Things I hate: Shinywitebox's novel DRM for iShowU

I like paying for good software. It's a quirk, I admit.

I don't even mind well done Digital Rights Management. Without copy protection the novel software I love would die. I'm okay with how FairPlay works for iPhone apps and movies. I'm fine with long software keys -- I keep mine in a Google Doc I can access anywhere.

Where I go bonkers though is when otherwise good companies decide to introduce novel DRM methods, such as key distribution methods. I can tolerate online registration and binary keys for subscription services like Spanning Sync, but I blow a capillary when vendors like Shinywhitebox, makers of the once excellent and inexpensive iShowU screencasting software, do things like this ...

Licensing & Refunds

... At purchase time, we create an account for you on our system so that you can get instant access to your purchase history and retrieve lost unlock keys if need be. You use these same account details to unlock the product (over the internet). After starting the application, click on the “Unlock ..." button that appears in the first dialog, then enter your email address and password (these are the login details you setup when you purchased from us)...

Additionally, at the time of purchase we send out an email with your current set of “unlock keys”. This is simply an alternative method, which you can use on machine that don’t have an internet connection. If you have purchased a product but have not received your unlock keys please first check your spam folders, and failing that, contact support with the transaction number of the sale.

The keys are XML files.

To add aggravation to injury, SWB has enforced this transition for version 1 of their software, now in legacy mode. When I ran my old software I accepted offered upgrades, thinking I was getting some bug fixes. Along the way I got an entirely new registration process and my old key failed. I had to request a new key (support responded within 10 minutes late at night, which is a bit beyond the call of duty).

Come on gang. Please don't do this to your customers. I like paying to upgrade products I like (in their case the new HD product upgrade fee is a pittance), but I really don't have time for this - just time to rant about it.

Please don't make registration process changes part of "free" updates to legacy products. Please don't institute unique DRM procedures that break the way I track the 200 or so software products I've purchased. Just don't.

Here's hoping SWB is reconsidering ...

Project Shredder begins

Gordon's Rules of Acquisition remind me that the purchase price is often the smallest cost of acquisition. So I like to digest each piece of gear before I bring down new prey.

The last meals have gone relatively well. My mother's iPad and my own iPhone 4 were big bites, but they went faster than expected. The Brother 2140 and updated Airport Express were bought for trouble-free implementation and they worked as expected. Migrating my old 3G to my son was more complicated thanks to AT&T's incomprehensible and undocumented contract rules, but it too has passed.

Since Canon refuses to make the dSLR I want [1], I'm delaying replacement of my aging DigitalRebel. So my path is clear for something more challenging.

Hence Project Shredder.

I am bad at filing. I've always been bad, but it's getting worse. Once the easy stuff is tossed, the hard stuff builds up in bins and boxes. I need a better approach [2].

I have some past experience with document and image scanning including developing document management technologies, but I've never felt that the technology was really ready for my home use. Over the past few years, however, OCR and full text indexing have matured into my zone of acceptably pain-free technology. Adobe's 1996-vintage PDF image/text format has become widely accepted [3]; it's the format I've wanted for fifteen years. The Fujitsu ScanSnap line has been stable and respected for at least ten years, and their space-saving S1300 has gotten a great review from a source I trust.

So it's time to make a stab at this. I'll have more to say in future posts about the S1300 when it arrives, and how the entire process plays out at our home [4]. Look for the "document management" tag for related posts.

-- footnotes --
[1] Stop the 3$!#$% megapixels Canon. Give us ISO.
[2] Adobe, like Microsoft, wasn't always a zombie company.
[3] Though Fujitsu's software distribution strategy may lead me to a Torrent client!
[4] I'll keep the way I file receipts and manuals. Receipts get tossed into a bin in chronological order. Manuals get placed in bookcase boxes in alphabetic order with the date of acquisition written on the front page. I weed receipts by tossing the bottom of the bin, the manuals as I add new ones. This process is so efficient I don't see much room for improvement.

Airport Extreme 802.11n range: better at 2.4 than 5

The last time I messed with my home wireless network I jumped through hoops to connect an old 802.11b iBook (yes, the computer, not the app) to an early 2009 Time Machine. A few weeks after I bought that Time Machine Apple revved the line.

Now that I've replaced the Airport Express that now powers my mother's iPad with a new one, I'm sure Apple will rev it along with the upcoming iTV.

In the meantime, I've made one new discovery. In my home, 802.11N 2.4 GHz has significantly greater range than 802.11N 5 GHz. Apparently this is not uncommon.

When I configured the Express to WDS Extend it worked well in our dining room, but it couldn't connect in the living room. I brought it back to the dining room and manually switched the WDS setting from the original 5GHz network I'd selected to the standard 802.11N network [2]. (Time Machine broadcasts both plus 802.11G and 802.11B.) It then connected from the dining room. I repeated this to confirm it wasn't a chance glitch.

So our current (all wireless [1]) home network looks like this:

• Time Machine: 802.11 n/g/b with 802.11n 5GHz and 2.4Ghz
• Airport Express: Extends Time Machine, WDS connection is 802.11n 2.4 GHz
• iMac i5: 802.11n 5 GHz (it's about 10 feet directly below the Time Machine)
• iMac G5: 802.11g
• MacBook Intel: 802.11n 5GHz at the moment, but I bet I have to switch it back to 802.11N 2.4 GHz to get more range
• iPhone 4: 802.11n 2.4 GHz
• iPhone 3G and 3GS: 802.11g
• iPhone 3 (used as iTouch): 802.11g
• iBook: would be 802.11b but I've retired it. It wasn't getting any use in the iPhone era.

Note Apples says the Airport Express will connect up to 10 clients, and the Airport Extreme will connect up to 50 users (I'm not sure where my older Time Machine sits). With our iPhones and guest devices it's not hard to get near to the Express limits.

See also:

• Airport Extreme: Firmware update, Time Capsule bugs, tips and fixes
• Fixing a broken WDS wired to wireless bridge on an Apple Airport Express

[1] I thought the "all wireless" setup would be temporary following some home reconfiguration, but it's worked so well I've stayed with it. I'm surprised.
[2] From Airport Utility select Airport Express. Choose Manual setup, then Wireless. Select the non-5GHz or 5GHz through Wireless Network Name.

--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

The hidden ever growing iTunes photo cache bug

There's a design flaw/bug in iTunes. When it syncs photos to an iPod or iOS device it creates a photo cache folder. That folder never shrinks, it only grows.

That's merely annoying on the desktop, but it does the same thing in iPhoto. To purge the cache you have to delete it, which requires opening the iPhoto image Package..;

iTunes: Photo sync creates iPod Photo Cache folder

... Control-click the iPhoto Library file and choose Show Package Contents from the shortcut menu.

In the iPhoto Library window, locate the iPod Photo Cache folder and drag it to the Trash...

My hidden iPhoto cache was 1.5 GB.

How exceedingly annoying. 

iPhone for kids: The Achilles Heel

For one brief shining moment I thought Apple had a good kid platform ....

Gordon's Tech: The kid's iPhone - configuration and AT&T

...As a computer, his iPhone has one large advantage over his desktop accounts. On the desktop Apple and Google together have totally broken OS X Parental Controls (MobileMe is the worst). On the iPhone, once you remove Safari and YouTube, you have Wikipanion and and Wolfram Alpha and Google Earth and Public Radio.app and New York Times.app...

That was before my intrepid 13 year old tutored me.

The problem is that a lot of iPhone apps use WebKit, and blocking Safari doesn't block WebKit.

So Google Earth has a Wikipedia layer. Click on the W icons, and it launches WebKit. Click around a while, and eventually you get to places I don't want my kid to go.

Scratch Google Earth.

AppBox Pro has lots of little tools he might like -- but it also includes iGoogle. (Why? Don't ask me.)

Scratch AppBox.

Wolfram Alpha looked good. Math, research, but no web. Oops. Except for the "Search the web" link at the bottom of every page that opens an embedded WebKit page.

Scratch Wolfram Alpha.

Houston, we have a problem.

Update 10/4/10: Google's AdMob ads give YouTube access from Pandora.

Location sharing on iPhone: Latitude, PlaceTrack and Latitudie

The Google-Apple war went public when Apple blocked the release of Latitude.app -- even before they blocked Google Voice.

With iOS4's support for background location sharing, I wondered when we'd see something like Latitude. (MobileMe also enables location tracking, but you can't share that information.)

About two months ago ago PlaceTrack tried to do this. Had it been accepted by Apple it would have updated Google's Latitude service. Unsurprisingly, since it's a Google-related product, it was rejected (limbo technically).

Yes, the Google-Apple war sucks.

Surprisingly, there's another App that updates Latitude - Latitudie. I wonder if it was accepted because it was first submitted internationally. It's $2 and has had mixed reviews. It it had better reviews, or if some geek I trust used it, I'd give it a try.

Gowalla shares locations, but it doesn't integrate with Latitude. It also has an annoying business model.

At the moment I'm most interested in Latitudie. I'm wary of putting it on my phone though -- I'd like to read a review from someone I trust.

Configuring iTunes to reference apps from a shared folder

9/25/10: With the latest release of iTunes it doesn't work any more anyway, you no longer get the prompt to find all your missing apps at once. So never was safe, and now doesn't work at all. Retained for historical purposes, plus it has some interesting links and a FairPlay discussion.
---
Oops. Don't do this, it causes iTunes to put every app on every phone synchronized with the share. Evidently iTunes writes metadata into the app file! I wonder if it's an extended attribute on OS X. A terrible design!
----

Sharing DRMd (FairPlay) material, such as videos and iPhone Apps, in a family is fraught. It's technically complex, and it's commercially complex. Rights holders, for example, probably want a BrainLock implant for every customer, so only one person can ever hear an iTunes song.

Given the commercial issues, Apple's FairPlay licensing is surprisingly generous. Wikipedia has the best (only?) summary, though since they're describing music it's obviously dated (Apple store music is rarely DRMd now) ...

• The track may be copied to any number of iPod portable music players (including the iPhone).^[2] (However, each iPod/iPhone can only have tracks from a maximum of five different iTunes accounts)
• The track may be played on up to five (originally three) authorized computers simultaneously.^[2]
• A particular playlist within iTunes containing a FairPlay-encrypted track can be copied to a CD only up to seven times (originally ten times) before the playlist must be changed.^[3]

Fraser Spiers' iPad educational project shows how this works for apps. He configured five authorized computers and one master iTunes account, so all the apps could be distributed to a large number of iPads. (I assume Fraser compensated the App developers somehow as this is a bit outside the usual scope of distribution.)

FairPlay may be generous, but iTunes really expects a single user. Even if every user on a computer shares a single iTunes account (ex: Dad's account), each has its own content collection. With iTunes 9 Apple enabled a sort of sharing, but it requires physically copying files.  Even in the days of TB drivers this can be wasteful.

When it comes to Mobile Applications (.app) this is particularly annoying. Each user's apps get updated separately for example [1]. So if Emily and I share the 1.5GB NAVIGON.app we each have a copy, and each copy is updated separately.

On the other hand, if you have every device sync to a single iTunes, users can't sync to their individual iCal or Address Book and content ratings and Smart Playlists become a bit of a struggle (ex: "last played" rules assume only one listener!). So in the old days many of us geeks gave each iPhone user in the family their own account. We used tricks like iTunes music 'include by reference' feature and its amazingly versatile drag-and-drop media behavior to sort of work around these limitations.

Now that most of sync to Google Apps via Active Sync rather than directly to our desktop accounts it really makes most sense to sync every device to one account (screw ratings). I'm doing that for the kids, but Emily still has her own account. Thanks to the 'include by reference and media drag and drop' technique we do ok with media, but Mobile Apps don't support include by reference. You have to copy them. So I've been using Apple's Family Sharing for apps only; it monitors additions to the master iTunes Library and copies the apps to her iTunes Library.

This had an annoying side-effect that all of our App updates had to be done twice, but when I bought the 1.5GB NAVIGON turn-by-turn GPS app things got really annoying. For geeks of my generation, 1.5GB is a lot of storage to waste (including backup of course).

I tried various tricks to get her iTunes to reference Mobile Apps stored on a Public Share on the computer that holds both our accounts. I tried Aliases and a I tried Symbolic Links to both apps and to the Mobile Application folder. Nothing worked ... until ... by chance ... I stumbled on what did work.

This is what I do now.

First I install apps to her account normally. Since we have Family Sharing setup anything I add to my account will be added to her account.

Then I did something like this (To be honest, I need to play with this a bit more, but if you're a geek this is all the hints you need. My apps are stored in a shared folder for which she has read/write privileges. If you're not a geek you shouldn't be reading this.):

1. In her account, move her .app files OUT of her iTunes Music:Mobile Applications folder.
2. Start iTunes for her, and right click on any of her App icons in the App view. I choose 'Get Info'. The App gets an exclamation mark next to it and ITunes asks if I want to locate the file. (Maybe I double clicked on the exclamation point?)
3. Choose Show In Finder (or ?). iTunes asked me where the file was. I navigated to the file in the shared folder on MY account and it accepted it. iTunes then asked me if I wanted to use the same path to update all other missing apps

That did it. Emily's iTunes now includes my Apps by reference instead of copying them. I only do one set of updates, and NAVIGON.app appears only once. Please note I'm not getting any extra privileges from doing this, I'm just saving disk space and update time.

All I need to do is periodically clean up her Library, update mine, and repeat this trick.

See also

• Sync iTunes Libraries Between Two Macs
• Working around iTunes lack of multi-user support
• The flaw in iTunes: 2 users, 2 iPods - and our brain locked future
• Tunes and the multi-iPhone family - two approaches

[1] Now that some App updates are iOS 4 specific, this ability to choose when to update may be a feature, but not I'm really getting complicated.