Category: Technology

17th April 2013

Going back to GetGlue

I’ve recently gone back to GetGlue, after an extended hiatus. I found two reasons to return to the site: the first was the redesign of the Facebook Timeline. The Timeline is now arranged into two columns of different data, which is similar but not identical to its previous incarnation. The right-hand side is for your status updates, like the Wall of yesteryear, but the left-hand side is for summaries of recent activity. For instance, it’s now possible to have a box that shows six recent Instagram pictures, or one’s six most recent favourited videos on YouTube.

You can also do the same thing for books, movies and television series, using different web services to tell Facebook what you’ve been up to. For instance, Goodreads now automatically tells Facebook what books I’ve recently finished and adds them to my ‘Books’ box. This is helpful, but I was looking for something that could do the same with television and film¹. Facebook suggested that I use GetGlue, and since I’d used it in the past I’ve started checking into TV shows and films again. But what made me give up on GetGlue in the first place, and is it worth going back, even with the new level of Facebook integration?

Several things annoyed me about GetGlue last time I used it. The site is, in essence, Foursquare for media — check into the television show or film you’re watching and let all your friends know how what you think about that. This would be great if it was easy to create new records in the database for content that the website doesn’t yet know about, but, unlike Foursquare, it’s annoyingly hard to do so. Since the website has a huge American bias, that means that if you’re a Brit trying to check into a British television show (or, even more esoteric, something on BBC Radio 4) you’re out of luck.

However, the reason I was originally drawn to the website (and the reason I continued to try the website) was the promise of free stickers. When you check into certain things, you win a sticker. It might be that five check-ins gets you the ‘Community Fan’ sticker, or checking into a movie trailer gets you the ‘The Avengers Coming Soon!’ sticker, but they’re cool. However, here the American bias again rears its ugly head; watching something at the wrong time² means you don’t get a sticker.

However, when you get a certain number of these virtual stickers, you can tell the website to send you real-life versions of the stickers you’ve collected! Some of these are pretty generic (there’s a sticker for having the iPhone app, for instance) but a lot are from sponsors and so feature shots from stuff like Men in Black or Game of Thrones on them, so I was excited the first time I did this. In fact, I was excited right up until I bumped into the third strike³ on the American bias front: if your postal address was in the United Kingdom, no stickers for you. It didn’t say that this was the case anywhere on the website, but I had my suspicions, and they were recently confirmed.

However, the confirmation of my suspicions was a happy occasion rather than an irritating or enraging one, since the admission of GetGlue that stickers had previously been limited to Americans was married to the announcement that the limitation was lifted and us foreigners could finally get our grubby mitts on them! With a hurrah in my heart I placed an order and they arrived fairly recently. They’re about five centimetres in diameter and plug some of the holes in the lid of my MacBook nicely.

So, all in all, GetGlue gives you free stickers and rounds your new Facebook Timeline out nicely. Win!

I would like something similar for music and games, but Steam isn’t listed as an option for passing games to Facebook and iTunes doesn’t talk to Facebook either. Hopefully last.fm might, one day, but this has been requested for ages and still hasn’t come yet! ↩
Say, Castle via iTunes Season Pass a couple of days after it’s aired on US TV, or Oblivion when it’s out in the UK but not yet in the USA. ↩
I am, of course, aware of the irony of using an American idiom to decry an American bias. ↩

19th January 2013

Setting a cover image on an ePub ebook

As some of you may already know, I recently received a Barnes & Noble Nook for Christmas. This has been a great gift and I’m thoroughly enjoying using it to read a lot more literature, but there’s a problem that has been recurring: some publishers don’t properly set the cover art on an e-book, meaning the cover doesn’t show up on my Nook. Since, for me, everything really should be perfect (it’s a disease, trust me), I have been attempting to rectify this problem with my ebooks and I’ve finally come upon the solution. It’s fairly simple to do, as long as you’re a little comfortable with editing in HTML.

The first thing to do if you’re having trouble is to download Calibre and install it. Calibre is a fairly clunky piece of open-source software but it’s very full-featured and allows for ebooks to be edited. Once you’ve installed Calibre, run it and drag the problematic ebook into the library. Now, there are two ways to proceed. One way is to click ‘Edit Metadata’, set the correct cover image and then convert the file into an epub; Calibre will embed the correct cover image into the new file. However, this method doesn’t sit well with me and so I’m going to outline how I do it below.

Right-click on the ebook and click ‘Tweak Book’, then click ‘Explode Book’. Look for a file that ends in ‘.opf’ (this will probably be in a folder called OEBPS) and open this file in your favourite text editor.¹ There will be, somewhere in this file, a line that says <manifest>. You want to find the ID of the cover within this tag. It’ll probably be something like

<item id="cover_image" href="cover.jpg" media-type="image/jpeg">

and so the ID is cover_image in this case. Now go up to the <metadata> tag and insert a piece of text before the end:

<meta name="cover" content="cover_image"/>

This will let the ePub file know where the cover image is contained, and should therefore show up properly on your Nook.

I use TextWrangler on my Macs and Notepad++ on my PCs; your mileage will vary. ↩

25th July 2012

AppShopper is the best iOS app tracker around

For a long time I’ve been keeping an eye out for a specific type of app. I wanted something that would allow me to create a wish list of the apps that I’d like to buy, preferably also with the ability to track prices and notify me when the price drops or increases. The first such app I bought was called PandoraBox [iTunes Link], by AppZap. Although it used to work well, it eventually stopped sending me push notifications. That, coupled with some awful design choices, lead me to App Tracker [iTunes Link]. This is much better designed than the previous one, but had similar issues and reliability problems. Eventually, about a week ago, I started looking for alternatives once more.

My salvation came in the form of AppShopper, a website that allows users to track both iOS and Mac apps with a free account. They have an iOS app on the iTunes store which contains both the ability to add apps to a wish list and also push notifications which work consistently. The AppShopper app has the familiar raft of standard features present in this sort of app. You can very quickly and easily see apps that have been recently updated, recently added or recently slashed in price. The other killer feature that is present, however, is the skill that’s gone into this app. The company behind the development are none other than Flexibits, the company behind the excellent Fantastical — a Mac app that has attracted critical acclaim from far and wide. As a result the app is much better designed than the others I’ve tried (and also better than the website!). If I have one criticism it’s that the search tab is hidden under ‘More’ and there’s no way to move it to the main tab bar; I’d use this more than the What’s New tab, I think, and so I’d love to be able to swap them over.

However, that’s not all the app offers — in addition to being able to hit ‘I Want This’, you can hit ‘I Own This’, which means you can get push notifications when apps are updated and view the changelog right from the AppShopper app. Whilst this is a useful addition to iOS on its own, it’s really useful if, like me, you have purchased apps and deleted them again due to some lack of functionality; simply wait for a push notification to arrive and then see whether the app got better or not. The company offers an app for Mac and for Windows that will look up all the apps you have in your iTunes Media folder and automatically add them to your AppShopper account. This is very useful if you have as many apps as I do!

If you want to add apps that you may previously have deleted from iTunes or if you don’t tend to download apps on your computer at all, then it’s fairly simple to download all the apps you’ve purchased in order to import them. Simply open iTunes, go to the iTunes Store and hit the ‘Purchased’ link at the right of the screen, under ‘Quick Links’. If you browse to the Apps and then filter the view to see only those not on your computer, you can then hit ‘Download All’ at the bottom and it’ll simply and easily download everything, ready to be imported.¹

All in all, this is a fantastic app that I am very glad I’ve found. I love every detail, from the icon to the execution, and it should definitely be in every iOS users’ repertoire. Highly recommended.

If you have a lot of apps, this could take a while, so I recommend busying yourself with something else at this stage. ↩

10th July 2012

Wargames companies and 3D printing

Something I’ve wanted to write a blog post on for a while is the transition from the old to the new. Let me expand on this a little bit. What’s happened is easy to explain: Before I was born¹, there were independent shops that sold things. Maybe they sold vinyl records, or maybe they sold VHS tapes, or maybe they sold books, or maybe they sold copies of Dungeons & Dragons, but they sold things. Eventually, those shops died out as bigger companies arose and stamped them out. Companies like Waterstone’s moved into town centres and used their distribution networks to stamp out smaller, independent bookshops. Branches of HMV and Virgin Megastores basically replaced the independent record stores and video stores. And Games Workshop penetrated the market by selling traditional gaming materials more cheaply than indie stores could and switching to their own proprietary systems when the indie stores had faded away.

Then, the cycle began again. Only this time it wasn’t a new chain of high-street stores, it was companies like Amazon and Apple, and this time the war was more complicated. Amazon was able to maintain low prices by running at a loss for years in order to undercut the chains that had used very similar tactics to undercut the indie stores. Meanwhile, Apple’s iTunes Music Store (now just the iTunes Store) went from its launch in 2003 to the leading music retailer in the United States in 2008 and the leading worldwide retailer in 2010. Steam has revolutionised PC gaming, becoming the dominant force in that retail sector and leading to a dearth of PC games at most high street stores. Online, digital downloads combined with cheap mail order services lead to the loss of many high street stalwarts. At this point we have lost Virgin Megastores and Woolworths, HMV has begun to haemorrhage money, Borders is gone in both the US and the UK, Game has gone into administration (resulting in the closure of my local Gamestation) and Blockbusters is facing an uncertain future.

This moves me onto the subject of 3D printing. You’ll note that I haven’t said anything about Games Workshop, despite mentioning them in my first paragraph. This is because Games Workshop are, for the most part, still afloat and still making games. But if you have been paying attention, there’s a clear pattern: Online, digital products are beginning to force the high street chains out of business, or at the very least are leading to huge reductions in their profits. And suddenly, 3D printing is right around the corner. Games Workshop has already involved itself in the 3D printing scene; unfortunately, they did this by sending a takedown notice to Thingiverse because someone called Thomas Valenty had uploaded two of his own designs that were intended to be used with Warhammer 40,000.

The first thing to note is that the Wired article that reported this takedown has a short series of thoughts on the legality of the situation, which will be even more relevant as 3D photocopiers, capable of copying items on demand, become more widely available. It turns out that patent law is probably more on the side of the consumer than it is on the side of the corporation in the case of manufactured items. Most patents only last twenty years, in marked contrast to the situation that we’re currently seeing in the music, movie and publishing industries where copyright lasts for a much longer period of time.

But, even if the law ends up being changed to screw the customers, Games Workshop are still even more screwed, because someone is going to work out how to do this legally. It’s like Napster and the major record labels; the major record labels finally managed to get Napster made illegal and then shut down, but in its place rose iTunes and Amazon, both of which were very successful due to the genius of taking a product and making it easier to buy than to pirate. Ditto for pirating PC games; it’s easier to buy them from Steam than it is to go through the rigamarole of torrenting them.²

Games Workshop are already beginning to look more shaky due to the rise of companies like Spartan Games, who sell a range of games that are very cheap to get started with; you can get a pretty decent army and the rules for under £50 in most cases, as compared with a rulebook that costs almost that much in Games Workshop’s situation. And, eventually, just as happened with the iTunes Store and Steam, there will be a company that makes its money by selling 3D printer models of the armies that they stock alongside cheap-to-purchase PDFs and iOS/Android/Windows 8 apps that contain the rules. It’ll completely undercut anything that Games Workshop is doing by being cheaper and easier than buying a hardback rulebook for £35 alongside an army that will probably cost about £100 on top of that.

I’m interested to see whether Games Workshop will follow the trend, or whether it will realise what no other high street chain has realised and actually alter its behaviour to fit this new way of doing things. I’m fascinated by the fact that every single industry has made exactly the same mistakes as every other, and that none of the high street chains seem to have reacted in time to prevent this happening even when it became obvious it would.³

Perhaps this is somewhat cynical, but you know what I mean. ↩
The reason that I’m reluctant to say that videogame piracy has been effectively beaten is due to the stupidity of games companies, who are currently crippling their products in such a way that the pirated versions are turning out to be better than the legal ones, due to both accidental and deliberate server failures. ↩
Honourable mention to Waterstone’s, who are trying to make their high street operations relevant to consumers who are getting more used to buying digital books. ↩

3rd July 2012

Secondhand Software

RockPaperShotgun recently reported on a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union explicitly stating that any company that sells software transfers the right to distribute that software to the customer upon completion of a transaction. The ruling was summarised in a freely downloadable press release (PDF) which says:

Where the copyright holder makes available to his customer a copy – tangible or intangible – and at the same time concludes, in return form payment of a fee, a licence agreement granting the customer the right to use that copy for an unlimited period, that rightholder sells the copy to the customer and thus exhausts his exclusive distribution right. Such a transaction involves a transfer of the right of ownership of the copy. Therefore, even if the licence prohibits a further transfer, the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy.

If you don’t know much about how software sales through services like Steam and Origin have worked up until this point, you might not fully grasp the enormity of the ruling, but this is huge news for anyone who’s ever bought software from a central service. RockPaperShotgun were, understandably, focusing on what this meant for the companies involved in videogames sales, but this also applies to online software stores like Apple’s App Store and Google Play. It means that any downloadable software is yours to resell, thus meaning that the second-hand market for videogames will continue to be alive and kicking¹. Another excerpt says:

By its judgment delivered today, the Court explains that the principle of exhaustion of the distribution right applies not only where the copyright holder markets copies of his software on a material medium (CD-ROM or DVD) but also where he distributes them by means of downloads from his website.

The point I want to make is that this ruling is, potentially, not just exciting for people who have bought software. I can’t see any reason why the ruling above would not also apply to, say, music that’s downloaded from the Internet instead of sold on CD. Or perhaps to books sold online instead of on dead trees. If I’m correct, then companies that offer downloaded content have to allow customers to transfer their purchases to other users in exchange for a fee from the other user.

It goes without saying that this may not be a system set up by the companies themselves. I highly doubt that there are suddenly going to be tools built into iTunes that facilitate the creation of a second-hand sales channel, for instance. However, according to this, tools will have to be introduced to allow users to transfer books purchased under one iTunes account to another one:

Furthermore, the Court states that an original acquirer of a tangible or intangible copy of a computer program for which the copyright holder’s right of distribution is exhausted must make the copy downloaded onto his own computer unusable at the time of resale. If he continued to use it, he would infringe the copyright holder’s exclusive right of reproduction of his computer program.

If the original acquirer is no longer allowed to have a downloaded copy, they cannot sell a copy to a friend and just send that friend an email attachment; they must no longer be able to read the copy in question. This would mean that the user would, presumably, no longer be allowed to download that book from the iBookstore and thus it would need to be transferred to another account. I can’t imagine the publisher being happy with the original user re-downloading content they have sold to a third party, either.

One of the problems I’ve heard people espouse with electronic media is the death of secondhand markets for various things. I often find gems in various shops that resell old stuff, and I admit that I would be sad to see this go. Another important aspect of the secondhand is the charity shops (or, if you’re not from around here, thrift stores) that rely on secondhand goods to work. Although I think they’re still safe for the time being, it is nice to see that, in Europe at least, those who like to buy secondhand will still be able to do so even in this modern and electronic age.

At least, it will be when companies implement this functionality and allow for the transfer of apps between different users’ accounts — whether this will be something that is quickly implemented, or whether it will have to wait for a European court case, is yet to be seen. ↩