Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Archives for September 2006

Who is Jonathan Ive?

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From Wikipedia:

Jonathan Ive was born in 1967 in London and is Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Computer.

Jonathan Ive is, simply said, one of the best designers in the world. I’ve just stumbled upon a fantastic article from Business Week which explains who really is Jonathan and how he comes up with his fantastic designs for Apple.

By the way, Ive led the team that designed the iMac and the iPod! And, of course, the MacBook (Pro) and the Mac Pro.

I always say to my students that computer science (and especially programming) is Art. And that it’s no coincidence that many of the best computer scientists are good musicians. It’s also no coincidence that many hackers are switching to the Mac. Macs are so good to look at (and to work with) that you are inspired by them to excel in your own work. It’s (nearly) metaphysical. But I know it’s true for me…

… thanks to Jonathan Ive :-)

Noulakaz Podcast (16 September 2006)

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Lo and Behold!

Kyan, Anya, Christina and I are finally releasing our Noulakaz Podcast (16 September 2006) to the world! It’s only 800Kb!

It’s actually Anya, aged 4, telling a small story. Listen to her. She’s funny :-)

As expected, I’ve used Garageband to create the podcast and it is really a brillant application.

By the way, you’ll notice that I’ve used the MPEG-4 AAC format (at 64 kbit/s) for the podcast because AAC has been designed as a better MP3. AAC files sound as good and are actually much smaller in size than MP3 files. You can listen to the Podcast using iTunes, VLC, MPlayer, Real Player, etc…

How to make Coverflow perfect (IMHO) in iTunes 7

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I love Coverflow. I was using it before when it was still a standalone app. And I’m using it more and more now that it is integrated into iTunes 7.

I tend to browse my albums by year but I’ve noticed something fishy. Basically, when you sort your tracks in iTunes by year, it does a secondary sort by artist name. This is fine for normal albums but really crap for compilations. For example, this is what I get by sorting by year:

Notice that the compilation albums ‘Made in England’ and ‘Made in England 2′ have songs (namely Why and Wot) before The Chemical Brothers’ album and some songs after (Should I Stay Or Should I Go et al.)

And, as expected, when you use the Coverflow view, the compilation albums appear many times instead of only once. For example, ‘Made in England’ would appear both before and after ‘Exit Planet Dust’.

The solution is easy: sort by year then by album name!

Unfortunately, iTunes cannot do this directly… but only indirectly. Here’s the secret:

  • Identify a tag that you do not use (I’ve chosen Grouping),
  • Select all your songs in iTunes,
  • Run the following Applescript in Script Editor (found in /Applications/Apple Script):

tell application “iTunes”
    set theSongs to the selection
    repeat with theSong in theSongs
        set theKey to ((the year of theSong as text) & ” ” & the album of theSong)
        set the grouping of theSong to theKey
    end repeat
end tell

  • This script goes through all selected songs and change their grouping tag to the year followed by a space followed by the album name (it runs rather slowly by the way…),
  • You can then sort your song collection by grouping,
  • And when you use Coverflow, you have each album only once!

Problem solved!

Thanks to codepoet for inspiration. Disclaimer: Backup your songs if you are not confident enough.