Rhapsody Online

I was browsing around the other day and ran into a small debate about whether subscription based music services have a market. After reading a few comments I found myself writing my own post, and then I decided to post part of that comment here.

I was against subscription based music for a long time, but eventually broke down and decided to try it out. My overall experience is good, some things I love, others no so much. By the way, this list is not weighted, even though I have more Cons I still think the Pros win.

Pros:

• Access to all the music I can handle, which opened me up to more music. For example, when I heard that Bob Dylan released a new album, I decided to listen to it. I would have never given that album another thought if I didn't have this service. It’s the same story for a bunch of other albums/artists that I just never had the desire to buy a CD to try out.

• TiVo - Rhapsody now works on TiVo. Navigating the music lists on a TiVo isn’t as easy as just playing a CD, but it has its advantages. I created a playlist for our Halloween party on my computer using Rhapsody, then hooked my TiVo to my stereo and played it for the party. We added some classic Halloween songs by the original artists and a few Top 40 songs that I would have never purchased otherwise. Despite his issues, I’d rather hear Thriller sung by Michael Jackson than some second-rate cover band.

• I like to try new music and I sit at a desk all day, so if I like an album I usually get sick of it after a couple weeks of listening to it every day. I'm always looking for something new, and I used to buy at least 4 CDs a month. It's much cheaper this way and I look at it as a $14 monthly trial period for all the albums I'm considering purchasing (Kanye West - great album, 50 Cent – not so much).

• You can share your playlists and other users can rate them. It’s nice since everyone using the service has access to the same songs.

• It has its own music player you can download, or you can just play through a simple web app (which works with Linux).

Cons:

• Great to use when I have a connection to the Internet, not so great otherwise. When I jump into my car I find myself wishing I had some of that new music I was listening to. Rhapsody Online does work with a couple portable players (Sansa), but I already have an iPod so I would have to make a commitment to switch players to get anymore out of the service. Not so much a knock on their service as it is just an inconvenience.

• You don't always get every song with each album; there are certain albums and songs that are not available. I can understand a certain artist or album (though it still annoys me), but sometimes it's just some random song on an album, or every other song on an album with no rhyme or reason. It can also change: one day half of Common’s album “Finding Forever” was no longer available. I already own the album, but it was just easier to listen through the service.

• Discovering new music is not as easy to do when you have so much available. Rhapsody needs some sort of service like Last.fm or Pandora. Maybe they should even consider buying or licensing Pandora’s technology.

• I still get a strange feeling about not owning the music, or if my network connection is down that I might not have access to anything.

• I haven't found a well-designed easy method of hooking the service up to my stereo. My wife still prefers to pop a CD into the player or just listen to her iPod.

• It's priced higher than Yahoo or Napster, but I liked the fact that it works with more platforms
  

I'm sure there are some other benefits and annoyances I'm forgetting, but hopefully you get the point. The subscription model can work for you - not if you've been listening to the same Led Zeppelin album for the past 20 years, but there is a market for it.

In my opinion, the anti-DRM movement doesn’t really apply to these services. Their whole model is to provide a large amount of music for a monthly fee. If I’m going to buy music online, I feel I can only trust mp3. However, if I’m renting it I’m only concerned with it working on the devices that I am using. Rhapsody even provides an integrated way to buy songs from their store in mp3 format.

Contacts > Sync > Yahoo! Autosync

I wrote earlier that I was looking for a personal "Holy Grail of Synchronization" to keep my contacts on my Palm device in sync with my email. I was fully willing to move to whatever platform gave me that option and I was rooting for Google since they already had an API for their Calendar web application. I am still a fan of Google's Gmail, but I still stand behind my previous statement that Yahoo Mail provides much more features that I can't leave behind if I switched.

Of all the features I want out of an email client, integration with Palm devices was my number one. Yahoo came closest with their Intellisync product, but the product was outdated and no longer worked with the majority of Palm devices. Intellisync tried to be part of Palm's HotSync process, the process by which the Palm would synchronize information with information stored on the computer. Adding Yahoo's Intellisync product slowed down the HotSync process so much that often the HotSync itself would timeout and fail. Eventually Intellisync stopped working altogether as new Palms came out or an update to the HotSync tool was released.

Nothing happened for years afterwards, but there was always people looking around for some sort of solution to the problem. A few articles were written, some buzz after Google released an API for their Calendar, but still things stayed the same. Eventually I wrote a blog post about the issue as well, where I suggested that someone just export the contact information directly out of Palm Desktop instead of using the HotSync process. Well, it appears that someone (I'm sure it was just a coincidence) was listening, and this time it was Yahoo.

Yahoo quietly released an update to Intellisync; well it's more like an entirely new product, called Yahoo Autosync. This tool does almost exactly what I originally suggested: it will export your contact and calendar information out of the Palm Desktop (avoiding the HotSync) and sync those setting directly with Yahoo Mail! I was so ecstatic that I could barely contain myself. Finally the tool I was waiting for!

Actual Experience

After downloading the tool, I had some initial problems, which I will post here in case you've run across the same issues. As usual, I wrote to Yahoo about the problems and got an automated response basically telling me that it's a free product and I'm on my own. I guess I could have written back and said my $25/year for Yahoo Plus did in fact qualify me as a non-free user, but that's not the point.

The first limitation I noticed was that it appeared as if the Calendar sync didn't work at all. Turned out that if I limited the time span for it to sync that I finally got a successful sync (limited to 30 days). I also originally installed the program on the D drive, which I believe also caused some errors until I uninstalled and installed on the C drive. That might have more to do with the discovery that Calendar syncing wasn't working, but I thought I'd mention it in case someone runs into the same problem.

I've also noticed a few contacts disappear here and there. I'm not sure when it happens, but it all started when I told the Autosync application to do a Two-way sync between Yahoo and Palm instead of a one-way Palm beats Yahoo role. After a couple of times when I picked up my phone only to find someone I call quite often suddenly missing from my contacts list I switched back to One-way sync from Palm Desktop to Yahoo.

Other Thoughts

I'm also a bit surprised that this tool hasn't gotten more recognition from the blogging community. The "Holy grail of synchronization" blog from a year ago was a huge hit, but the steps involved were crazy. It almost seems as if Yahoo doesn't stand a chance against Google because a certain population is so enamored with Google that they refuse to use any other service. It's almost as if they hear silence every time I mention the word Yahoo.

I love Google, and I really like Gmail, but I know at the end of the day that I need certain features and I'm not willing to jump through a bunch of hoops to get them when another service provides them easily for free. When are we going to see a little retro-feedback for Yahoo already?

-jj

Local Google Docs Server

The other day I decided to try out Google Apps. I work with a few remote developers and it seemed that looking into Apps was worth my time. After trying it out for a few days, I'm considering using this tool as our developer document manager.

Google Apps basically wraps a bunch of Google's online applications under an umbrella of an organization or company. All users under this umbrella can email each other, share calendars, documents, and a few other things.

For the most part, I am only interested in the Docs application. It allows you to store documents, share them with other users, keeps a history of changes, and you can edit the documents directly in the browser. Oh, and don’t forget you can export those documents to your computer in a number of different formats (MS Office, Open Office, PDF, HTML, etc). Currently it can handle: word processing (Word), spreadsheets (Excel), and presentations (PowerPoint).

I have a few complaints – the document organizer doesn’t allow you to share folders. In fact, folders might as well be tags, because they are only useful for organizing things for yourself (your folders do not show up for other users in your system).

I would love to introduce this kind of tool to my client, but I already know the answer. They would want to own the content by hosting the Google Apps application on their own intranet server and I can’t blame them. Keeping an application like this behind a company firewall makes everyone feel a little safer. I started to look around for some sort of equivalent online document editor, but I can’t seem to find anything that allows you to use it on your own server.

In fact, I haven’t even found any open source tools for editing documents online at all. I’m kind of surprised, because this kind of functionality could be a huge addition to other projects. Imagine an open source online document editor like Google Apps that could be used in other projects. Wikis could use the document editor object to allow users to easily edit pages instead of coming up with these strange markup languages. Heck, shouldn’t Google be using their own Doc App within Blogger? It seems much better than Blogger’s online editor.

I heard the other day that Microsoft will be creating their own online Office tools. One would hope that they would incorporate this technology within SharePoint. I can’t stand opening documents that are stored in SharePoint, it takes forever and seems like such a hack to save the open document back to the server. Of course I heard they will require the user to have Office installed on their local computer. I guess this shouldn’t be a huge deal for corporate users, but you can’t help but think that this is just another limitation that will cause the tool to be useless.

I guess I’ll just take the "wait and see" route until something better comes along.

Show/Hide Results Pane -- SQL Server 2005

Attention! Unfortunately Blogger lost all the screenshots for this post, but I created a new post for SQL Server 2008 that is virtually identical.  You can get there by following this link: Show/Hide Results Pane – SQL Server 2008

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I've been using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for a few months now, and I've noticed a few differences between the SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Manager / Query Analyzer tools and the new Management Studio. I'll post some quick things I did to feel more at home in the new development environment.

Show/Hide Results Pane

One of the simplest and most useful features when debugging a script is to able to run your query to see some results, then hide the results pane to continue tweaking the sql code. This feature was a button in Query Analyzer in SQL Server 2000, but for some reason disappeared from the default buttons available in SQL Server 2005's Management Studio. Well, the button may not exist as a default button, but it's easy to add it back in.


After running a script in a query window, the window splits between the script and the results (each referred to as a pane). See the snapshot above.

To add a button to hide the results pane, click on the little down-arrow at the end of a toolbar and choose "Add or Remove Buttons", then choose "Customize..."

The Customize dialog window will open with the "Commands" tab selected. Now we only need to find the command we are looking for. Under "Categories:", choose "Window". Then under "Commands:", find the command "Show Results Pane".




Once you have located the "Show Results Pane" command, you have to click and drag it to where you want it to be located on the toolbar.
You can now Hide the Results Pane

Or you can Show the Results Pane

Originally I had my button located on the Standard toolbar, but eventually I figured out it made more sense to add it to the SQL Editor toolbar. It's pretty easy to find the SQL Editor toolbar - it only displays when you are working in a query window.

Tabbed vs. MDI Queries - SQL Server 2005

I've been using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for a few months now, and I've noticed a few differences between the SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Manager / Query Analyzer tools and the new Management Studio. I'll post some quick things I did to feel more at home in the new development environment.

Tabbed vs. MDI (Toolbar vs individual windows)

This is extremely simple, but I'm often surprised how many developers are debugging an issue but only looking at one query at a time. They often forget the exact item they are looking for. I switched to a windowed view a long time ago and found it useful to hold information in the background.


The default view in the Management Studio is to use tabs for all the queries (see snapshot). I know some developers like to see one statement at a time, but I'm usually referencing more than one query at a time.

To change the layout of the queries, chose Tools > Options from the menu. The first item under Environment gives you the option to switch between Tabbed documents and MDI (windowed).

Here is the result, all the queries are no longer in a tabbed view: