part 1

It appears that Apple were prepared to rock the boat after all.

With the launch next month of the ‘premium’ versions of EMI tracks, I can begin to see a world where I am prepared to buy music online. I’m happy to pay the slight extra cost for the DRM-less tracks - especially given their higher quality.

However there remains for me one barrier to this utopia; iTunes remains a proprietary application that is only available on Mac and Windows. Given they don’t have DRM as an excuse anymore, will an open alternative become viable?

I say “viable” as I know there are already unburdened music stores out there. But without the “mainstream” artists available through their sites, the appeal is unfortunately limited.

As I mentioned on Andy’s blog yesterday, I have used Ubuntu Linux on my work laptop for about two years now. From the early days of running Lotus Notes under Wine emulation to the successes of Notes 7 running natively within IBM Workplace Managed Client, I have seen many ‘challenges’ come and ago that are part and parcel of using any technology that is not considered mainstream.

One of the issues that comes up from time-to-time is that of document format. For a long time, the standard office tools were Lotus Smartsuite - not surprising since IBM owns it - and then, a few years ago, IBM moved to the Microsoft Office suite. Given a company of a few hundred-thousand, it wasn’t surprising that not everything and everyone moved to Office overnight. Even now there are plenty of legacy documents in the various Lotus formats.

I survived with OpenOffice through perseverance and accommodating colleagues who would convert the odd WordPro or Freelance file for me - although I haven’t had to resort to that for months now.

OpenOffice isn’t 100% perfect - there are occasional formatting oddities which can make some documents interesting to read. For example, one document I am currently working on has a few bulleted lists. One of the lists persists in formatting with huge bullet points despite all of my efforts to convince it otherwise. (Before anyone asks, no I haven’t raised a bug for this; I’ll see if I can get a non-confidential example document that exhibits the same behaviour first.)

This eventually brings me to today’s entry in “Signs things are improving”; my manager sent out a planning spreadsheet today that was in OpenOffice Calc format. It took a few moments for the shock to pass before I remembered that she is running a beta of Notes 8 that includes its ‘Productivity Tools’ - aka OpenOffice.

Open Standards for teh win!

I’ve had an MSN id since University. It has had two uses:

• to act as a spam hole for sites that need an e-mail address,
• and to let me chat on the MSN network.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t feel particularly compelled to keep the ID active. I’m not sure what has led me to make this decision, but today I have decided to let the ID expire and say goodbye to the MSN network.

Most of my contacts are on Google Talk and this evening I have prompted one to start using it more - I even got him to install the Windows version of Gaim.

So, if you’ve got my MSN id and not my Google Talk one (unlikely)… let me know. If you don’t have either and want it… let me know.

In other news, my Web2.0 rating has just increased a notch with the addition of my last.fm account.

Steve Jobs has posted some thoughts on DRM. He highlights many of the issues with DRM and considers some of the possible future directions Apple could take.

He makes the very good point that over 90% of the music sold by the companies last year was DRM-free; by virtue of being sold on unencumbered CDs. Sure the labels have tried out DRM-laden CDs, but it’s not always worked out well - yes Sony, I’m looking at you.

Whilst its good to read what Apple’s position is on a DRM-free future, I felt it lacked any mention of what Apple is doing about it.

Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free.

Its not clear whether Apple is one of those unhappy people with energies needing direction.

It seems to me that they do what the “Big Four” record companies require in order to distribute music and they won’t do anything to rock that lucrative boat.

Update:

Engadge and Wired provide some thoughts on the subject. I had missed the link to the EU’s calls for Apple to open up iTunes.

Also, note the irony that this has been published the day after Apple and Apple have settled their legal dispute.

Update again, nice post by Jono on the subject.

Sam Ruby, a colleague I have not met within or without work, has this to say on Standards:

A standard is one that has multiple, inter-operable, independent implementations. An open standard, at least in the software world, is one where at least one of those implementations is open source.

The full piece can be read here.

Roo has got an interesting post on his recent visit to the BBC; it certain sounds like they are heading in good directions.

In the comments, Andy Piper linked to The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles. They make a lot of sense and should be required reading for anyone interested in the subject.

I particularly like the line:

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes

It encapsulates everything I enjoy about the internet these days.

Whilst I may not worship at the alter of Apple beyond owning an elderly 3G iPod, I do like their series of Mac/PC TV ads. Their blatant stereotyping of the suit-wearing PC compared to the hip and cool, hoodie-wearing Mac may be a little unfair, but they do get their message across. What would it take to get Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together in front of a camera for a real-life debate of their respective platforms? Unlikely I reckon.

Apple do invest a lot of time and effort on image and style. They certainly benefit from controlling the hardware that their software runs on - both in terms of controlling the look of the brand as well as being able to profit directly from it. I wonder how many people buy a Mac because of the look of the laptop they get to carry, or the operating system it runs?

Either way, Apple just went up another notch in my cool scale; the Get a Mac TV adverts have been redone for the UK market, albeit it web-only, with the very funny Mitchell and Webb taking the Mac and PC roles. It’s a perfect fit for their characters - whichever advertising creative realised this, should be rewarded. There are only 6 ads up at the moment, but I’m sure more will follow.

Its not enough to get me to switch though - I’m in a position where I pay nothing for my Operating System and don’t have to pay a premium for the shiny white box to run it on.

Go check out the UK ads here.

Numberwang.

Having googled around this subject, I was surprised to see how little information was out there that could help me. This post is intended to increase the Google Juice.

I bought a Canon Selphy CP510 printer earlier in the year to replace my Canon Stylus Photo 950. The ‘950 was proving too expensive to run given how little photo printing I was doing and the large amount of text printing Jo was doing. (The Selphy only replaces the photo printing side of the 950; I also bought a HP Scanjet F320 which acts as a better general printer).

The Selphy is a great little portable photo printer that does almost all I want. Being able to directly attach either of our cameras is really handy. However I came across an annoying issue with it; it refuses to print an image that has been edited on the computer and put back on the camera. It simply says ‘cannot print’ with no further explanation. Google doesn’t help much here, aside from a few reports that agree with my experience. Unfortunately I couldn’t get to the bottom of the issue so I had to get the Selphy directly attached to my laptop.

The LinuxPrinting.org page for this printer details the state of support; currently described as ‘mostly’. The laptop is running Ubuntu Dapper which makes a lot of this easier.

The last time I tried printing to the Selphy, I added a printer to the system, selecting the Canon CP100 driver; there wasn’t a CP510 driver listed as was suggested there should be. When I tried printing from EOG it failed, wasting a shot of the Selphy cartridge. Not wanting to waste more, I left it at that.

This time, I read around a bit more, and got the impression that gimp-print/gutenprint was the way to go. That meant installing some extra packages that I didn’t have - an apt-cache search on gutenprint reveals a number of them.

I then fired up the GIMP and loaded one of my recent photos. Under the print dialog I added a new printer called ‘Selphy’ and under the ‘Setup Printer’ dialog I selected the Print Queue of the original CP100 printer I added previously.

For the driver, I expected there to be a CP510 driver in the list having installed the new packages, but there simply wasn’t. I selected the Canon CP220 driver this time, and was happy to discover that I was able to successfully print directly to the Selphy.

One last note; before printing, make sure you click ‘Save Settings’ - otherwise it will print and then forget all the settings you’ve made.