1FPS|by David Chartier

You saw the movie, now play the game.

via Didn’t You Hear?

Apple has a new support document that further details the new Address-Book-to-Gmail sync feature that debuted in 10.5.3. Here are a few choice talking points:

• The feature now appears in iTunes 7.7 in addition to Address Book’s pref pane
• Apple explains: “Google uses email addresses as the unique identifier for each Gmail contact. If some of your contacts have the same email address, they may not all sync.”
• Also: “Anyone you have corresponded with in your Gmail account will be included in this sync by default.” Google, stop this behavior, or at least give us the option to shut it off.

My favorite bullet point is towards the bottom: “If you are syncing your computer with MobileMe, remember that these contacts may sync to MobileMe as well.” Note that Apple says these contacts “may” sync to MobileMe, instead of “definitely will, because MobileMe is a far more reliable replacement for .Mac.”

Granted this is a typical, targeted (but incredibly early) back-to-school e-mail promotion for students, but I don’t remember seeing iTunes U being so prominently pushed before. From what I remember, Apple’s been making most of its iTunes U deals under the table. In fact, I don’t remember any announcements besides the original press release.

Fast Company has an in-depth piece about Microsoft’s new ad campaign to rebrand as cool. Redmond sidestepped its typical ad agency for this endeavor, opting for Crispin Porter & Bogusky:

Nothing is doing more to carve away at Microsoft’s reputation — and contribute to its loss of market share — than the assault launched by Apple two years ago in the form of the “Mac vs. PC” spots featuring The Daily Show satirist John Hodgman. The ads became immediate pop-culture fixtures, spawning more than 1,000 video spoofs on YouTube and taking home last year’s Grand Effie, the ad industry’s highest honor for effectiveness. “Nobody messes with anyone in the tech industry the way Apple has messed with Microsoft,” says Enderle. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a major national campaign that disparages a competitor, and the competitor just sits back and takes it. If somebody tried to do that to Oracle, you wouldn’t be able to find the body.” Gartner media research analyst Andrew Frank credits Apple — whose annual media spend is less than half of Microsoft’s nearly $1 billion budget — with single-handedly rebranding Microsoft “as a kind of self-conscious and self-absorbed nerd that is out of touch with the normal lives and needs of its users.”

Yes, for the record, I quoted a publication that quoted Rob Enderle. He may be a frigtard when it comes to Apple products, but he’s pretty spot on here with his assessment of Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign.

Even though Microsoft is switching gears and going with a different and immensely successful agency, though, I can’t help but think it’s still missing the mark. Fast Company says Apple spends less than half the money Microsoft does on marketing each year, and yet its ads are so much more effective. Maybe Microsoft took note of that nugget of detail, but this $300 million push with a new ad agency screams that it’s still getting caught up in minor details and not paying attention to the bigger picture.

Apple’s marketing works because its products (generally speaking) really are more appealing, easier to use, cooler, and [insert whatever your non-marketing reason is here]. People aren’t buying Mac products just because Justin Long usually gets the upper hand. It’s because Apple’s great (and notably simple) marketing turns people on to great products. And those people show Apple stuff off to their friends and family because they found computer stuff that works and that they can get excited about.

The fact that Dell, HP, and the world’s other major PC manufacturers have practically had to force Microsoft into selling XP for at least another four years says that people aren’t excited about Vista. Chopping Vista’s retail price spoke a few volumes on its own as well.

If Microsoft is spending $300 million to rebrand itself as “cool,” it had better be spending an exponentially greater amount on listening to complaints from businesses and consumers, and then fixing all the things that are wrong with its products. A tech company will not get consumers’ attention with marketing anymore if its products can’t back it up.

I usually can only handle iJustine in small doses, but I have to say this is worth a chuckle.

I’m in the basement about to shut down the Mac Pro that houses our entire iTunes library. Jessi is upstairs using the Apple TV to stream an album from the Mac Pro. So I don’t interrupt her music or grading, I put the album on a playlist in iTunes, synced the playlist to the Apple TV (while it was still streaming), then shut down the Mac Pro so I could swap out a hard drive (remember how much I love playing inside our Mac Pro?). The Apple TV, to my surprise, kept playing straight through the album without skipping a beat.

Jessi never knew or had to be bothered by the fact that I cut off the stream. The Apple TV just switched to the local copies of the songs I synced up and kept on playing.

Smart.

I picked up a second internal (SATA 3.0Gbps) drive for my Mac Pro and popped it in yesterday. After working on probably hundreds—if not thousands—of desktop PCs in my past across various jobs and the personal machines I used to build, I have to say this is the greatest experience I’ve ever had inside a desktop. Granted, The Mac Pro may not be quite as hackable as a beige box in a few respects (due in part to sensitive areas being blocked off with metal enclosures), but this hard drive installation experience was so enjoyable I had to create a video.

Apple pays a lot of attention to the little details, and the pleasantly accessible construction of the Mac Pro is a great example of how that effort pays off.

Jacqui Cheng, one of my editors, on an NBC exec speaking about qualms with iTunes Store distribution:

That’s right: NBC would like to dump its contents back onto iTunes, ask you for at least $2 (or more) per episode, and then have Apple place extremely tight restrictions on if and how it can be played on an iPod or iPhone. Without the ability to take it with you offline—like, say, when you’re riding the train to work, or flying across the country—there isn’t a lot of difference between buying a show on iTunes and watching it for free on Hulu. And perhaps that’s the point.

Considering that we can finally take video content off our computers conveniently (and securely, for better and worse) with great gadgets like the iPhone and Apple TV, part of me thinks Jacqui’s headline could simply have been “NBC exec: ‘I am high as a kite.’”

Big Book of Apple Hacks is now available from O’Reilly online. I’m told it should arrive in traditional book stores sometime this month as well.

I’m pretty jazzed as this is the first time I’ve been published in dead tree form. The venerable Chris Seibold—a senior writer at Apple Matters—authored the book, but I contributed five pieces that cover moving an iTunes library to an external hard drive, different browsers and how to leverage little-known features, as well as a general overview with tips and software for making a good podcast or screencast.

The book is $34.99 and contains 640 pages of Apple hacking goodness.

802.11n is a fairly reliable way to stream content to an Apple TV, especially if you can go 802.11n-only to prevent non-N devices from dragging down the network. WiFi, however, is still susceptible to quirks, and it appears that the iTunes <–> Apple TV wireless handshake is too. We switched to 802.11n-only a few weeks ago in an attempt to improve our 40GB Apple TV’s ability to stay connected to our 250+GB iTunes library (over 210GB of which is video), and it’s worked pretty well. That said, we still run into the occasional-but-frustrating library ejection, sometimes right in the middle of a show. I suspect these dropouts may be the cause of wireless interference due to the materials used to build the townhome we rent, or perhaps our close proximity to other people’s wireless networks and devices. Even if I’m right, though, it doesn’t help our predicament.

I want to be able to store and sync our entire library with the Apple TV so we don’t have to deal with these annoyances. A cheap hard drive would solve this problem perfectly, and it would give us peace of mind to keep purchasing content from the iTunes Store without having to worry as to whether we can watch it in our now cable-less living room.

No, a Mac mini is not an option. The Apple TV, when we got one, cost $300. Now they’re $229 for the base model we have. Mac minis start at $600. For those not paying attention, a Mac mini is more than twice the price of an Apple TV. A price which isn’t worth it to solve what should be a minor problem. Plus, the Apple TV’s new Take 2 UI and features finally pulled ahead of Front Row. Fundamentally, the device is designed for a TV. Front Row and the Mac OS X environment are not.

The kicker is that the Apple TV actually has a USB port that is more or less handicapped to the general consumer. Apple says it’s for doing maintenance and troubleshooting when the time comes. Yea you can hack your Apple TV to do tons of wild stuff, and there’s even a hack for using external hard drives, but that only works on a previous 1.x version of the Apple TV software. Plus, it’s an ugly hack, and the Apple TV Take 2 software is just too darn great.

So what’s a frustrated Apple TV owner with a growing iTunes Store-purchased video and podcast library to do? Why, submit feedback via Apple’s official Apple TV feedback page, of course. If you’re in the same predicament, I urge you to send your own thoughts to Apple as well. For the record, here’s what I sent:

Please allow us to plug in our own USB hard drives to expand the Apple TV’s storage. There’s a USB port on the back of the device that is otherwise unusable. This really is pretty silly, and there isn’t much of a legitimate reason for Apple to keep this functionality locked away. Are you worried we’ll start plugging in hard drives and swapping content? For the users who want to do that (I don’t; check my iTunes Store purchase records), there are far smaller, capacious, and easily accessible devices for doing that called “iPods.”

WiFi—even 802.11n—is not a great solution for streaming content from our increasingly expanding iTunes libraries. Neither is drilling holes through our walls to run ethernet cable. If you want us to keep buying content from the iTunes Store (especially space-hogging video) and enjoying said content on our living room TVs, we need the ability to expand our Apple TV storage by plugging in an extra hard drive.

At least it couldn’t hurt, right? Go submit some feedback, see if it’ll help.