Are refurbished Macs worth it. If you’re going to spend hard earned money on a Mac, is refurbished a wise decision? Most of the time the answer is a resounding yes.

A refurbished Mac is a computer that a customer returned to Apple within 14 days of purchase because of one defect or another. If returned within this time frame a customer is entitled to have his unit replaced. Apple then takes the returned Mac and a tech guy looks at it and repairs it. They inspect it further and if it’s good, the repack and sell it as a refurbished. The refurbished unit carries the same 1 year warranty that Apple gives for brand new ones sans the 90 day telephone support. You can still buy AppleCare for it.

The refurbished Mac might have cosmetic defects. This is not covered by the refurbishing process. So if you’re unlucky, you’ll get a unit with scratches or a dent on it. But this is rare. Most refurb units are close to brand new conditions.

A refurbished deal could be something like a Macbook Pro 2.16 Ghz, a model just prior to the most recent one. This can sell for about 20% less the sticker price. For a savings of close to 400 dollars. The retail of this unit was $1999 and Apple will sell it at around $1599.

So is a refurb worth it? Well if you’re someone who doesn’t need to have the latest and the greatest or doesn’t mind buying something second hand, then a refurb unit is a good option of owning a recent model Mac at a fraction of the cost. Warranty is available and best of all it’s been looked after by an Apple technician. The downside to it is that it might be cosmetically imperfect. Then again most of us can live with that.

So the next time you’re in the market to buy a Mac, you might want to take a look at refurbished units at Apple’s site. If you have any thoughts on this matter, please share them with us via the comments.

Post from: EveryJoe

Macs For Less

Darn! This always happens to me. This entry is a day late because I was stuck at the hospital without anyway to read and blog about this significant news. Well better late than never.

It started with this and now Apple and EMI announce DRM free music. Nice. For $1.29, 30 cents more than the standard music tracks on iTunes you can download DRM free music that’s recorded at a higher 256kbps AAC bit rate. Apple says it’s indistinguishable from the original recording. DRM versions of the tracks will still be available for 99 cents.

True to Apple fashion, they make it easy for you to upgrade your music collection. Come May when the service is launched worldwide, Apple will provide an option to convert your entire collection (EMI songs as of now) to the DRM free versions.

What does this mean to us iTunes users and music lovers? It means better music courtesy of the higher quality. We don’t have to go through the tedious task of burning tracks to CDs and ripping them again just to get DRM free music. The ability to now use iTunes purchased tracks on a number of devices. But… it hurts the pockets a bit more. Multiply 30 cents with just a 100 tracks and you get 30 dollars. I don’t know about you but where I come from, 30 dollars is still a lot.

Apple promises that by the year’s end 2.5 million tracks in its catalog will be DRM free. If Apple is successful with this, it could really mean a significant paradigm shift on how online music business is done. Then again, after some time into this they might just realize it does work and revert to the old stuff. At the end of the day it’s all about dollars and cents. They show that this scheme makes money and is reasonable, they’ll keep it. Otherwise it’s back to the drawing board.

Apple’s press release is here.
EMI’s press release is here.

*Photo used above courtesy of EMI. 

Post from: EveryJoe

Apple and EMI Launch DRM Free Music

And in other news, the guys from Will It Blend try it out on an old iPod. Out with the old, in with the new they say.

And hey, seeing what’s inside that iPod (did you see the smoke?), maybe the guys from Greenpeace have it all right from the start. All that cadmium and nickel and mercury …

Post from: EveryJoe

Greenpeace protests, iPods on the blender

On the right corner, we have Plaxo, the world’s most popular PIM synchronizing tool that’s compatible with almost all OS platforms.

But for today, we’re going to take a look at the lighter side of these two web tools as we see which one does it best when it comes to … greeting cards (!!!) An integral part of our online social life is remembering special ocassions and acting with an eGesture such as sending cards via email.

Plaxo calls them eCards. Apple calls them iCards (who would have thought?)

Price and Selection
So let’s assume that you paid the premium membership fee to send these electronic cards. By default, you have Plaxo as the winner. Even with basic free service, Plaxo lets you send a eCards, albeit with a limited selection. Premium services which cost roughly USD $30.00 per year allows you to choose from over 617 (and counting) designs and lets you upload photos for custom made cards.

.Mac iCards also lets you choose from a relatively smaller collection of 256 cards and allows you to make custom cards by uploading photos from your iDisk. Which is a little uncomfortable because it adds the extra step of uploading photos to your iDisk via drag and drop then refreshing your browser to find the picture you want to use. A .Mac account also costs 2x more.

Design and Impact
With the menagerie of photos available for Plaxo’s online eCard service, Plaxo takes the cake. In terms of UI, .Mac has the clear advantage because of the sleek appearance of the .Mac interface. However, this is one case where the end does not justify the means – and we really don’t care how good the UI looks as long as we made our special friend smile.

Plaxo can automate a birthday or anniversary reminder, allowing you to save your relationships by making a card which can be sent on that special day. This is Plaxo’s advantage as a highly efficient PIM and calendar tool.

In terms of customization efforts, Plaxo allows you to change card and text background colors as well as borders. Apple’s iCards are more straightforward, allowing you to choose from six different fonts and that’s that. If you’re in a hurry, .Mac is the way to go. If you’re up to some creativity, Plaxo’s eCards are much better.

Verdict
Err, roowkay Scoob, are we taking this too seriously?

I have both a premium Plaxo service AND a .Mac account. Does it really matter which service you use to send these cards? I guess if you want to build your rapport with other .Mac users, you’d have to use your iCard service. This works the same way if you want to “impress” Windows users by sending them Steve Jobs certified greeting cards. With a picture of the new MacBook Pro on the card face.

But Plaxo – well, it is free. And that counts for a lot already. If you’re up for more card customization, this is what you can use. Plus the fact that you can auto schedule reminders – well, that’s a biug plus for forgetful jones.

Post from: EveryJoe

Plaxo eCards versus .Mac iCards

There’s a great article over at BusinessWeek Online on the partnership of the iPod-running shoes team up between Apple and Nike.

Nike CEO Mike Parker had more to say when it came to the iPod integration, “Obviously, a lot of that was already happening … If the shoe and the iPod could talk to each other, what would they say and what’s the potential of that connection? We got the creative side from both companies and we started exploring.”

I know! How about going the next step and trying to fit a Mac mini into a pair of running shoes? Dual core of course. Swoosh!

Their first jointly produced product: the Nike+iPod Sport kit, which involves an electronic sensor inserted under the inner sole of a new Nike running shoe dubbed the Moire (pronounce (MOR-ay). That sensor talks to a small wireless receiver that attaches to Apple’s iPod nano music player.

[read more]

Post from: EveryJoe

Apple and Nike partnership

I can’t talk about the ills of AppleCare and support jobs with talking about the good. I mean, obviously, if things were completely bad I simply would have quit long ago. There are people that appreciate us, and there are good customers that call in a lot that we know by name, or even voice. There are the great stories about people that almost ditched the Mac for the sake of one or two issues and a phone agent got a sudden burst of caring and fixed absolutely everything that person had wrong and won the person over for life (or at least a few years).

[read on]

Post from: EveryJoe

Memoirs of AppleCare tech support

Accidents can be good things sometimes. I was typing up a review for my magazine and made a mistake with a spec and accidentally typed an asterisk within a long number. Then I highlighted the number to erase it and accidentally copied it instead and forgot all about it. A little later, intending to search for something, I accidentally pasted in the number in the search field for Google on the upper right of the Safari window and hit Enter.

Guess what? It returned the correct answer to what Google thought I was looking for.

Curious, I made out other equations and entered them, and it returned the correct answer each time, even if the equations were complicated ones. Well, whaddaya know?

People I told didn’t know this little calculator function either, and a quick search for documentation about this didn’t return anything, so I assume not too many people know about it.

This is great for math morons like me, and is a hoot to use, even if you can just hit F12 and use the Dashboard Calculator widget.

If you didn’t know about it, well now you do. And if you did all along, why the heck didn’t you tell us?

Post from: EveryJoe

Calcu-google? Google-ator?

The telecommunications industry is big business here; cell phones sell like hotcakes, and everyone has one. Democratized pricing, provider subsidy and creative budget service plans enable people from all walks of life and all income brackets (and even those without an income) to own a phone. Having the latest and greatest phone is a mark of success and a guaranteed status symbol – casually and nonchalantly whip out a new one in public and heads will turn.

A consequence of this is that everyone texts everyone else anything and everything all the time. It’s cheap and fast. SMS is the communication medium of choice. Whole government coup plots can live and die wholly on text. An urban legend has it that the SMS messages flying to and from a major mall in Manila in just one weekend afternoon surpasses the entire month’s messaging activity of some small European countries.

Which brings us to OS X’s Address Book.

Personally I’m not a big fan of keytap messaging (even if there is such a thing as the T9 Dictionary function). I find it wearisome and tedious – and occasionally dangerous; some people here love to drive and send text messages at the same time. If I can avoid it, I will. I’d much rather call people than have an SMS chat session with them. If I have to, I prefer to use my PDA when I’m mobile, or when I’m in front of my Mac, I use Address Book to send my SMS. It’s a great free app for text messaging people from the keyboard, but unfortunately, you get what you pay for in this case.

I just wonder why Apple, through the many iterations of this little app across the various versions of OS X, hasn’t developed Address Book. With each new release of the OS, I look for some sign of improvement, and Tiger has been another disappointment. Same app, different OS version. With the drive to go wireless industry-wide, I wonder why Apple neglects this area for its users. It seems like a no-brainer, right?

I don’t want to have to purchase third-party apps for just a simple thing like SMS, like buy a copy of the wonderfully thorough and comprehensive (but not free) Phone Agent or some similar app. Like most spoiled Apple brats, I would prefer this functionality free from within my operating system. Everything else is in there anyway, I don’t know why Address Book is so retarded.

Yeah, it’s a great basic app. You can keep your contacts in there, complete with pictures of them, lots of number slots and you can sync them to your heart’s content with every danged Mac you own – but it can’t do a simple thing as keep a record of the messages you send using it – it’s not recorded on your phone, so no one except the person you sent the text to can say the text message actually exists. It can’t even split a long message into two or more and just send them out that way – it just refuses to send the thing if you go over the character limit. Hell, Address Book can’t even give you a proper acknowledgement that the text you sent actually went out properly; the window closes after you click on Send …and that’s that.

Wouldn’t it be great if it kept a copy of all the text we receive and send, sortable by time, date, sender, recipient, etc. and the content archivable, indexable and searchable from within Address Book or Spotlight? Wouldn’t it be great if it could get or send the existing messages to and from our cell phones, so we never have to erase any messages ever again? Wouldn’t it be great if it had the ability to send graphic smileys like on Sony-Ericsson phones? Send text to multiple recipients?

It should be able to handle MMS, for God’s sake! Think of all that wasted Quicktime functionality! Think of what you can actually do with your iSight outside of videochatting with the precious few who have iSights as well! Think of all that multimedia goodness we could create and output through the phone, to wow all our non-Mac friends!

Better yet, why doesn’t Apple just junk the darned thing and buy up the company who makes Phone Agent? Enable iSync on it, call it the The New Address Book – Now on Steroids! and incorporate it into Leopard. Now that would be fantastic!

Whaddaya say, Steve? Should we all text him about it?

Post from: EveryJoe

Addressing Address Book