It got me thinking about Apple including my contact information in DRM-free music files I purchase from iTunes. A lot of people are worried about this–though I’m not sure why. Perhaps Apple is trying to provide contact information in the event my music is stolen from my computer. I would certainly like to reclaim my files if they were stolen, but how could I if I could not clearly prove I purchased them from Apple in the first place?

So Apple is trying to protect owners of music – could be EMI, could be me. What is so wrong with that?

TestTrack Studio

Congratulations TestTrack team!

Steve’s presentation was interesting, but let’s face it, many people expected Apple to offer a video streaming solution. Two areas that Steve did not address with iTV, at least for the moment, were games and video chat. Imagine if Apple delivered both of the following with iTV:

PlayTime
Assuming the iTV is a mini Mac mini, it probably has BlueTooth capabilities and certainly has USB ports. Throw a few joysticks on it and you have a very capable game system for $300. Plus, you have Apple’s online music/video/games store as a pre-existing distribution system. Now this isn’t the ill-fated Pippin. iTV as a gaming system has real potential. If the iPod is now a gaming system, the iTV should be as well. The Mac games market would explode and perhaps the day would come when Aspyr would be porting Mac games to Windows six months after their release on iTV.

VideoChat
All Apple notebooks now ship with an iSight integrated into their display bezel. The iMacs do as well. Imagine if iTV had the iSight as well. With that little remote, you could select Chat -> Address Book -> Mom & Dad -> Call and be video conferencing from the comfort of your living room. No long distance charges. No powering up the laptop. This is a great couch potato- enabling technology. But, Apple needs more than just an iSight to make this work correctly. They need a way to stream audio and video through the iTV. Why? So they can give you picture-in-picture capabilities to inform you of incoming calls or to let you make outgoing calls while watching TV. When someone calls you, you can then accept or reject the video and/or audio portions of the call with the little remote. With iTV video chat you could remotely watch the “big game” with friends, video chat while playing video games, and so on.

With PlayTime and VideoChat, these things would jump off the shelves from Q1 2007 on until the government split Apple into separate operating system and media companies. Imagine the possibilities.

When my son, Oliver, was just a diapered toddler, his Aunt Kathleen gave him a small plastic hockey stick. I figure the stick cost Kathleen about six bucks.

At last count, I figure that stick has probably cost my family about thirty thousand dollars.

So opens Ed Wenck’s book, “The Hockey Dad Chronicles”. As a hockey fan, player, and coach, I have a special fondness for the sport and an appreciation for the effort required to master the fine arts of skating, shooting, playmaking, and turning an opposing a player into a stain on the boards. Ed’s book chronicles his son’s hockey season from a parent’s perspective, including the ups, the downs, and the just plain weird things he saw or experienced. Whether or not you have a kid who plays hockey or another organized sport, this book contains funny anecdote after funny anecdote.

I rate it four trees:

There’s one more thing… Surround SCM 5 is coming and it is very cool. Surround has always been competitive with the pricing and feature sets of VSS, Perforce, AccuRev, MKS, and PVCS. That’s nice, but being the same is pretty boring and not where we want to be. With version 5, we’re changing the game. Developers and non-developers alike have expressed a need for more granular control over the change management process and Surround 5 squarely addresses this need like no other product in our space. Like TestTrack TCM, we’ll be showing Surround SCM 5 at SD Best Practices. We’ll be announcing it on the Web site soon as well.

There are more goodies in the pipeline, but I’ll save them for another day

In the future, or the distance past according to StarWars, droids will take over the more mundane tasks in our lives. In the software development world, specialized Collabodroids will facilitate collaboration in a team environment. They may help transform or transport data, or they may watch, learn, and help automate a task such as regression testing.

Fortunately, Collabodroids will not render us obsolete. We’ll still have to program, debug, and virus protect them. There’s also a good chance they’ll be based on some version of Windows, so we’ll probably have to reboot them frequently.