Dear iTunes

I love you. I truly do. I've used a wide variety of players over the past eight years: MacAMP (later became MacAST - don't ask), SoundApp, SoundJam MP, WinAMP, even MMJB. But none of them were the best player they could be. Each had gut-wrenching flaws but had something they were really good at. MacAMP/AST became too expensive (you know, back when you had to pay for MP3 players that weren't hardware) but had killer skins. SoundApp ran without fuss, but had no equalizing options to speak of and very limited playlist options (to be fair, SoundApp was more a conversion utility... it just happened to be a player I used because it was fast). And on and on...

Then a couple of years ago, iTunes came out for Windows, and I downloaded it within hours. I'd played with it before - in fact, I would make trips to CompUSA to play with their new OS X-enabled Macs and would just get bewilderd by how awesome iTunes was. Then, one shining, golden day, iTunes for Windows came out, and I've never gone back to anything else.

But there are two very serious flaws with iTunes, and they're really beginning to grate on me. First, and less serious, is the playlist management. The playlists themselves are fine and do everything I expect they would. But I will on occassion produce multi-CD mixes that I use for long drives (I had an 11-CD mix for my trip to Iowa last year). I create them in iTunes and keep the track list for each CD in a separate playlist. It's easier doing that than combining the CDs in one list, then having to re-create a single CD's list if I need to reburn it. What would improve iTunes in this regard would be hierarchical playlists. Keep all the mix CDs in a mix CD "super playlist" that expands only when you need to get at a specific part of the multi-CD group. This would also work when an artist releases a multi-CD album like, for instance, the 8-CD Red Rocks collection that DMB just put out. So, yeah... make playlists better. That's the first thing.

The second flaw, but far more debilitating one, is that the music that comes out of iTunes sounds like absolute shit, especially when you compare it to what I get coming out of a well-tuned WinAMP setup. In WinAMP I use a plugin called, simply, Enhancer. It is an inline DSP that performs all the functions of an equalizer (via the presets) but is oh-so-much more. You can add little things that vastly improve the sound quality, like reverb, or focus on very specific areas of the spectrum to compensate for your particular speakers or headphones. It's really something to behold. I really dislike most of WinAMP for listening to music - the playlist manipulation is abysmal - but Enhancer is a killer app. What iTunes needs is either to open up the plugin SDK to all comers, or - better yet - have the wizards over at QSC produce something for the iTunes.

So how about it Apple? You're celebrating the one billionth song downloaded from the iTunes store, and you're making money hand-over-fist from your iPods. How about putting a little more into your desktop application? Make us actually believe that the next version is really worth the downloading and not just a clever way to advertise the Music Store.

Calling all CSS-enabled geeks: Solve this! Or, Liveblogging a debugging session.

So, for at least the past week, I've been unable to read Wonkette. Not because of the Cheney story (though I'm sure it wouldn't have helped matters any). No, I can't actually see the text. I thought maybe there had been some kind of attack on the site that horked and broke things. But after (at least) a week, I have to assume this is some kind of conscious design decision on their part.

What in the world am I talking about, you ask? Well, here's what I see when I go to Wonkette right now, in Firefox:


Funky, eh? Doesn't really make for good reading.

I went with a hunch I had and checked the site in the other two browsers I test stuff with, Opera and IE. The results, in Opera:

Some text is readable, but the font rendering is horrible in what little is there.

In Internet Explorer:


Huh. Right as rain. Oddness.

I checked out the source of Wonkette's main page, and then went to the stylesheet it refers to (which you can see here). There was this line, which I suspect is at least part of the problem for FF and Opera users:

font-family : "Hoefler Text", Georgia, "Times
            New Roman", Times, serif;

The default font is something called Hoefler Text. I launch Word to see if I have this font and what its dilly may be. I do have it, and here's what it looks like in Word:


So, wazzupwitdat?

A quick web search took me (where else?) to the Wikipedia page about the Hoefler Text typeface. There we learn it was created by Apple to display some thing or other that was awesome about the Mac OS in 1991 (I think the tech on display at the time was OpenText, but I'm really taxing my recall of ancient issues of MacWorld for that info). So, the font came from the migration of data I made from my Mac to this Wintel machine a couple of years ago. (Sidenote: Are they gonna start calling the new Intel-based Macs Wapples? Dibs on coining the term, btw.) Apparently, this particular font doesn't behave well in a Windows environment. So off I went to the Fonts folder.

Long story short: I ended up pulling everything named Hoefler out of there, and the page now looks the same in Firefox and IE, as they're both now using Georgia. Opera still has rendering issues, but I never use Opera for general browsing.

Whatever. What a waste of a perfectly good morning.

So, code monkeys all, I call you to this question: Am I correct in thinking that I just have an incompatible version of the typeface? Or is it something more dastardly with the way Firefox and Opera render pages?

Current Conditions

So, I have WeatherFox installed in my browser, which put a line of weather info at the top of the window, letting me know what I could just as easily find out by turning my head 90 degrees. But why go to all that trouble when the info's already here on the screen.

At any rate, WeatherFox tells one what the conditions are outside right now. I find what it's telling me about the outdoors right now a little odd.



That is all.