This is what I do too. I use Media Monkey for library and metadata administration because it's way more powerful and intuitive for power usage than iTunes...but it's ugly. Media Monkey is just ugly and it doesn't make all your hard work with album artwork and such feel very rewarding.

I've disliked iTunes for quite a while now as it's still treats your music library like it's a stack of CDs. It's completely uninspired when it comes to how metadata can be used to re-shape an interface to better meet it's data set. It seemed natural to treat your MP3 library as digital CDs at first when your library was mostly ripped CDs. But that's not the case anymore and Apple has clung to that paradigm while also being a top online music seller. It boggles the mind really. Side Note: The iPhone app management interface they released for iTunes is shockingly bad. Like it's 2003 Microsoft bad. What were they thinking?

Media Monkey gives you quite a nice set of tools to shape your library at it's core but it doesn't do a good job of helping you enjoy your music. I think there's still a big hole in the media library+editor+jukebox marketplace (XBMC, etc. don't count as they're not for editing, just enjoying). Anyone want to start a project?

I didn't say anything about whether or not everyone loves them. The application that got me started as a child was Disney Animation Studio for DOS and I certainly don't love Disney Corp. But I owe them my life and my career.

My point is that artists and young people of many different backgrounds everywhere are able to pirate Adobe software, discover new skills, create works that just ten years ago would have been laughably expensive, and end up having a career as an animator for Pixar because they started with Flash. What Adobe and Flash specifically does is inherently good for society and the internet.

How many internet memes and hours of wasted time to do we all owe to Flash? Don't we owe Flash and Adobe at least some respect for how much enjoyment we get out of Flash games and animations? You don't need to love them but it seems disingenuous to hate them or say everything they make or do is crap.

Any "professional" who says that they don't use undo is lying or doesn't know what undo means (navigating your history in this case is the same as undo). Undo is a critical feature in any modern digital workflow. It's the feature that allows for experimentation.

What measure are you using when you call Adobe products clunky or buggy? In comparison to what? Lithography? How many of their products and releases of their products have you used?

This notion that everything they make is bad would take a really long time to verify. I can use just about everything in the entire creative suite competently at this point and it's taken ten years and six release cycles of all-day every-day professional usage. Adobe keeps me in business and has continued to add new features that get me our of work faster again and again. Do you commenters have to rely on them in the same fashion or do you just dabble when necessary and then damn them to hell?

Oh they've made some bad choices as a company but do you demand that every software company have some kind of perfect record of decision making before you use their products? Adobe is a giant lumbering beast that actually do a much better job at innovating than a lot of other companies their size. What are my alternatives anyway? The GIMP?

There are a lot of people who make a living off of Adobe products and if you were doing anything besides irrational hating you'd offer me up an alternative set of products that can keep me in business.

I think you'll find yourself in the minority opinion on that one in creative shops and homes across the world. Do you think you can point to a single piece of creative-anything made in the past 5 years that doesn't have an element of some kind of Adobe product in it? It's universal at this point. Just clicking on a link someone posted as proof would launch a page that would require my browser to utilize an Adobe product.

Now I'm not sticking up for Flash or even Adobe in a corporate sense. Flash is a horrible disfigured monster of a framework that should be considered a prototype of an idea by anyone serious about such matters. But it's a necessary monster. When it comes to Adobe, their pricing and release strategies are really becoming pretty annoying and it's hard to keep up with which programs are merging into which other programs and on and on.

But if you want to do something cool and get it done in a hurry Adobe will get you there 95% of the time. Adobe's UI scheme is quite clever (at least in the CS 1-4 releases, haven't tried 5 yet). If you learn one UI well you can use them all quite intuitively. They're UI designers are actually quite disciplined about it. Not to mention they also own and operate Lynda.com which is the best online school ever made.

If you're just a casual Photoshop or Illustrator user it can seem frustrating. If you need to start in Photoshop, add Illustrator vectors, composite those layers, add the artwork to After Effects, animate the artwork, add the animations to Premiere, add video, composite animation and video, add sound edited in Sound Booth, etc. etc. you can do it with just a matter of a few clicks at this point. There's little file management if you setup the project correctly. It's actually quite amazing.

Adobe doesn't cater to the casual user, they cater to the professional production artist and on that front they do a pretty good job of it.

Pascal's wager is a poor one for many reasons. It's a classic false choice. All you're truly wagering against is the notion of a personal god who monitors and judges your every thought and action (which is a bet I'll take any day). Not whether a god or gods exist.

Many atheists will cede that they border on deist as in "If there is a god it's the equivalent of how we view ants, not some kind of overbearing father figure/mind reader/judge/asshole." What supreme being has the time or inclination to listen to what us dumb apes are thinking all the time? That sounds like a really short-sighted view of the possibilities of omnipotence.

Many atheists will also cede that there could be a higher power, just one that's also a part of the natural universe (aliens, AI machines, a singularity, etc.)

Just sayin!

Wikileaks didn't have to publish their names clear and simple. There were many different ways of exposing that kind information without putting the informants and their families at risk.

A disclosure like this punishes the informants, not the actual people in both the US and Afgan governments who deserve punishment for these ill-managed conflicts.

I hope that Wikileaks goes on publishing documents and embarrassing governments, politicians, and corrupt members of the international media. I also hope they stop screwing with the little guy as they did with those Afgan informants.

It's actually around 10% of their funding. They tell you the percentage of corporate funding during their fund raisers..

I don't like the corporate "underwriting" either but most of the companies are pretty benign and out of those a lot are educational foundations not for-profit companies.

I will willingly cede that my previous post lacked nuance or detail which is antithetical to a proper comment. I had to run to a dentist appointment.

Most US news journalists don't actually figure out who's telling the truth. All they do is "he said she said" stenography that generally leaves you dumber for having read it. There are certainly exceptions (Frank Rich's NYT Column or Harpers for example) but their true reporting is lost on the massive throngs of paid stenographers.

Here's a brief selection of stories that were reported on by our drop of good reporters but then muddied to death by the ocean of crap reporters and their superiors.

2000 Recount, Pre-9/11 Terrorist Threats, NYC Financial District Air Quality, WMDs, Judith Miller, Jeff Gannon (check that one out if nothing else), Abu Ghraib, Does Torture Work?, Death Panels, Sub-Prime Lending, US Attorney Firings, Frank Luntz (the real Luntz method, not puff-pieces about his "wordsmithing"), & Valarie Plame

...and that's just a few.

I show up as anonymous because of a site error I'm currently experiencing, not out of cowardice as the auto-naming system implies.

If you think that most US newspapers are doing a good job just look at those statistics about people thinking Obama is a Muslim.

I thought Wikileaks was pretty cool until it published names of Afgan informants which is certainly not cool for many reasons. SO...both groups are looking pretty crappy these days and it's hard to take a side.

Go ahead and shoot the messenger.

That article is honestly a bunch of lame CYA for the designers and developers of the magazine apps. I love how it says what bad practices they used and then goes on to say that those same practices are going to be used by the rest of the iPad publishers. I can guarantee you that even the SteveJob himself knows that doing what his advertisers want is going to lead to huge file sizes on these apps. I have the app in questions and can tell you that it's not Wired's content that's eating up most of the space, it's the ads.

Supporting every advertisers branding, typeface, and content in both portrait and landscape mode is going to require more space and cost much more than if it was done with markup instead of flats. You can't just go installing huge sets of typefaces onto a device without paying licensing fees to the foundry for each installation and you can't markup text to be rendered without a native typeface installed (same as the web). Representing fonts as flat images however does not require the same licensing (it requires a license for use for the content creator, not the user) so that's going to stay the same for any ad that stays "on-brand" (i.e. 95% of them.)

In conclusion, the average file size might go down a little bit over the next few months but it's still going to be in the multiple hundreds of megabytes for a while to come.

Did you mean far or fair bet? Via the article: "There’s also an iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch application going through Apple’s approval process, and an Android app in the works."

I have my doubts about most readers ingesting this tome via a traditional desktop browser. Long-form reading in a browser is annoying for most people and having an online book with media integration just for the desktop web seems very 2001 and nothing new at all. The main success factor for this venture will be the mobile market deployment.

Even if they went all HTML5 with the mobile app you'd still have to stream rather large media files over a 3G connection which would work but would probably suck a bit too. The 5MB HTML5 caching limit on Safari for iOS would also prohibit pre-loading large amounts of content on Apple devices.

I generally really like Neal and Greg Baer as authors but as media application developers I have my doubts. (I know Neal is a developer but that doesn't mean he knows how to design usable products, it could actually work against him in that department).

Naturally these are all assumptions at this point but I've had my dealings with making media-rich mobile apps and these things become issues quickly.

File size is going to be an issue on media-rich ebooks and other similar apps for some time to come. A single issue of Wired for iPad is 500MB. That means an 8GB iPad can only handle about 15 issues assuming that's all you put on the thing (not to mention having those files duplicated on your iTunes machine as well). That's a lot of data for such a diminutive magazine rack and this seems like a step-up from that.

If Stephenson's intention is to head toward a self-inspired "Young Ladies Illustrated Primer" type experience he's going to run up against the file size issue pretty quickly.

Also the art direction and interface elements on the Mongoliad site are embarrassingly bad. It looks like a bad Diablo tutorial site. I hope it doesn't reflect the look and feel of the actual book experience.

I should also say that I'm terribly curious about the final result but I'm not going to hold my breath for anything revolutionary.