Despite the awful name, AudioGalaxy is just about exactly what I’ve been looking for. It’s a free and simple way to access your entire music library when away from home. You do this by downloading a small helper application that connects your iTunes library XML file (or any other shared folders you choose) to the AudioGalaxy.com web site. The initial scan can take a while depending on the size of your library (I think mine took about 16 hours, but I’m not sure about that) but once it’s completed, your tunes are accessible on the go.

The Browser Interface

When at work, I primarily use the web browser interface to browse music, add songs/albums to a playlist and listen to my music. The user interface is pretty bare-bones, but it does what it needs to do. There are a few quirks, like I have artists such as “01″, which I don’t actually have in my library. But it allows me to listen to Tom Waits when I didn’t think to put any on my iPhone, so I have no complaints.

The iPhone App

In addition to the service being free, their companion iPhone app is free as well. The app is reasonably similar to the native iPod app on the iPhone, but same as the web interface — you have to add your music to a playlist before you can listen to it. It sounds like it might be downsampling the music a bit to keep things streaming smoothly over 3G — but that’s acceptable to me, since a day of 320k streaming would likely kill my data plan.

Parenting Update

Totally enjoying being a parent more the second time around. But I suspect that I’m going to need to read a parenting blog, or get a parenting podcast or something soon because going on instinct is only getting me so far. Anyone know a foolproof method to potty train a kid over the duration of a week?

We Moved

While my city friends thought I sold out and moved to the suburbs years ago (when we moved to Oak Park), now we really have. I dreaded this day for years, fearing that it would mean that I wouldn’t go to concerts any longer. Turns out it’s not that big a deal, I’m seeing just as many shows as I did in Oak Park. I guess when a person will fly to Australia or Amsterdam for a concert, a 40-minute drive to Chicago isn’t that substantial a drive.

I’m Going to Sell My CDs

Just typing those words horrifies me, but honestly — I haven’t listened to a CD in a CD player in over a year. Everything is on the computer, backed up to a hard drive and then I’m going to start backing that up to the cloud. I figure I might as well sell the CDs while they’re worth a (very) little something, before they’re worth nothing at all. I’m keeping the Eno CDs though — I’ve scoured the Earth for those.

Concerts

I’ve seen Veronica Falls, The Horrors, Wye Oak, Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel, Death Cab for Cutie, The Cults, Best Coast, Lykke Li, Coldplay, OK GO, The Kills, The Vaccines, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., Vivian Girls and a few others. Hoping to see The Cure in L.A. soon (fingers crossed!), Fitz and the Tantrums and Still Corners.

iPad 2

I got an iPad 2 (thanks Gerard Design!) and it’s true — it’s twice as badass as the first iPad. It’s faster, wicked thin and the video camera makes Facetime chat as easy as on the iPhone. I like the Smart Cover too (in orange of course), but every now and then I have a heck of a time getting it to act properly as a stand. But then again, I have a hard time with Transformers too.

iPhone 4S

The 4S is certainly quicker, the camera really is much better and Siri is pretty interesting — though other voice apps are actually a bit more helpful (like Dragon Go!). For example, I asked Dragon Go! who was playing at the Empty Bottle in Chicago tonight and it gave me a list of upcoming acts. Siri just said it didn’t understand the question, offered to search Google for me, and then game me some lip when I told it that it “sucked”. But being able to read and send text messages by voice is great and iOS 5 is a terrific upgrade.

The Good:

More storage is nice

This is sort of a “duh”, but it’s worth mentioning since it’s the main reason I upgraded. Well, that and the fact I received a gift certificate for a 16GB iPhone. But the expanded storage is a big winner. I can be a little less choosy as to which albums I pick for the commute and I can throw a few podcasts and audiobooks on as well without fear of skimping on the tunes.

The sound quality is better

From call quality to the improved volume of the speakerphone, the 3G just sounds better all around.

The flush headphone jack is convenient

Not that it really ever mattered to me, I only use Apple’s earbuds anyway. I realize there are better sounding ones out there, but I tend to destroy earbuds on a frequent basis. And it’s just too easy to swap them out by dropping by the Apple Store or hitting the Applecare web site.

GPS is nice to have

Although the only time I’ll end up using it is when I’m lost in a city that I’m unfamiliar with. Would have come in handy in Barcelona earlier this year, but other than that I’ll be sticking with the GPS in the Mini Cooper. Without turn by turn directions and a usable map size, GPS is not all that useful. Especially since the original iPhone used cell tower triangulation, which for most situations is good enough.

The 3G fits nice and snug into my favorite iPhone case

When the 3G came out, Case Mate dropped the price on their “Signature Leather Case” from $30 to $6. So I picked one up, and what do you know – it fits great with the iPhone 3G. It was actually a tiny bit loose on the original iPhone, much to my disappointment.

The Bad:

You can’t charge over Firewire anymore.

Which really sucks, because several of the iPod docks we have around the house are plugged into the wall via Firewire. This isn’t something that worth the expense of purchasing new docks and cables just to charge over USB, so it means that I can only charge my phone in my home office now. Hassle.

The Mini Cooper won’t charge it either

Which power sucks, because that means that I need to go back to carrying both an iPod and an iPhone on road trips now. It also means that my phone isn’t charging during my lengthy morning and evening commutes. Stinks.

The battery life sucks with 3G on

Even with the new software update, turning on 3G almost guarantees that your phone is at a half charge by the end of lunch. I tend to keep 3G off for this reason.

3G really isn’t that much faster

I suppose it’s faster, but in the sense that slow is faster than slower. WiFi speeds are “quick” and anything less than that is slow. So if you’re looking to upgrade to the iPhone 3G because you’re looking to get your home broadband experience when you’re on the go, keep waiting. This isn’t it. I don’t know if it’s the latency of cell networks, the processor and memory of the iPhone or something beyond by understanding – but surfing the web using the 3G iPhone involves only slightly less waiting than it did before.

And this year’s keynote was highly anticipated — maybe not like last year’s iPhone keynote, but something like that is few and far between. This was a solid keynote with solid launches of new software and hardware. Here’s my two cents on Tuesday’s events.

iPhone 1.1.3 Update

Some great updates in here: ability to add web pages as home icons, pseudo-GPS with Google Maps and the ability to send SMS messages to multiple receivers. But still no search? Seriously? And while i was wildly excited about the ability to manage music via 1.1.3 with iTunes 7.6, you can still only tie the iPhone to one library, which means you still cannot load up the iPhone with music at home and plug it into your work machine and listen to the music through iTunes.

I suppose the reason for this is that if you’re listening to music through iTunes and someone calls, you’d have to eject the iPod before answering the call (likely missing the call). I’m not saying that’s unreasonable, but I’d still prefer to be able to carry one device instead of two.

Time Capsule

Great stuff. I don’t have a use for this personally, but laptop users sure do. I have a hell of a time getting Faith to backup her iBook because of the effort involved. I’m still not using Time Machine though since it’s such a dog on my G5′s old video card and because my backup drive is the same size as my boot disk.

iTunes Video Rentals + New AppleTV

I’m still not seeing the opportunity for video via iTunes. I never bought a movie through iTunes because they were nearly the same price as DVDs for something that’s more difficult for me to watch on a TV. We have a video dock at our place, and a few times we’ve bought episodes of Lost that we missed. But we watch them and then delete them. It’s pretty unlikely I need to see the show twice. Movies are different — when I buy a movie I might only watch it once a year or so. Or maybe I want to take it to a friend’s house. Good luck doing that with an iTunes movie.

If iTunes movies were cheaper to rent than higher quality video store rentals, or more convenient than renting a movie from OnDemand I could see using it. But right now it’s still not compelling. The only way I can see renting a movie from iTunes is for flights, and that’s it.

As for AppleTV, I’ll pass on that too. On those rare instances when I need to get media onto my TV, the video iPod dock works fine. AppleTV isn’t going to replace my cable box, or my DVD player. It’s a shame the AppleTV doesn’t have a DVD player in it — then it would be an easy decision to choose it next time I upgraded. But right now it feels like I would be paying $229 for the privilege of renting movies from iTunes. No thanks.

MacBook Air

While I love the potential for a machine like this, I don’t think this machine is it (yet). If anything, it feels like a cross between the Powerbook 2400 and the G4 Cube. Limited features and expandability at a premium price. If they can get a faster processor into it, a larger hard drive and a second USB port, I’d consider it as my next work machine. But that’s unlikely, and all things considered I’d still probably prefer my 15″ MacBook Pro.

I’m actually really surprised it didn’t include nationwide broadband. While I don’t think much of Amazon’s Kindle, I am envious of that kind of connectivity on something larger than my iPhone screen. If this had wireless nationwide broadband, this would be the must-have laptop. But right now it feels more like 2/3 of a MacBook at 5/3 of the price.

No doubt, there are some great features in Leopard. Time Machine is brilliant and Quick Look is a handy feature — especially once you install more plug-ins for it. But all in all, it’s just a bit of a mess of an OS. I keep on finding myself unable to click on any icons on my Leopard desktop, my machine keeps losing it’s Airport connection, and those are only a few of my issues. I’ve mentioned my disgust with Stacks before, so there’s no need to go over it again.

Maybe 10.5.2 will be different. Maybe it won’t. I might just sit out 10.5 altogether and see if they get it right with 10.6. Most likely some incredible app will come out that will require 10.5 and I’ll get suckered into installing it again. But for now, I’m loving 10.4 again. Familiar, stable and with all the features I need on a daily basis.

My growing tolerance of Leopard has faded, and now I’m thinking screw this cat. Apple typically does a great job with the things they do. I love my iPods. I love my iPhone. While I wouldn’t say I loved 10.4 Tiger, I can say that I had no significant complaints about it. You know what they say about good design, often it’s so transparent that you don’t even notice it. Well I’m noticing Leopard a lot these days, and not in a good way.

In Leopard, my apps crash for no reason. Occasionally I can’t click on any icons on the desktop. I don’t use Spaces and I hate Stacks. Quick Look is a nicety, although for my purposes it’s not dramatically more useful than dragging things to the Preview icon in my desktop. I dislike the new iCal. Frankly, Leopard has been very little upside and mostly a hassle. Leopard reminds me of an unwelcome house guest, one who moves things around without asking. I suspect I’m about a week away from switching back to 10.4.

For quite a while, I used 30 Boxes. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a lot like Google Calendar except the dominant way you enter events is through a single input box. Google Calendar has something like this now and they call it “Quick Add”. This allowed you to put in an event like “Meeting with Sean 2pm 12/3 tag work” and it would add the event at the correct date and time and color code it whatever you might have defined for work. 30 Boxes also allowed you to tie into all of your other online information such as your accounts for MySpace, WordPress, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and more. You could also tie it into RSS feeds, iCalendars and such. When used to it’s fullest, 30 Boxes gave you a view into your own history across the web, as well as the activities of your friends who also had 30 Boxes accounts. Best of all, you could publish out tagged items from your calendar to wherever you like and style the data as you saw fit. For a while, I had a list of upcoming Chicago concerts in the sidebar pulled from 30 Boxes, which were just events tagged as “concert”. I also synced (one way unfortunately) all of my 30 Boxes calendars down to iCal on the Mac to have a local version of my events. That way I could pull my calendars into my phone, iPod or whatever.

The thing that stunk about 30 Boxes is how it handled meeting requests. You could add folks to one of your events and they’d get an e-mail asking them if they plan to attend, but it didn’t automatically show up in their calendar or anything that folks expected from a business calendaring system. So I had to bid farewell to 30 Boxes.

From there I switched to Google Calendar because I heard of an application called Spanning Sync that would allow two way synchronization between that and iCal. However, my first sync went disastrously and I quickly switched to exclusively using iCal.

I loved using iCal and used .Mac to sync my calendars between my home and work computers. But this too was doomed to failure, since Outlook 2003 (which most of my clients use) cannot properly read an invitation sent from iCal/Mail. Folks would get goofy results, be unable to respond to the meeting request, etc. Basically it was a hassle for everyone except me. Not the sign of a good solution.

So I’ve switched back to Entourage. And for the life of me, I can’t remember why I stopped using it in the first place. True, it’s slightly less elegant than OS X Mail. And it’s certainly less elegant than iCal. However, there are a great number of things that it does better in a business environment, and other than tracking concerts, keeping track of meetings at work is the most important thing I use a calendar for.

It’s not all bad news though – thanks to sync services in Entourage all my calendars and contacts are synced to iCal and Address Book in OS X, which means they’re also synced to my iPhone via iTunes and my home machine via .Mac. That’s a lot of applications working in tandem to get my calendars everywhere I need them, but so far so good.

In other changes, I’m warming up to Leopard. Except for Stacks. Stacks still have earned my hatred. I think stacks could be fixed with a few small tweaks.

First, make the Stack use the folder icon and do not change the icon based on what’s new in the Stack. Changing icons is an easy way for me to not recognize my folder. Whoever let that out of Apple should not only be fired, but they should also be tried by a jury of their peers.

Second, make the folder open with a control-click. Not the folder that contains the folder (as it does now) but the actual folder itself (like the 10.4 click behavior).

Third, move the “Show in Finder” link so it’s always the closest link to the dock.

Lastly, don’t truncate the names of folders in the grid view. A folder named “Adob…s CS3″ is positively useless. The fact that even “Show in Finder” has been truncated to the unintelligible “Show…inder” should be evidence enough that this is a bad implementation of this idea.

Otherwise, Leopard is mostly working out fine. My video does feel a tad pokey though for some reason. While my friends are telling tales of speed increases, my machine feels responsive but with a touch of lag. Might be time to upgrade my venerable GeForce 5200 for something with a bit more moxy – like an ATI Radeon 9600 with 256MB of memory.

First, the keyboard – it’s extremely flat, which is nice that it won’t collect cat hair and other grossness. However, some of the keys have been rearranged and they’re so flat that I’m having trouble typing at all. I actually feel like I’m in my first high school typing class with this thing, my accuracy is so bad. Maybe some laptop users love their keyboards and long for that feel on the desktop. But personally, I’m not seeing it. This thing is going back pronto.

Leopard has fared a little better than the chicklet keyboard. So far, I don’t have anything glowing to say about it, but the things that annoy me only tend to do so in small to medium amounts. For example, the new unified theme is so… grey. I mean, I suppose it’s fine, but it’s a lot like nothing at all really. There’s not much to dislike (or like) about it because it’s just so indistinct. It looks more like a theme than an official Apple UI. And the menubar – some folks are making a lot of full about it being a little translucent, but I only use solid color backgrounds for the most part. So it’s not really affecting me. The dock is a little more annoying, not because of the new style of it, but because that new visual style means all my icons are smaller for no real benefit. Thank goodness for the Terminal hack that makes the 3D effect go away.

As for “Spaces” (the virtual desktops) I don’t see the point. Spaces seems like it solves the same sort of problems Expose does, but I prefer Expose. The new iTunes-like Finder windows are pretty nice, except that you can’t resize the text in the sidebar. This means that I’m missing my targets in the sidebar a lot more than I used to.

However, the worst thing by far about Leopard is the new “Stacks” feature. It used to be that you could drag a folder into the dock and either click on it to open the folder, or right-click on it to get a hierarchical menu (like the Apple Menu of OS 9). Clicking on a Stack now either gives you a fan of items (for a few) or a grid of items (for a lot). So far, this behavior is infinitely less desirable than the previous 10.4 behavior, and I’m hoping for a preference to turn it off in 10.5.1.

As for the changes in Mail, iCal, Safari and Address Book – they’re a bit different, but I’m not experiencing any “ah-ha” improvements. I suppose once Spotlight finishes indexing my hard drive and iTunes finishes looking for new cover art, there will be speed improvements. And Trevin says that Quick Look will change my life. I figure I’ll give Leopard a week, and if I’m grumbling about Stacks and other issues, I’ll head back to 10.4 for the rest of 2007.

So I downloaded iFuntastic last night, and got started messing with my phone. I had some reservations as my phone was rebooting and being altered by the application, but I figured if anything went horribly wrong I could just do a full restore. The process went without a hitch, and in no time I had a collection of elegantly ambient ringtones loaded up on my iPhone. I even set one to subtly remind me when it was time to get on the road to work this morning.

Trouble didn’t start until Apple rolled about the iPhone 1.0.2 update this evening. Like a fool, I decided to install the update on my phone right before leaving work. The update quickly went south, and put my iPhone into restore mode. At that point, the only option was to download the full 90MB software image to do a full restore. I think Apple punishes people at this point by making this file download as slowly as possible, maybe even going as far to make the download stall periodically. It took about 30 minute for the software to download, install and restore my iPhone to a healthy state.

The pickle at this point was that I have my iPhone synced to two machines. I sync my calendar and contacts from my work machine (where I use the calendar the most) and I have my music and video set to sync from my home machine. This means that once the iPhone was restored, all music and video was removed from it. Luckily I had brought my iPod to work also, so I had tunes for the ride home.

My lesson learned: it’s really not worth all this hassle for a couple of Eno ringtones. The man’s a genius, no doubt, but no ringtone is worth an evening of sweating over a full restore of an iPhone.