Just So You Know…

The next weeks I will continue to make some minor improvements to this site. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Back To Tomorrow

We don’t want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward. #

- Dan Quayle, US Republican politician (1947)

Qloud & The Filter Reviewed

Today I’ll review two iTunes plug ins, which were recently launched.

Qloud does tagging within iTunes, an idea I discussed here last year (Dutch). So you could say I’ve been waiting for something like this to come along. Unfortunately, I had quite some problems with the installation and the user interface. The installation took forever and I needed to download the program again to get it installed. After I finally got it installed, the user interface just froze iTunes and my PC, over and over again. Within 15 minutes I got so frustrated, I removed the software and didn’t look back. (1/10)

An even cooler idea was made into The Filter, a service that aims to create “perfect play lists’ from your music collection“. Although installation was pretty easy, I think they do miss the point. Instead of monitoring usage of iTunes and creating play lists based on your personal behavior, the service still expects you to do the work and create play lists yourself. Before I downloaded and installed The Filter, I also expected a community functionality which would enable an exchange of play lists between users. This was not the case. In my honest opinion another missed opportunity. (4/10)

If any of these plug ins will be a success, Apple will perhaps integrate these functionalities in the next version of iTunes. Possibly this will lead to acquisition of any of these companies, something the guys that develop these kind of products are aiming at. However, if I would be responsible for M&A over at Apple, I would not be tempted. Not even a little bit.

(both links via Lifehacker)