Brian Stucki:
This weekend marks the ten year anniversary of the first Mac mini. I feel confident in saying that no one has watched this little machine grow more intently than I have watched it. It’s the center of everything I do here at Macminicolo.
To celebrate a decade of working with the Mac mini, I’ve put together a timeline of hightlights from the last ten years.
I’ve used iTunes Match for quite a while now because my music setup is fiddly.
My iTunes library is quite large, so until a couple of weeks ago, the files reside on a RAID connected to my home Mac mini.
My main computer isn’t the Mac mini, however, but a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. Even though it sports a 512 GB SSD, I don’t want to sacrifice disk space to music I’m not going to listen to, so I use iTunes Match to keep the two libraries connected. I can download what I want to my laptop, or delete something I don’t, all without affecting the home library directly.
That was fine until a couple of weeks ago, when I upgraded to a NAS and put my 2-disk RAID out to pasture. Now, my iTunes library resides on the NAS on its own share. The Mac mini is running the iTunes application, pulling the files via SMB2 over Ethernet.
(It works shockingly well now that I read that sentence back.)
However, it came to light this weekend that the copying of my iTunes library hadn’t gone smoothly. I had some files missing, and others with bad metadata all of a sudden.
I couldn’t nuke the music from the home library with iTunes Match-supplied files — or files from my notebook — because the service had spread the bad metadata around my little ecosystem of pain.
I should point out that this isn’t iTunes Match’s fault. Really, the system worked just as it should have: iTunes detected a change in my library and synced it across my devices.
However, I wasn’t able to get iTunes Match to see correct data if manually changed. I would straighten out an artist just to watch iTunes Match sync and change it back.
So I started over.
Like every other cloud service Apple offers, there’s no man-behind-the-curtain preference pane to reset things. There’s no toggle labeled “Reset iTunes Match” anywhere.
However, iTunes Match can be tricked into being reset.
I started by launching iTunes from the Dock with the Option key held down, which let me create a new iTunes library. With this new, empty library, I logged into iTunes Match. This displayed my music collection as iCloud sees it. I hit Select All and delete, removing the files from iCloud.
It took a little while for iCloud to notice all my music was gone. I use iTunes Match on my iOS devices, so I erased all my local music on my my iPad and left it awake on my desk to keep up with what iTunes Match was doing. After about 20 minutes, the iPad showed no music.
Once it did, I turned off iTunes Match in the new library. I then copied my music from my known-good, local iTunes library into my new, completely empty iTunes library. It took a little time (and considerable disk space) for iTunes to copy all my music over.
Once the import was done, I re-enabled iTunes Match and let it scan my library. On its first pass, it only picked up purchased music, so I created a Smart Playlist to tell me what wasn’t on iCloud:
I selected all this music, right-clicked and selected “Add to iCloud,” forcing iTunes Match to take the music. After the service did its thing, my iTunes Match data fully matched my local, known-good library, ending the cycle of bad meta-data and mis-labeled songs.
All in all, I like iTunes Match, and this issue wasn’t the service’s fault, but Apple should allow users access to reset their data when things start to spiral. All of the juggling I had to do took a good amount of time and bandwidth, and it shouldn’t have to be so hard to straighten things out when needed.
While Apple isn’t at CES, they sure can be felt in Las Vegas most years.
I waded through a bunch of weird, not-so-good RSS apps for the Mac to pick the best one. TL;DR: it’s Reeder.
If I had unlimited funds to grow my Mac collection, a TAM would be first on my shopping list.
Cabel Sasser:
Coda was removed from the Mac App Store in mid-October, at the same time version 2.5 was released. Since new releases always generate a short-term sales spike and we wanted the numbers to be fairly representative of “typical sales”, we looked at one month on either side — September and November.
The results were interesting. We sold a couple hundred fewer units of Coda post-App Store removal, but revenue from it went up by about 44%.
Now, two explanations for that: in addition to keeping the 30% that would have normally gone to Apple, we also returned Coda from its sale price ($79) to its regular price ($99) alongside the release of 2.5. Even if those factors hadn’t been in play, though, I don’t think the decline in Coda revenue would have been as dramatic as we originally feared it might be.
The best way to advertise on 512 Pixels is via the RSS feed. Exclusive for one week, sponsored posts come with a whole pile of benefits. I’ve got openings for the next two months available now.
I don’t often want to shout “Amen!” after reading a blog post, but I don’t disagree with a single syllable of this. These paragraphs really hit home:
Apple has always been a marketing-driven company, but there’s a balance to be struck. Marketing plays a vital role, but marketing priorities cannot come at significant expense to quality.
I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.
Tim Cook’s a master of real-world logistics; he needs to exercise those muscles over Apple’s software now more than ever.
It’s hard to believe we’ve been making shows as Relay FM for 20 weeks already.
Realmac Software’s Dan Counsell:
When you get swept along in the shininess of the App Store it’s easy to forget that you no longer know who your customers are. You don’t have any of their details, you can’t even respond to them when they leave a review on the App Store. The fact of the matter is they are really Apples customers, not yours.
When you sell directly outside of the Mac App Store you get the contact details for every single person that buys your products (and rightly so), this is often overlooked but it’s key to running a healthy and sustainable business.
Since the summer of 2011, I’ve carried a notebook with me.
It started as a way to journal on the go, but that was replaced by Day One pretty quickly. My use of paper notebooks evolved into a low-friction capture system for notes during phone calls, meetings and brainstorming sessions.
For a while, I stored them in a big Ziploc bag, but that didn’t scale for long. It was hard to go back and find notes later, and as work got busy, I was burning through notebooks pretty quickly. Before long, I had a stack of filled notebooks hanging around.
I started scanning my notebooks after about a year of using them heavily. By making high-res PDFs named by the dates the notebook was in use, it became easier to go back and find anything that hadn’t made it into OmniFocus or Evernote.
For physical storage, I sprung for the Field Notes Archival Wooden Box. It’s a luxury in a world where a shoebox would have worked just fine, but I like the way it looks on my bookcase.
In a digital world, there’s still a place for things like paper notebooks. They can’t cause distractions in meetings and don’t require Wi-Fi. While I try to be good and not have much just in a Field Notes notebook, if something is, I can get my hands on it later quickly.
This week, on Connected:
At the end of 2014, Stephen and Myke reflect on what proved to be a wild year in technology.
Come for jokes about Instagram, stay for a review of the most important new app of the year.
This episode was made possible by: