Here's a Way to Get C# Into More Use ...

Here's an interesting approach to push the new "C Sharp" language more into the mainstream -- tie it to office.

Microsoft plans to unveil on Monday a tool for customizing Office 11 applications based on its Visual Studio programming environment.

The new tool, code-named Visual Studio Tools for Office, exploits the data-sharing capabilities of XML (Extended Markup Language) to help developers create Office-based applications. The enhancements are designed to let companies tailor Microsoft Word and Excel applications to their specific corporate processes and to link "islands of data," said Robert Green, lead product manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft.

"Business processes are not well-integrated, particularly when they include data at the desktop. We're going to see much better interconnections," Green said.

...

With Office being tied to Visual Studio, people who work with Microsoft languages Visual Basic and C# stand to benefit from an environment aimed specifically at professional developers. Programmers can also take advantage of the .Net Framework in Visual Studio.Net, which automatically generates much of the lower-level coding needed for networked applications. [_Go_]

No word on how this affects Outlook and my personal concern -- Inbox Buddy -- which runs on top of Outlook.  I do know that Office 11 is some fairly major changes and this only is going to add to them, IMHO. 

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19+ Hours to Incomplete iPod Synchronization

[Sorry for the delays in getting this out.  Just a bad, bad, bad day so far.  Has anything good ever happened to anyone in the history of the universe on a Monday?  I mean sheesh.  Oh and did I say it was bad?].

I'm writing this with more than a bit of trepidation -- I know no matter how I write this I'm going to take some flack.  So let's start with a disclaimer:

NOTE: The iPod is a work of great beauty.  I bloody well love the little beastie.  I mean it's the size of a pack of cigarettes and it can hold 20 gigabytes of music.  I really do love it.  I wouldn't have spent the @)(#*@ 19+ hours, now would I, if I didn't love it?

But .... (And, dear reader, you new a but was coming, didn't you?)  The iPod on the PC isn't the effortless thing that Mac folk like to maintain.  So here comes my tale of woe. 

1. My iPod arrived Friday afternoon thanks to the wonders of Amazon.  Having tasks to accomplish I actually managed to put it aside until Saturday morning, believe it or not.  Now that's not to say that I didn't take it out of the box and both ooh and ah at it.  Even to say that I "fondled" the lovely lines and delicate curves that are the iPod would not be extreme.  Like most modern Apple products, the term "work of art" is not out of the question.
   
   
2. Saturday morning arrived and, despite much important work, I attacked the iPod with the enthusiam of a vandal sacking rome.  Installation was pretty much a snap consisting of one CD and connecting it to the Firewire interface I've been using for months now. 
   
   
3. Now, as a blog reader and someone who's boring enough to do his homework, I know that the MusicMatch iPod software has been pretty widely "dissed" in favor of Ephpod.   Ephpod is from a 3rd party developer and closer to iTunes than is MusicMatch.  Since I've never been a MusicMatch fan anyway I figured that I should give it a whirl.  And now the force left me and a dark cloud entered the room.
   
   
4. Ephpod downloaded in a jiffy, is totally free and looks just plain beautiful.  From an interface perspective it made me feel like I was using an iMac -- and that's cool.  I clicked on the Add Directory button and told it my MP3 root directory (astonishingly enought -- MP3, can ya believe it?).
   
   
5. It started chugging though my MP3 files.  And it quickly found that my MP3 ID tags were not in order.  An MP3 ID tag is a bit of metadata stored in the MP3 file which has information like Title, Artist, Genre.  If the ID tags aren't present then you pretty much can't even select a file to play.  Kind of hard to select the Doors "Light my Fire" when it's artist field is blank or has "Artist" in it. 
   
   
6. Now I have 5500 odd MP3 files.  So you know here this is going, don't you .... 
   
   
7. That's right -- I needed to clean up all my MP3 ID tags -- say 50% of 5500 files times at least three fields (Artist, Title, Genre) -- that's a lot of metadata.  Thankfully ephpod just prompts you as it goes and remembers what you last entered.  This made cleaning up many of my MP3 files relatively painless.  But note that I said "many"....
   
   
8. At the roughly 50% stage (49% to be exact), ephpod crashed.  [_Go_]  Ok then.  I reloaded it and tried to add some more files.  Crashed.  Sigh.  I tried deleting some of the files I had added to ephpod thinking I had reached some kind of capacity limit and that if I deleted them I could add more.  Crash. 
   
   
9. I continued to play with ephpod for a bit since it's approach to fixing the MP3 ID tags was damn good.  I've used other MP3 tagging tools and they pretty much uniformly aren't good.
   
   
10. When ephpod failed to accept any more files, I decided to give it a shot for synching my iPod.  That too caused a crash but some music did get to my iPod.  That was cool since I could then at least listen to something while I figured out how to deal with my MP3 files and their ID tags.
    
    
11. I surfed over to download.com and looked over the different MP3 tools.  I did focus solely on the free tools while ignoring the different $20 to $30 / copy utilities.  Most of them weren't very good but MP3 Tag Tools [_Go_] wasn't bad.  Actually I'd say that most of them were pretty horrible; fine to edit one or two files and lousy for large scale changes.  But MP3 Tag Tools wasn't too horrible and I used that to edit a lot of tags.  I mean a lot of tags (I don't know what you did Saturday night but I really can't recommend as a hot date "Tag Editing" or 'But Honey, it'll be fun....').  The cats did their best to keep my company but as Daddy did nothing but stare at a screen and mutter about "ID tags" and "Stupid UI choice / Idiot developer" they lost interest.
    
    
12. After I did as much with MP3 Tag Tools, I moved over to MusicMatch, the software which was officially bundled with the iPod.  I've never been a big MusicMatch fan preferring the simplicity of WinAmp over MusicMatch but it works.  Generally.  Now you do realize that problems are coming when I say something like that, don't you ?
    
    
13. So I started to import my MP3 directory into MusicMatch and, of course, this exposed the different files where I still hadn't gotten the ID tags quite right.  Thus began "Tag Session 2" which extended from Saturday night into much of Sunday.
    
    
14. Well I finally got everything ready to go.  I had edited all my tags and it was time to do a full synch.  Coolness was in the air, wasn't it ?
    
    
15. Well I started to synch and it took a long ass time.  I mean multiple hours.  And then it got to about 3700 files when this charming little error occurred.  [_Go_].
    
    
16. Yup. Division by zero.  Which effectively ended my synch process.  It did get 3700 odd music files onto my iPod but definitely not all of them.

Total time spent?  Approximately 19 hours and all of my music still isn't on the iPod.  Now the vast bulk of that wasn't spent actually doing the synch -- the bulk of it was spent normalizing the ID tags in my MP3 files.  My guess as to the final Ephpod and MusicMatch functioning / synch problems is that they simply can't handle a music archive of 5500 songs.  Given the size of hard discs now a days that's just as dumb as a small collection of brown toads.  So I guess that I'll fork my archive into things I'd actually listen to when mobile (rock, punk, new wave, comedy, jazz, new age) and leave things like classical behind since I rarely listen to it.  I also clearly have some duplicate files which I can remove to cut down the total number of files.

So why were my ID tags so wrong?  Well a lot of my CDs were ripped literally years ago when CDDB wasn't as prevalent.  I also have a fair amount of ecclectic CDs (Vince Guaraldi Trio, BachBusters) which just don't show up in CDDB.  So a lot of music was just stored in MP3artistcd and I'd play the music via filename never really caring much about the ID tags until they actually mattered.  Of course, like most of us, I probably have a few files acquired via some kind of peer to peer distribution and those also had messed up ID tags.

Oh and if you wonder why I tried a lot (5 +) of different tools but wasn't happy, I can only say that when you have files to modify measured in the thousands, a lot of UI assumptions just don't work anymore.  Example: To select the genre of a music piece in MP3 Tag Tools, you have to select it from a combo box.  That isn't sorted.  Try doing that 1,000 times.  Heck even doing it 100 times sucks rocks.  So most of my music isn't categorized by Genre.  MusicMatch allows you to paste in the Genre which is better but lacks a sortable editing grid like MP3 Tag Tools which means I can't just set all the options quickly directory by directory.

Do I regret my purchase?  Actually no.  Not in the slightest.  I seem to have been seduced by Apple's charms in this respect like most other Mac lovers.  After all, the MP3 tag normalization would have had to be done no matter what.  And since they didn't write the PC software I really can't blame them, can I?  (Sure I could but I won't; after all I have been seduced).  I do find it astonishing that just trying to synch 20 gigs of music cause the errors that I found.

I'd connect the iPod to my iBook and try and do the synch that way but since my iPod now has as big a hard disc as my iBook then that's just not an option.

Overall?  Would I recommend it?  Without questions or reservations.  The iPod is just an awesome piece of engineering.  Kudos to Apple.

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Remember Tom Swift ?

If you never read Tom Swift growing up then this will mean nothing.  If you did then you'd probably enjoy reading Jeff Duntemann's essay on Tom Swift. [_Go_]

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Macintosh Small Business Accounting Software?

Anyone have a recommendation here?  Something like Quicken but for the Mac.  Quicken QuickBooks Mac doesn't seem to be shipping until after January which isn't encouraging.  Thanks.

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An iPod Powered Post Coming Soon !

Just a quick note that a) I've got my iPod, b) Love it, c) Spent most of the weekend trying to synch it.  Hence the lack of posts yesterday.  "Most of the weekend"?  Yup.  Details to follow.  I would comment that while the iPod on the PC retains Apple's utterly brilliant hardware, the software is but a pale shadow of the hardware.  'Nuff said for now.  More soon (I hope).

But that said, I bloody well love it.  It's just wonderful.  Nicest thing I've used in years.

8:45:19 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This