Recently in Technology Category

At my last job, I worked with a couple of elderly graphic designers who were scared to death of new technology. They were both stuck in the world of printed marketing collateral and nothing bent them out of joint more than my prediction that paper will soon be a thing of the past.

I’d tell them that as soon as the hardware is perfected, brochures, magazines, books, and newspapers will disappear as fast as the vinyl LP and VHS tapes. Of course, I’d also explain that this new technology would actually increase the need for graphic designers. Without printing costs to worry about, organizations will be able to produce many more documents. They were never convinced. They firmly believed that electronic publishing would somehow put them out of work.

Well, it looks as if we’re very close to having a usable electronic reading device — one that is flexible and can be read in bright light. The demonstrations I’ve seen of the Plastic Logic reader are quite impressive. I have to say this one is the best I’ve seen.

I have over 50,000 music files on my computer. Until now, it has been very difficult to manage a collection of that size using iTunes. Apple’s new version of iTunes, iTunes 8, includes significant improvements that may make this software my music manager of choice.

One of the things that was inadequate in previous versions of iTunes was how it sorted music files. If you preferred to have artists filed by last name (Michael Jackson under “J” for example), you had to edit the tag of every music file by that artist — one at a time.

With iTunes 8, you can now edit the sort field of multiple items. Yeah! I don’t know why iTunes didn’t do this sooner.

This feature is such a huge time saver that it alone has me sold on iTunes 8. In addition, the applicant appears to be much faster.

iTunes 8 also introduces a new grid view for browsing albums, artists, and genres. This interface is almost exactly like my favorite music organizer, AlbumPlayer. AlbumPlayer also includes a very robust database and sorting functions (still superior to iTunes).

One new feature of iTunes 8 that I found disappointing was the Genius Sidebar. Genius is supposed to give you lists of tracks that you don’t have for a particular artist and suggest similar music that may be of interest to you.

So, I selected what I thought would be a very easy for Genius to handle, AC/DC: 

The Genius sidebar wasn’t able to find songs by AC/DC? It couldn’t match AC/DC to anything similar? AC/DC?! Obviously, Genius isn’t quite as smart as the name implies. I think I’ll be turning this feature off.

I really like the new graphic interface of iTunes 8. It helps quite a bit to have album thumbnails when browsing through my music collection. It makes using digital music more like browsing through CDs in a record store or your own collection (if you’re as organized as I am that is).

I spend quite a bit of time scanning and collecting cover art for my digital music collection. So, it is nice to have a way to display it in iTunes.

BTW, if you’re looking for quality album cover art, check out AlbumArtExchange.com.