Cult of Mac today moans about iCal. I wonder if this comes from author Giles Turnbull using the application or just the oddly negative responses he and others have seen online. Nipping through the article:

Yesterday, the guys at Macworld published a useful article about making Lion’s iCal less annoying, but just as useful and entertaining were the comments beneath it.

The simple fact that Macworld felt the need to write an annoyances-fixing article speaks volumes.

Not really. People hate change. It doesn’t really matter what you do to an application: when you change some of it, people will get pissed off and want to change it back.

One good suggestion was to avoid iCal altogether, and buy another calendar app. Apple’s iCal is designed in such a way that it stores its event data in a database, which other apps can access. If you’re already an iCal user, it’s easy to try out alternative calendar apps without having to export and import your data, as long as they support use of iCal events. Most of them do, these days. One of my favorites is QuickCal.

I admit that I was initially tempted to try an alternative to iCal, but I decided to stick with it. For a little context, it’s worth explaining how I use iCal. I block in events across four calendars: work, home, and two ‘urgent’ versions of each. For magazine articles and other work, I create an event that approximates how long I think a piece of work will take, and I block recurring commissions as far into the future as possible. This enables me to see if, say, October is full and that I really shouldn’t be taking on extra cover features unless I somehow figure out how to clone myself. I then use iCal to manage my daily work, deleting events as I complete the relevant task, or, for personal/home things, as the event passes.

For me, there are only three things I really dislike about the new iCal:

• The visual design is hideous. I suspect this is Apple very intentionally starting the transition to iOS-like apps in OS X and that we’re going to see more skeuomorphic user interface design in forthcoming revisions to the system. It’s a pity, because the ‘leather’ toolbar is distracting and the text on it isn’t as readable as it is in other apps. Next to the smart, sleek new Mail, iCal just looks like a kiddie app; it’s even at odds with its own smart preferences pane. But this isn’t a deal-breaker, even if I did hack out the ‘torn paper’ graphic under the toolbar.
• Apple removed the mini-calendar sidebar, which I used daily to rapidly navigate my events. Navigation is now a little slower, but this also isn’t a deal-breaker.
• It’s mildly more awkward to create an event in a specific calendar, although you can click-hold the ‘add event’ button to select a calendar or very easily switch calendar once an event is created. This is very much not a deal-breaker.

The BBC reports that the EU has decided to extend music copyright to 70 years. However, I feel the article needs some helpful translation work.

Musicians are set [to] receive royalties for their songs well into their old age under a new EU ruling.

“Record labels are set to make even more money from dead and very aged popular musicians, under a new EU ruling, which doesn’t actually help most musicians.”

Regulations approved on Monday extended copyright on sound recordings from 50 to 70 years.

“Cliff Richard’s earliest songs had started to enter the public domain, which would have reduced his royalty cheques by a little bit, and this would have been a disaster for the 250-million-records-sold musician.”

According to those backing the law, the copyright extension is all about creating an ‘incentive for authors’, and I’m sure Cliff and others in their 70s will now feel a huge incentive to make more music and be more creative. We’ll for a moment ignore all the people who could have done something truly creative with popular songs entering the public domain.

The move has been welcomed by the music industry. Presenter Jools Holland called the ruling “fantastic news”. “Artists put their hearts and souls into creating music and it is only fair that they are recompensed in line with the rest of Europe,” said Holland who also performs and records his own music.

“And who is also getting on a bit, which has nothing to do with his stance on this subject.”

I agree with copyright and patenting in principle. There should certainly be a period during which a creator and their backers reap the rewards of creativity. But there must be balance. In extending copyright beyond the point most creators will live, we’re not encouraging creativity; instead, we’re helping a few very old musicians not lose some royalties from their earliest recordings, but mostly filling the pockets of record labels petrified of losing their investment that’s already been paid for myriad times.

Still, I can’t imagine anyone expected a different outcome, and copyright for popular media will continue to be extended periodically. If you ever think the likes of Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain, I’ve a mouse-shaped bridge to sell you.

Things have been quiet on the blog this week, due to overwork, but things will also continue being quiet for a bit, because I got hacked for the second time today. Last time round, I welded a ton of security to this side (one aspect of which at least informed me that a bunch of files had been changed). I’ve no idea how the shitheads got in this time, but I do know it’ll take me time I don’t have to clean up. So it’s probably going to be a while before this blog’s up and running again.

In the meantime, here is some light music, backed with the sounds of fuckwit ‘hackers’ being repeatedly punched in the fucking face. (Seriously, guys, take out your ire on a website of some importance, not a tiny little tech blog.)

I’m pretty sure some analysts spend their days lobbing darts at a dartboard and then applying whatever number they hit to the current piece of analysis, especially when it comes to marketshare. However, it takes a truly special company to consider outlandish reports conservative. And so it goes with Bloomberg’s report:

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) said its Windows Phone operating system may capture more than 20 percent of the smartphone market over the next two to three years with the help of hardware manufacturers and increased marketing efforts.

So, here we have an analyst firm—Gartner—who thinks Android will lead forever in smartphones, growing from a 23 to 49 per cent share, and that iOS will struggle onwards, growing its share from 16 to 17 per cent. Windows Phone? Naturally, that will skyrocket from 4.2 per cent to 19.5 per cent, blazing past iOS in the process. And yet Microsoft thinks that’s conservative. Presumably by 2020, every single smartphone will run Windows Phone and will directly jack your brain into Steve Ballmer’s PC.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too quick to judge. People thought Apple didn’t have a chance, and it took a fair chunk of the market. But then Apple did that by innovating and creating a new type of personal computer/smartphone hybrid that took Apple users and everyone else by storm. I fail to see how Microsoft will have such meteoric marketshare rise, even with its Nokia tie-up, when most people either remain infatuated with the iPhone or happy with the cheaper/more expandable Android alternatives. Still, maybe Microsoft knows something I don’t—perhaps Tim Cook in his new CEO role is hastily remaking all iPhone 5 cases out of fish scales.

A post by ‘ghostinthecomputer’ says Apple should kill off the iPod touch. It’s an interesting idea, which Daring Fireball’s John Gruber largely agreed with, but I’m unconvinced.

The iPod Touch has always been a bit of a strange device, basically a stripped down iPhone, without any phone or cell data capability. It was called an iPod, but was completely different from Apple’s older iPods that focused almost solely on music.

This much I agree with, but I wouldn’t call the iPod touch ‘strange’, since it’s essentially a small, wireless computer; its name is perhaps troubling, but understandably leveraged the insanely popular iPod brand. But it’s no more an iPod than an iPhone is a phone.

With the coming fall event, this is Apple’s opportunity to make a trademark dramatic move and kill off the iPod Touch from their product line. However, they shouldn’t just leave a void where the iPod Touch once was, they should replace it with the much rumored low-end iPhone. The low-end iPhone would fit perfectly into the market where the iPod Touch was, and in many ways would be better than the iPod Touch for most consumers.

First, if the low end iPhone sold, without a contract, for around $200-300, it would be in the same price range as the iPod Touch, and would draw the same buyers.

This is where the argument starts to fall apart. Apple will have to be extraordinarily aggressive in terms of pricing to meet that target. Right now, the previous generation iPhone is £428 in the UK. The low-end iPod is £193, but that also, unlike the low-end iPhone 3GS, includes FaceTime, a Retina display and HD video recording. At present, then, the iPod touch at the low end is a generation ahead of the closest equivalent iPhone and still under half its price. I’m sceptical Apple will suddenly bring all its iPhones into line and scrap the iPod touch and reduce its profit-margin sufficiently for the low-end device to remain competitive. Additionally, Apple would have to fight a perception battle: people still shop for iPods, notably for kids; they don’t want their kids to have an iPhone. Others are happy with their smartphone but still want a device that’s capable of playing music and running iOS apps. This sales and marketing shift alone could cost Apple a ton of sales.

I don’t disagree that there are benefits to the iPhone-only approach. You’d end up with an ‘iPad mini’, to which you could add 3G; you’d stop people questioning whether to go for an iPod or iPhone and then buying neither, due to confusion; and you’d—potentially—finally end up with a low-end device that had a half-decent stills camera. But you’d remove Apple’s most ‘throwaway’ iOS device; you’d have no option but to ditch the iPod’s super-thin form-factor; and you’d have people paying for the phone components, whether they used them or not. To me, I’m not sure that sounds like an Apple strategy, and I’m guessing within the next few weeks we’ll hear announcements about the new iPhone 5, an 8 GB iPhone 4 becoming the low-end model, and a new iPod touch line.