ready

I noticed a 'ready for hillary' bumper sticker for the first time today.

I may live in the D.C. but I'm still just a lower echelon gadget blogger, not a high powered politico or brand consultant. I can tell you that 'ready' is not a winning brand strategy.

The American people are sick of a long list of things -- somewhere on that list is 'ready'. My sources tell me that ready.gov, a disaster preparedness site run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had over three dozen interested visitors last year -- but not many more than that. We had years of 'shovel ready'. In the trenches of consumer electronics, we dealt with 'HD Ready', 'Ready for Vista', and '3D Ready'.

For millions of consumers, ready now means something only in newspeak. A product that announces its readiness may really be saying "I would have included that technology but something went irretrievably wrong on my way to market. My manufacturer needs to sell something now and you're obviously looking to buy. If we can pretend that I'm not obsolete then you can take me home today." I just e-wasted a printer that was Wi-Fi ready. Its readiness? An ethernet port.

I think marketers now know that ready is over. The present boom in smart TVs skipped a boomlet in 'Smart Ready' TVs. As far as I can tell, a Smart Ready TV would have been essentially any other TV.

Back to Hillary. In our newspeak, the RFH campaign is really saying that they meant to be fully Hillary 2.0 Compliant but it somehow all went off the rails just as the stickers were going to press. Ready just doesn't convey a sense of readiness anymore.

As a consumer advocate, I would stay away from Hillary Ready products and wait for genuine Hillary On Board items. None were on the floor at CES this year, but I'm looking forward to some as early as the first quarter of this year. I'm hoping that H.O.B. 2.0 will pick a wireless charging standard as a running mate and finally bring some clarity to the situation. I'll bring you a complete analysis as soon as I get a review unit. 

phonoh

CES has come and gone and there was not much to report. Neil Young's 'Pono' musical toblerone had its big debut. Eager readers can pre-order now for February delivery.

I told you last week about my own dissatisfaction with the state of my tunes. The silence of my new MacBook has been an improvement over iTunes. Still, I crave the highly compressed audio junk food Neil Young seeks to eradicate. I need it the way hipsters need tater-tots. I couldn't sleep.

I hacked until music started playing. Then I stopped. Here it is. I give you phonoh. Works in Safari and Chrome. Drag files from the Finder on to the deck.

Here's a complete rundown on the features:

Controls	None
Warranty	None
Portability	None
Playlists	None
Equalizer	None
Music Store	None
Wearable	In a backpack
Yellow	None
Letter 'H'	Two!

In the harsh light of this rigorous comparison, the otherwise minimalistic Pono appears to drip with baroque and unnecessary features. Phonoh packs the only feature that counts -- the letter 'H'. Pono? None. Phonoh? Two!

The 'H' isn't silent to real audiophiles, Neil.

pepsi challenge

Here's a quick manifest of all my personally owned laptops up to this morning:

1998: Sony Vaio 505 (PCG-505 TR) -- this machine rocked!
2000: Sony Vaio SR-33 -- this machine sucked!
2001: Apple iBook (Late 2001) -- this machine rocked!
2004: Apple Powerbook G4 -- this machine rocked!
2006: Apple MacBook Pro (core2duo) -- this machine rocked!
2011: Apple MacBook Air 11" (Mid 2011) -- this machine rocked!

Today adds:

2015: Apple Macbook Pro Retina 13" (Mid 2014) -- I expect this machine to rock!

That first machine in 1998 weighed 3.1 pounds, lacked an optical drive, and came loaded with a bunch of bloatware. Today's machine weights 3.46 pounds, lacks an optical drive, and came loaded with a bunch of bloatware.

The worst piece of bloatware on this new box is a thing called 'iTunes'. It shares a name with a clever little bit of music management software I used to use on my 2001 iBook. The iTunes of today is a sprawling monstrosity that leaves me more confused with every new version.

I'm taking the Pepsi Challenge with the new machine. I'm going to listen to music on it without iTunes for a month. I'm not turning my back on Apple, or Mac OS X, or even my library of purchases from the iTunes store. Just iTunes itself.

I'm not even going to ditch iTunes yet on the iMac in our house where many purchases are made. Just on this machine. I've made one trip in and out to authorize this machine so that DRMized iTunes content will play in QuickTime and then hopefully in the browser. Audio seems all aces so far, video is not yet happy.

Though this machine is a technological marvel, I'm actually more excited about nuking iTunes than I am about this 'Retina' screen.

jazz

I told you in July about  a small logo I built for my kids. It is still here.

We still use it -- more than I can say for some already forgotten Christmas toys. We use it a lot.

We use it for logo. We use it to generate G-code for our CNC machine. Now we use it to make music.

Shouts out all around for the community of hackers who brought us HTML5 web audio. The best thing about web audio is that it makes sense. There should be many moneyed interests that benefit from a programmable web.

Our logo now lets kids play musical notes with the 'play' command. Here's an example:

play [ list '4G4' '8F4' '4E4' '4D4' '4C4' '4D4' '4E4' '4C4' ]

'play', of course, is implemented with web audio. My six year old played with 'play' for just a few minutes before going to a cupboard and dragging out a USB MIDI keyboard controller. It was completely obvious to her that music should go into the computer just as easily as it comes out.

Thank heavens for six year olds.

I sat her down to have a little chat. I dread these chats. Granny's dead. Santa's not real. Democrats lost the Senate. The chat I dread most is also one of the most common in our household -- Computers aren't wonderful in the way you are now imagining. It breaks my heart every time.

I told my daughter that we could plug it in but nothing would happen. I said we could run GarageBand, but her expression turned to a scowl before I could even finish speaking. "That's
the confusing program!" she said. She's right. GarageBand has all kinds of problems. One is that
it often crashes for us -- on both iOS and MacOS -- when our four year old wails randomly on the MIDI keyboard.

This is where Chris Wilson, from Google, swoops in to the rescue.

Chris wrote Jazz, a browser plugin for MIDI. Chris is also an author of the more complicated W3C Web MIDI API specification.

It took me only about ten minutes to bang some basic MIDI into our logo using Jazz. I took a stab
at using the native MIDI apparently available in Chrome. More than an evening has already disappeared down that hole at this point.

If you load logo and have the plug-in installed, you can plug in a MIDI keyboard and hear notes
without doing anything -- even reloading the tab. It works as an automatic, trivial keyboard instrument. It tolerates a four year old banging on the keyboard.

Almost nothing else works properly at this point. You can't record MIDI from logo yet. You can't do MIDI output. You can't use the keyboard to control the turtle. I'm not worrried about any of that. That's the easy stuff. The fun stuff!

The hard part was building something that just works. Chris Wilson did that with Jazz and I'm grateful.

MIDI input is not like web audio. It doesn't make automatic sense for folks under 40. That's what makes me especially glad for Jazz. The various moneyed browser folks are still in the wilderness on this one.

The Chrome folks took a swing at MIDI in the browser but haven't quite gotten there yet. The Mozilla folks are still fooling around with game controller support in the browser. I suspect they were smoking some powerful 'set-top box' peyote when they came up with this one. They will
eventually get on board. Apple's still busy not supporting WebRTC. They will get their act together once they realize that MIDI keyboards don't have an escape key.

MIDI in the browser is solid gold. With MIDI and logo together in the browser, I feel like I'm getting the band back together from the '80s. It feels good, though we're having a bit of trouble coaxing the KoalaPad out of retirement to play bass.