Posts Tagged iTunes
Apple Genius Playlist — It’s like Pandora for your IPod Tunes!
I finally took the time last night to setup the Genius Playlist option for my iPhone. Basically the Genius playlist option now lets Apple generate a playlist with songs in the same fashion that Pandora does for it’s Internet Radio streams.
For example, I selected the new Ben Folds song Hiroshima and it created the following playlist based on the songs that are on my iPod:
- Ben Folds – Hiroshima
- William Shatner – It Hasn’t Happened Yet
- Counting Crows – A Murder of One
- Weezer – Only In Dreams
- R.E.M. – Bad Day
- Beck – Loser
- The Offspring – Hammerhead
- Cake – The Distance
- Tom Petty – The Waiting
- Ben Folds – Give Judy My Notice
- Blues Traveler – Hook
- Steve Miller Band – Take The Money and Run
- Beck – Where It’s At
- They Might Be Giants – Particle Man
- Counting Crows – Raining in Baltimore
- Weezer – Surf Wax America
- R.E.M. – Imitation of Life
- Oasis – Hey Now!
- Green Day – Long View
- No Doubt – Spider Webs
- Disturbed – Down With the Sickness
- Ben Folds – Rock This Bitch
- Tom Petty – American Girl
- Beck – Devil’s Haircut
- William Shatner – That’s Me Trying
So as you can see, not only do I have a pretty diverse selection of music on my iPhone 
but the Genius Playilst generation is pretty smart! Big ups to Apple adding this because it’s 2008 and the ’shuffle’ feature is soooooo 1995 
I suggest everyone give it a shot! It does take a bit of time though. My modest selection of ~600 took about ten minutes to generate the information for. I’m not sure if this had anything to do with data transfer speeds because I was using my MacBook Pro over wireless while the music resided on my NAS.
Also as an additional point I have to also say that I’m a big fan of the new Ben Folds album, Way To Normal. This is probably one of the more FUN records he’s put out since Rockin’ The Suburbs in 2001. A few choice tracks are (of course) Hiroshima and also Bitch Went Nuts. 
Ben Folds - Way To Normal
Also as a little window into my life, Ben Folds – The Luckiest was our wedding song. It WAS going to be Andrew W.K. – Really In Love … but we changed it at the last minute in an effort to not take years off my in-laws life
Let’s take a dive into XCode and Objective-C!
Posted by eric in Apple, General Programming, General Software, iPhone on August 6, 2008
So, I’m diving into the pool!
I recently purchased a MacBook Pro for the sole purpose of developing software for the Mac/iPhone platform. It’s completely unknown to me and currently the XCode IDE looks nothing if not completely confusing compared to the friently intuitive interface of Microsoft Visual Studio that I’m used to
What brought me to this point? Well, two things.
First, I’ve been wanting to dive into Objective-C for a little over a year now and started dabbling with it a while back on my old G4 Powerbook. I was impressed with the coolness of it, but being that I was developing on a G4 Powerbook, I was limited as by this time Apple had begun the mass migration to Intel based systems.
Second is that I want to develop applications for the iPhone. Not to make a mint or anything, more or less because I think I have some good ideas on programs people would use. Like how Apple provided the iTunes controller, well, hows about a WWWinamp controller for the iPhone? Perhaps one that lets you search your library locally on the iPhone without even connecting to WWWinamp?
I started down this path because there’s currently a program for sale on the iTunes App Store that lets you control your instance of WinAmp remotely… for $4.99!!! What the crap?! I was floored that the author would expect that kinda money for a program when there are PLENTY of other FREE alternatives out on the web (like WinAmp Remote, AjaxAmp or WWWinamp). I made it my mission to release a comparable program
It’s just going to take a month or so to ramp up on the new IDE and learn how to do SOAP calls and whatnot. Should be a fun adventure though! My wife begins the final semester of her Teaching Credential program in a couple weeks, so I’ll have four nights a week alone to myself to nerd out and gorge on Hot Pockets!
I have another version of WWWinamp in the works as well. This is basically some code modernization for sections that I wrote over a year ago. Updating things to use Generic Methods and whatnot. You know, fun .NET stuff
Cheers!
MacBook Air: First Impressions With The Solid State Drive
Today while on our lunch break a couple co-workers and I ventured over to our local Apple Store here in San Diego. We had seen on a few Apple related sites that the new MacBook Air had been showing up in Apple Stores so we decided we needed to take the latest laptop from Apple for a test drive.
A little background from my point of reference. My wife is currently using a 2.2Ghz Black MacBook with 1GB RAM and my personal laptop is an ‘ancient’ 17″ Titanium PowerBook with a 1.33Ghz G4 processor and 1GB RAM. Both are currently running the latest version of Leopard (10.5.1). So these are the benchmarks I’ll use when comparing the speed of the new MacBook Air.
The model I was testing was the ‘top of the line’ 1.8Ghz model with 2GB of RAM and a 64GB solid state drive (SSD). I verified that it was in fact the 64GB SSD because the system preferences labeled the available disk space after format as 55.35GB and the serial number was that of the listed 64GB SSD model.
Our first test was to just see how fast iTunes opens as this usually takes even a couple seconds on my wife’s MacBook. Even on a machine only clocking in at 1.8Ghz, iTunes literally took only a SECOND (we timed it) to open and be ready to use. I was floored! Other applications such as iMovie or Garage Band only took a second or two to open as well.
It’s obvious that performing every day operations will be much, much faster on the new MacBook Air with the additional ($999 additional as well) solid state drive. The benefit here is the seek time for non-cached data has dropped from milliseconds to NANOSECONDS. That alone greatly increases the load time of data, regardless of actual transfer rates once the data is accessed. Operations such as saving or opening large sequential files might seem a little slower on an SSD drive compared to traditional disk drives, but honestly, I feel the benefits far outweigh the draw backs.
What excites me is now we’ll have storage devices that can finally feed our fast data hungry CPU’s information at a rate that will actually make then earn their keep Even when booting Windows XP while watching the CPU monitor, you’ll notice that it’s not the CPU that’s the limiting factor in boot time. It’s the disk I/O that’s causing things to slow down. The hard drive has to trash around all over the disk loading information and god forbid you don’t defrag regularly
For additional reading, you can check out the benchmarks posted over at MacRumors where users in their forums are posting actual MacBook Air SSD Benchmark information using such programs as Xbench.
Cheers!
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