It seems that there’s a large variation in people’s experience with iCloud and iTunes Match, Apple’s recently introduced service for making your entire music collection available across all your devices. At the risk of making things worse — since I have nothing conclusive to add — I thought that I’d add my anecdote to the collection.

Like most software — and especially Apples — it works best when you work in a particular way. It’s often difficult to tell how close your expectations are to the real thing until after you’ve handed over your credit card. But what I will say is that iTunes Match works pretty well if you want to do what I do. So if you read nothing else in this post, you should look at the next few paragraphs.

What do I want to use it for?

I have about six hundred albums, comprising over six thousand tracks. I mostly listen to a smaller subset but I often get an ear-worm and want to listen to a random track that I may not have heard for years. So on my iPhone I have a lot of music, but not all of it. Use case one for iTunes Match was therefore to be able to access all my music on my iPhone even though I don’t have the space for everything.

I typically don’t put any music at all on my iPad, since I use it more for movies than music. But when I’m travelling it’s occasionally nice to be able to rely on my iPads battery as well as my iPhones! So use case two is playing music on my iPad without explicitly copying any onto it.

(These last two are clearly variations on a theme, but the key point is that I don’t want to have to stream everything. When I’m at work I don’t always have internet access, but I can probably get WiFi access for a few minutes at lunchtime.)

Ten years ago I spent a lot of time ripping my CD collection. Most is in MP3 format at 160kbps, some is at 128kbps; the newer ones are reasonable quality AAC but, if I’m honest, there’s little consistency. Additionally, many tracks are of dubious quality, with dust and scratches contributing most of the glitches. So, use case three is upgrading my library to clean, high bit rate copies.

How does it work in practice?

The process is typically Apple, by which I mean works without very much user intervention and pretty smoothly.

It first scans your library, sees what’s already in the iTunes Store and then uploads any gaps. The scanning and matching is really quick. The upload depends on the speed of your broadband.

It matched around 5000 of my 6000 tracks, which is not bad going. However there were some oddities:

• It was very inconsistent with spoken word tracks. I have a number of radio series — the Hitchhikers Guide and a bunch of Douglas Adams interviews, the Mighty Boosh — and some tracks were flagged as “Ineligible” while others were going to be uploaded
• Some tracks that I purchased from iTunes a while ago were not matched
• Some albums were only partially matched, despite the full album being available to purchase

The common element is that it’s not at all clear what criteria are used to make the match. Either Lala wasn’t quite as sophisticated as I thought or Apple have not fully integrated their software yet.

Whether these are problems or not depends entirely on what you want to do with the tracks. That the spoken word albums are (mostly) unavailable is slightly disappointing but not really a problem.

The iTunes tracks not being matched is, frankly, bizarre. Here you can see one track from an album “Purchased,” one “Duplicate” (it isn’t) and the rest were uploaded (i.e., not matched and a copy from my library uploaded to iCloud).

Still, neither of these issues stops all my music being available on all my devices — use cases one and two.

However the last point above is disappointing. Some albums match every track bar one or two. This means that it’s not possible for me to upgrade the whole album to a 256kbps AAC file. Not the end of the world but not exactly what I was promised.

In use

iTunes Match is mostly pretty seamless. You see all your music on all your devices. If the track hasn’t been downloaded, it appears with a cloud symbol next to the name. Click or press on the track and it plays, albeit with a short delay. iOS clients download rather than stream the content. The Apple TV just streams the music and videos.

Two surprisingly un-Apple-like glitches take the edge off the whole thing.

Firstly, not all the album art work makes it from my iTunes library to my iPad and iPhone. It’s a small point, but for a company that places so much emphasis on the aesthetics it’s unexpected.

Secondly, while it is possible to upgrade your low quality MP3 files it’s not entirely clear how to go about it. I guess I expected to see an “Upgrade track” or “Upgrade Library” or even a “Update to iTunes Match” menu option, but no.

I couldn’t see anything in the documentation either. I had to fall back on Google. The trick, it turns out, is to delete the file. Obvious, no? Then iTunes will show the same track but with a cloud icon to the right. Then you can download it.

Conclusions

So, overall, I like iTunes Match. It’s not without flaws, it’s undoubtedly a 1.0 release, but it’s already useful to me and I think it’s only going to get better. I guess the big question comes at the time next year. Will I renew the service?

I’ve not been quite so active blogging this year due to a number of factors. A case in point: it wasn’t until December that I wrote about my holiday in July and a friends wedding in August!

This meant that the most popular articles were actually written in previous years:

1. Sophia Smith
2. Eight Best Computer Books
3. Installing Oracle 10g on CentOS4
4. Minolta Dual Scan II
5. iPhone Dev: Saving State

While I appreciate people visiting, I am continually surprised by the appeal of some of these. Oracle 10g and CentOS 4 are, in software terms, ancient! And the Dual Scan II is more than a decade old — I bought it with my iBook G3 in 2001!

The most read articles that were written this year were:

1. iOS Developer Program: from individual to company
2. Do Apple take 40% in the EU?
3. Programming is Hard
4. Why you need a crash reporter

Kind of surprising that they were all about iOS development.

And here are a few blogs that I liked writing but, it turns out, people didn’t enjoy reading…

• Dear Companies House. A cathartic rant elicited a response from the target
• Programming is Hard
• Your most important customers
• The Trouble with eBooks
• A new CEO for Yahoo?

• Average App Store Review Times – Displays the average app review time by pattern-matching tweets. Clever. (Currently around seven days, apparently.)
• Osborne! – Nice article about the Osborne-1 and the man behind it.

• Palm Pre smartphone – "So you're after a smartphone, you've got money to burn and an obvious decision to make: this or the iPhone. No other touchscreen smartphone is even in the running. The Pre has some obvious advantages. It's a bit smaller than the iPhone and 'Synergy' works well, which could prove useful if you're more familiar with Facebook than the concept of Gmail or an Exchange server. But weigh it against the iPhone and it's hard to recommend."
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide Turns 30 – Still one of my favourite books.
• Cat registered as hypnotherapist – To be fair, cats do seem to convince people to pet them and feed them without any apparent pay-back. Maybe they do hypnotise them?

Most people reading this will know that Snow Leopard refers to version 10.6 of the Macintosh Operating System, Apple’s latest update released late last month.

I wasn’t sure whether I should upgrade initially. I have been stung before by being an early adopter. Mac OS X 10.4 was a nightmare on my iMac G5. The big ticket new features such as Dashboard and Spotlight worked just fine¹. What didn’t work were little thing like, oh, networking. Eight times out of ten it couldn’t connect to my AirPort Base station. This made almost everything, including downloading patches to fix this very problem, a compete and utter pain. I think it took until 10.4.3 before everything worked reliably.

I waited several months before making the leap to 10.5 for this very reason. But Leopard at least had some neat new features (and the lame new look of the dock) to try to tempt me over. Snow Leopard, by design, has few user-facing enhancements to make it worth the risk.

Of course I’m not a typical end user. The reason I moved from Windows to the Mac back in 2001 was because of its Unix underpinnings:

MacOS X is based on a BSD Unix kernel (called Darwin and available under an Open Source licence) and has an enhanced Macintosh user interface grafted on top. This is truly the key. You have the complex internals available from a command-line when you need it and a state of the art GUI when you just need a word processor.

And now that I’m an iPhone developer I have a vested interest in using the best tools available for the platform, and they were only available for Snow Leopard. Also a lure where the new APIs (Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL) and language enhancements (blocks). I’ve not done much Macintosh development but these were exactly the kind of things that would potentially get me started.

All this is a long way of saying that, despite the risks, I took the plunge anyway.

And…

Well, so far it’s pretty much been a non-event.

Yes, it’s quicker. Most noticeably in starting up, shutting down, Time Machine and in Mail. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of nice little things — and I’m still finding new ones — but it’s mostly been entirely seamless, almost an invisible upgrade. And I mean that in a good way.

Yes, all my programs still work. I’d read reports that PhotoShop Elements didn’t work under Snow Leopard. I can report that it takes a considerable amount of time to start up and frequently beach-balls afterwards. Or, put another way, it works just as well as it did under 10.5.

I’d also seen scare-stories about old versions of Microsoft Office and other PPC applications that need Rosetta to run but, again, I’ve not seen any problems². Even lower level software like my screen calibration program and film scanner software are fine.

I have two negatives so far, both fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.

The first affects Yummy and Yummy Browser and that’s the fact that the new version of Xcode only supports developing for iPhone OS 3.x³. Luckily there are very few users on 2.x but it’s still a little disappointing that I have had to make the move.

Secondly, it’s my printer. There is no longer a HP-supplied driver for my 2002-era DeskJet. Luckily Apple includes GutenPrint with Snow Leopard and there’s a bundled driver that recognises it. So on the plus-side I don’t have to go out and buy a new printer as I feared I might have to. On the down side the quality is just not there. While it was never a match for any contemporary photo printer, it was more than adequate for my needs. With GutenPrint, text is readable but there’s noticeable banding. I’m not sure I’d use it any more for “official” letters, though maybe I’m just being a snob. Photos have the same issue with banding but have the added distraction of some coarse dappling as a substitute for the more subtle colours.

No significant upgrade is going to be entirely problem-free but overall I’m happy with it. It’s about as easy as it could be and, despite Apple’s claim of no new features, there are certainly tangible benefits to making the leap.

1. Some would argue with that statement. Personally I never had any serious problems with Spotlight. [↩]
2. To be fair, I moved to Office 2008 around the same time. [↩]
3. It’s true that you can build for older releases but there’s no way to test it in the simulator. I’m not willing to release software that I’ve not been able to test. [↩]

• Apple Answers the FCC’s Questions – A few interesting tidbits, including the fact that two reviewers look at every update, but I'd say that there was little of real substance here.
• The brutal truth about America’s healthcare – "But the truth is that the rich, and the insurance firms, just don't realise what we are going through, or simply don't care. Look around this room and tell me that America's healthcare don't need fixing." Still finding the whole debate quite bizarre.

• Does University Challenge really test intelligence? – No. Knowing a bunch of obscure facts isn't intelligence. If that's the measure, then Wikipedia is way smarter than Einstein or Newton or Gauss or Darwin.
• Review: Canon EOS 5D Mark II – If anyone wants to buy 5000 copies of Yummy so that I can afford one of these I'd very much appreciate it.
• Creationists are still denying Darwin. Stephen Moss asks why – "What worries me about many of her fellow creationists is that they begin with the Bible and then start looking for scientific evidence to back up what their faith tells them is true." That and the fact that they keep coming up with the same arguments.

• Wall-E: One giant beep for mankind – "Pixar's films have always outstripped those of Dreamworks – maker of the Shrek series, among others – because they contain universal truths rather than a series of swiftly dated cultural in-jokes."
• How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand – Is evolution not the natural way forward? An alternate take would be: how do the French think that they can mandate changes in language?
• Big Oil's Iraq deals are the greatest stick-up in history – "Iraq is being forced to sell 75% of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation."

• An elephant never forgets? George W. Bush's lost e-mails – "The administration has chafed at external oversight and shown a tendency to come up with dubious legal justifications for ignoring laws it doesn't agree with." Just what is Mr Bush trying to hide?
• WordPress 2.5.1 – I just upgraded to the newest version of WordPress. Looks good as far as I can see but let me know if you spot anything untoward.
• Madonna, Hard Candy – "It's about grooves rather than memorable songs, and Madonna just doesn't make for a convincing soul diva [as she] sings them with the emotional engagement of a sat-nav suggesting a right turn onto the A23."

This evening I went along to this years Turing Lecture, an annual presentation hosted by the British Computer Society (of which I’m a professional member) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. This years lecture was given by Grady Booch, someone that most people in IT will either have heard of or, at the very least, been influenced by. He started his early career working on object oriented design and is currently passionately working on a project to collect the architectures of a hundred computer systems.

It’s difficult to pick out highlights, partially as there were quite a few but mainly because I wasn’t taking notes and can’t remember half of the parts that I pledged to write about. I do remember that he gave a one line summary of every decade from the 1920′s, culminating in the 2030′s being described as “The Rise of the Machines.” Hopefully not in the same way as in the Terminator movies. And on a smaller scale he talked about his front door bell crashing and why, as an IBM Fellow, he was using a PowerBook and mocking some less reliable operating systems.

The lecture was broadcast live on the Internet and, they tell me, will be available to watch probably by the time you’re reading this on the IET website. It’s well worth a watch.