Everyone’s talking about the new flash based iPod, which may or may not be called iPod Radio. There is also speculation about the meaning of the banner at MacWorld San Francisco entitled Life is random.

I’ve since discovered that quite a lot of people on the Macintosh forums use their iPods in shuffle mode. I’ve never done this – just specific playlists and albums – apparently this makes me ‘old’. Nobody listens to albums nowadays.

Quite often I listen to one of my iTunes Smart Playlists which plays random selections of certain styles of music. It’s rather good. I was somewhat taken today with a Mac forum members Smart Playlist as follows:

• All songs added within past 30 days that I haven’t heard in 48 hours
• 200 random songs that have not been played in 4 months (selected at random)
• 200 random songs that have playcount of 0 (selected at random)

I decided to create my own version of this. I created three Smart Playlists – each as described above, each of which source a master playlist which I call Radio Candidates. This I then use to seed some others:

• Radio Playlist, which contains all songs in Radio Candidates that are over 2 minutes in length (selected at random). This is so you don’t get those stupid filler tracks.
• OddPod Radio, which contains 4 GB of songs from Radio Playlist (selected at random).

I can download OddPod Radio to my iPod.

There is one problem. I share my music from an iBook which acts as a server. Unfortunately, shared music is never assessed when you play it, meaning that playcounts etc. are never updated.

There’s this cool program you can buy called Delicious Library. It allows you to scan and manage your collections of stuff, like books, CDs, DVDs.

I read this today on MacMinute: “Delicious Monster Software has announced that every time a user buys an item from Amazon.com through its Delicious Library application, the company will donate 100 percent of the revenue sharing that it gets from Amazon.com to charities, starting with tsunami relief efforts. Delicious Library users automatically participate whenever they buy items from the Similar tab, or any link to Amazon.com within the application.”

Yes, you read right. Delicious Monster Software hook into Amazon.com so that they get a commission payment when you buy from Amazon via their program. This is done through the standard Amazon Affiliate Programme. Quite correctly this information is also explained in their Help page (way down the bottom, mind) but includes the hilarious line “We have adjusted the retail price of our software downward to account for this potential revenue”. (BTW, Here’s a quote from a reader on Versiontracker: “At a price of $40 Delicious Library is clearly twice as expensive as its competition”. Some other readers have similar remarks.)

Now, you might think I’m arguing against a valid revenue stream, but I’m not. It is a valid and innovative revenue stream. However, given that it relies on the customer using the software in a particular way, and is a side-effect of the customer doing something, it should be mentioned more prominently to potential and existing customers.

Dear Reader,

Let me ask you a few questions:

a) Do you have trouble persuading people to take internet security seriously?
b) Do you have difficulty persuading people not to use Microsoft Windows?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to either of these, have a look at these posts:

Follow the bouncing Malware

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

AquaMinds NoteTaker

According to MacWorld: “This release includes five sample plug-ins: SketchPad, a freehand drawing and text tool; VisualMap, a diagramming utility; Table, which creates simple Excel-style tables; DBQuery, a JDBC database query tool; and Calc, a basic calculator.”

So now we get Feature Bloat from third party developers. Great.

Yesterday I wrote about Feature Bloat, it got me thinking about why some (most?) software programs end up full of things that few people use. One of the answers is to persuade existing customers to upgrade and thus bring more money in.

Consider this: You write a program which may or may not be novel. However, there is an initial rush of purchases, followed by a steady drop-off until the market is saturated; you’ve reached all the customers you’re likely to; or something else appears on the market which takes people away from your program.

Unless you charge for it on a subscription or support basis, you’ll eventually end up with little or no revenue and a bunch of customers who expect support for the product and/or want it to work with the latest version of their operating system (OS). One way of getting funds is to charge for upgrades to newer versions of OS. But, unless it’s a really good program, most people will expect that kind of upgrade for free.

So what do you do? What compelling reasons can you give your customers to upgrade? The simple answer is add more features. Adding features prolongs the life of your program whilst keeping it head-to-head with competitors’ products. This also provides the funds for supporting the program and possibly develop it further.

The snag comes in deciding what features to add. Some of these ideas come from competitors’ products. Others, curiously, from customer’s themselves who want to cram more things in (and this happens to even the simplest of programs).

My problem is that usually one finds that features are added without any real thought to what they will be used for. The designers of a program should go back to the program’s original purpose – it’s manifesto – and devise innovative additional features that enhance that purpose, not just bolt on ‘cool’ things that 98% of customers will never really use. Innovation increases the chances of holding on to existing customers and attracting others. Trouble is, innovation is hard work.

Over the last few weeks this site has been hit with a lot of SPAM comments. I’ve installed a live blacklist check which now moderates and deletes comments, but sometimes whole streams of new SPAM arrive and end up published on the site.

I discovered today that my Blacklist plugin for WordPress (the software which runs this site) does allow you to re-process comments after you’ve added new entries into the blacklist. This will save me some time. But what I really wanted was something to catch comments even earlier.

I thought about e-mail addresses. Most of these are dummy invalid addresses, so it should be possible to catch them. I remembered that PHP on Linux includes the getmxrr function that can examine DNS records to see if there is a valid MX record for an e-mail address.

Therefore, yesterday, I added this to the code that validates comments.

So, SPAM.. I’m waiting..