Quibbling Dot Net

Okay, so, I love my iTunes/iPhone combination. I love it even more now that there’s no DRM. And the new iTunes LP format is hawt. But I have sort of a list of picky things that I would really like to see addressed sooner rather than later.

1. The Genius Mix- not to be confused with the Genius playlists based on one song, the Genius Mix is a genre-based. It’s awesome. Music for hours. And completely unsyncable to my iPhone, which is what I take with me to work, when I need a continuous, hours-long playlist. (And no, I’m not going to put my whole collection on Shuffle- I don’t need Gregorian Chant busting up against Incubus. The point of Genius is that it’s smarter than that.) I’m really not sure why this isn’t usable on an iPod- processing power limitations? That problem could be solved by another missing feature…

Never mind, y’all. These mysteriously showed up after another sync. Not sure what that’s about, but now I have them. YAY!

2. iPod as roving iTunes library. What I would love to be able to do is plug my iPhone into my work PC (which I do regularly to charge it) to be able to play the music through my computer’s speakers. I’m at the office frequently after my cube-neighbors have left, and occasionally I’d like to be free from the tyranny of the earbuds. I can’t do this, which is a pain in the neck.

3. Album/Artist playlists in the iPod Touch/iPhone interface play everything, not just songs. These are great, because I used to have to make playlists specifically based on a particular artist if I knew I just wanted to listen to some Blues Traveler that day. But even while more and more albums in general, and iTunes albums in particular, that come with bonus video content, there’s no checkbox to say “just play the music-only tracks.” For example, I bought the deluxe version of the new Mika album, “The Boy Who Knew Too Much.” This is an album that I will listen to over and over even in the course of the same day. But for my $2 extra paid for the Deluxe edition, there are multiple video tracks from live shows, a music video, a “making of” video about said music video, etc. I do not need to have those playing while I am trying to work. But there’s no way to just set the album to repeat without also having these tracks play. So there I am, getting my groove on at the office, and all of the sudden there’s Mika talking about wardrobe on the first day of the “We Are Golden” video shoot. Interesting when I have attention to devote to it, but intrusive when I don’t. Yes, I could work around this by making a playlist by hand, but that sort of defeats the purpose of the Album/Artist feature.

4. iTunes LP is not screen resolution-aware. Oh how I love the whole idea of iTunes LP. I’ve always loved liner notes, but not as much as I’ve loved not having to keep track of physical CDs. For a long time, the best you could hope for in terms of liner notes with an iTunes album was a PDF version of CD liner notes, which was… okay if you just wanted the same text everyone else got, but anyone who has ever worked with me at my current day job knows how passionately I believe that defaulting to PDF for digital content delivery is a lazy cop-out. iTunes LP is far more comparable to, say, a good set of DVD extra features- custom menus, image galleries, Easter Eggs, the possibilities are endless. Going back to the Mika example- “The Boy Who Knew Too Much” is one of the earliest iTunes LP albums, and it’s a perfect fit for the kind of stuff Mika likes to do- all of his songs have piles of drawings and illustrations associated with them while he’s writing them, and the album art for most of his stuff is drawn directly by him and his sister. So he was able to use the iTunes LP format to really expand the experience of the whole album- but the LP interface is clearly designed for a bigger window than I can reasonably get on my 13″ MBP.  So I spend a lot of my time just using the iTunes scrollbars so that I can get to the scrollbars built into the LP content so I can read the rest of the lyrics on the page. And then I have to scroll BACK to get to the menu controls.  I do not think this is the immersive experience the artists (Mika, his sister, and the people who implemented the design into the iTunes LP format) had in mind.  If my iPhone is smart enough to scale a web page to fit on that little screen, why is iTunes not smart enough to scale an LP?

Someone snuck into the Bridge house, 20 years from now, and BUGGED IT.

If you’re reading my blog, you probably already know that my husband and I are both ridiculous Internet nerds. We’ve each had our own online presence since before we met, much less started dating. So when we got married, we had to figure out what to merge and what not to merge.  We retain our separate blogs and Flickr accounts, we’re horrified at the idea of sharing an email address (though us -at- tom and tiff dawt com forwards to both of us) because it seems like sharing underwear, we have separate Twitter accounts, etc. We moved our webhosting onto one account, we share one Amazon Prime account (because you can share it between multiple Amazon accounts at the same address- we still have our own Amazon personas with wish lists and recommendations), etc.

What we were really looking to merge was our digital property, much like we merged our physical property. (Yes, I realize digital content purchases are really “licenses” rather than “ownership,” but those licenses are still a form of property, so hear me out.) 

We both started buying music from iTunes before we were married. So when we got married, we had two different iTunes accounts with music tied to those specific accounts. Now, the Apple DRM scheme permitted us to authorize up to 5 computers, so we could still accommodate our needs if we did a little work, but there are some limitations to how the authorization is implemented that made this more of a pain than it needed to be.  The flaw in the assumption of how the DRM worked was that a person with an account would never have legitimate shared ownership of what they had purchased. The 5 computer thing helped, but it would have been better if an account owner could designate a second account as “spouse,” so that the license property held in common could behave that way without a lot of authorizing and de-authorizing (because you have to authorize and de-authorize the computer’s user accounts, not just the whole computer).

(Fortunately, the iTunes store has moved to a DRM-free music catalog, so that should make sharing music within our household a lot easier in the future.)

Meanwhile, however, the Kindle implements this flawed assumption without the flexibility of being able to have multiple accounts linked to the same device like you could with iTunes and your computer.  Tom and I each have our separate Amazon accounts, and while we can designate both of those accounts as belonging to the same family for the purpose of using Amazon Prime, we don’t seem to be able to do so for the purpose of using two Kindles. 

Right now, if we buy a book we both want to read, say, the latest Dresden Files novel, it arrives in an Amazon box. I read it (usually staying up half the night because I am engrossed), and then when I am done Tom reads it (while I anxiously wait for him to finish so we can talk about it.) Meanwhile, while he’s reading it, I can move on to another book or something. 

But because a Kindle can only be tied to one Amazon account, it can only have Tom’s Books, or Tiff’s Books. Which means that in order for both of us to adopt the Kindle, either one of us has to give up our Amazon account, and its accumulated 10 years of purchase history, wish lists, and recommendations (and don’t knock it- I use the recommendations feature TONS) so that we buy all of our Kindle books on the same account, or we have to buy all the books we’re BOTH interested in as physical books, which defeats the purpose of having a Kindle. Or buy the Kindle book twice, which is still often more expensive than buying the physical copy once.

In googling a bit, it looks like you and swap authorizations on your Kindle as often as you want, but I can’t find any information about convenient/inconvenient that is. Would I have to re-download everything every time I did that? Because that would be a giant FAIL.  It sounds like books from the de-authorized account disappear eventually, but I can’t figure out how long it takes.

And note: What I’m really talking about here is sharing content within the Tom and Tiffany Bridge household. We’re not interested in buying content and then sharing it with the whole world, but since we are married, anything I buy is also legally owned by Tom, so it would be nice if the stuff I buy would ACT like Tom also owns it.  And this is what I mean by licensing as a form of property- I realize that when I buy digital content, all I’m really buying is a license to it. But that license is still our community property, and that license should behave that way.  And all it would take is the ability for two accounts to designate each other as “spouse” or “legal domestic partner” or something like that.

After all, this situation exists because we were geeky enough to embrace the Amazon model early. We’re very good Amazon customers, so I’m disappointed that it hasn’t occurred to Amazon to accommodate us.

As you may have noticed, I HATE when people use “click here” as link anchor text. (Anchor text is the text that makes up the link.) There are a variety of real reasons for this, all of which have been written about and documented ad nauseam all over the Internet, but judging by the copy I edit every day, most people still don’t know why:

1. It’s redundant. Anchor text is like a sign on a door. The sign should tell you where the door/link goes, not the simple fact that it’s a door/link. That’s why the sign says “Ladies’ Restroom,” not “Door.”

2. It’s bad for search engine optimization. Search engines use a few factors to evaluate links- one of the key ones is the anchor text on the link. “Click here” doesn’t tell the search engine anything about what you’re linking to.

3. It’s bad for usability. While a user is trying to find what she came to a site for, she scans, rather than reads. While scanning, she’s looking for cues to key content and interactive elements- images, buttons, charts, links. A link with descriptive anchor text is far more helpful for this purpose than a link that says “click here.”

4. It’s bad for accessibility. In web production, “accessibility” refers to how easy it is for disabled users to navigate and conduct transactions.  Screen reading tools for the visually impaired can list out the links on a page, so that the user can engage in the same kind of scanning that a sighted user would do. If all your links say “click here,” that technology is useless and the user may have to wait until the reader reads out the entire content of your page to get to the sentence that describes that last “click here” link.

5. It encourages bad web design choices. Links should look like links. They should be a different color than the surrounding text, and while it’s not always critical that they be underlined, underlining should only ever be used on links. If you need “click here” to cue the user that it’s a link, your site is designed poorly.

So we’ve established that “click here” is bad. So what do we use instead? Simple: use text that refers to the content the user can expect upon following the link. For example:

I’m Tiffany Baxendell Bridge. I’m a web content producer and standup comedian. You can view my resume, watch my comedy, or see which social media services I use.

In addition to being better for all the reasons I’ve listed above, that paragraph is a lot less tiresome to read than a litany of “click here to see my resume, click here to watch my comedy…”

So don’t use “click here.” Your content will improve, your search engine rankings will rise, your users will be happier, and the Internet will be a better place.

1. “Click here” is a vile and unhygienic habit, leading inevitably to intemperate behavior, loose morals, and tooth decay.

2. When Chuck Norris‘ mom writes “click here,” he round-house kicks her in the jaw.

3. Every time you write “click here,” God kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens.

4. If you write “click here” in your web copy, the terrorists have already won.

5. You know who else writes “click here?” OSAMA BIN LADEN, THAT’S WHO!

I was trying to figure out why the search box is doubled (that is, there’s the pretty styled searchbox and then the other one smack on top of it), when I opened this page in IE7, and noticed that the search box there goes AAAAAAAAAALL the way across the top of the screen. Apparently size=15 means different things to IE7 and sanely developed browsers. 

Eek.

UPDATE: Aha! I fixed it. Yay!