iTunes for Windows
I wasn't going to post anything about this, but Greg sent links to a couple of "Rants & Raves" at Wired News (both should be on this page). Since I wrote up a long-ish email in response anyway, I might as well post it here as well.
The first one concerns problems connecting to the iTMS, the second is a complaint that iTunes for Windows can't transfer music to anything other than an iPod.
I'll address these two issues separately.
I sent an e-mail through the Apple website describing the trouble, and got two responses back. Both said that if I was running an Internet security program, firewall or proxy connection, I wouldn't be able to connect to the store. I would have to shut down the firewall.
Don't know what the guy is talking about. I have it installed on my WinXP box, and it connects to iTMS no problem (through both a Linux box running a firewall as well as a 3Com broadband router). Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if something like Norton blocked it...
Not supporting other players: chicken and egg; Apple wants to stick with AAC -- iPods are the only device that support AAC. Be interesting to see what makes Apple blink -- support for stuff other than AAC, or non-iPod devices. Since their DRM solution seems to be pretty much entwined with AAC, I don't think that will change. I'm sure that Apple is out there beating the bushes, trying to make it attractive for companies to add AAC into their next round of products...
And of course, this "problem" only exists for music downloaded from iTMS. I bet that music-service-X and their DRM solution don't allow transferring to all MP3 playing devices...
It would be interesting to see how many people actually have MP3 players, as opposed to burning Audio CDs and/or MP3 CDs. I don't have anything that can play MP3s except for my computers (well, I did just get one of these, but I didn't exactly buy it as an MP3 player).
By the way -- iTunes Win works great on my network. All my music stored on my Mac (actually on an external firewire hard drive connected to it) shows up as a shared library, and everything streams across the network auto-magically. I see no massive CPU usage or other problems that have been reported.
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Update for Windows
There is a point release available if anyone is having trouble.
there's a pretty huge..
...improvement in speed and stability of Quicktime between 6.0 and this 6.4 (in XP and Win2K). Mind you 6.0 was atrociously buggy, & I still hate how they don't offer you a choice to install it or not when you install iTunes. The AAC codec could've easily been installed without QT. QT's file association control also works properly now where it use to grab stuff no matter what settings it had.
Quicktime on Win
Back at Nortel I downloaded Quicktime for Windows, it was slow to the point of highly annoying to use.
How is the new version? It sounds like they hired on a few extra Windowz developers to optimise the libraries.
So the next thing is - how will Microsoft retaliate? They haven't changed a bit, they will threaten Apple somehow, either via a lawsuit, or by killing Office, or some other means, but those two seem to be the most aparent. That is, unless Apple has a bargaining chip that is significant enough to control Microsoft, like an open source version of a highly mature OpenOffice they are threatening to release, pending any significant anti-competitive Microsoft action.
Depends on what machine...
If it was a 2 year old Dell laptop with minimal memory, I wouldn't be surprised if it "ran slow" :p
Apple updates the Windows version with every release -- I have no idea what the release schedule is like. I've never had problems with it on any current PC.
I think MS is already threatening Apple -- go look at all the sites that only have WMA audio/video files available. So, in a sense, it's AAC vs. WMA, except the Windows-based music stores all use different flavours of DRM, with different software packs that allow/disallow transfers to other machines/devices.
Office for Mac is dead -- didn't you get the memo? I have hopes that a new AppleWorks might remove the need. Somehow I doubt that there is a secret version of OpenOffice kicking around. I already write all my presentations using Keynote. There are a bunch of Panther rumours about how Apple has added Word/.doc support directly into Cocoa, so that anything can open Word files. Haven't seen any official stuff about this. I'll post here after I have it installed (maybe next week?)