The Multi-part postings “The dreaded ‘Idea’” addresses minor world needs that I’d like to see happen but don’t believe any single one is important enough (for me) to go to anybody with.

Part 1 spouts freely about Twitter and iPhone/iPod Apps & iOS along with a short treatise-like rant on ideas.

Part 2 explores needs in the web media landscape.

Reading

• Service to access all your ebooks anywhere. Any platform on any device.

UPDATE: Enter Google ebooks

Accomplished with web service using the following steps in the user process:

Step 1: Provide login info for all your eBook accounts and/or upload existing eBooks.

Step 2: Choose where and how you want to read your eBooks.

Step 3: Read

• Directly adding email newsletters/lists to ReadItLater

UPDATE:  Official and user created Read It Later apps for this.

ReaditLater lets you queue up words from the Internet to read later.  When you find something you don’t have time to read now just click a bookmarklet button in your browser’s bookmark bar.  Later, when you find time to read, you can tear through all your reading material at ReaditLaterList.com or from their app on your phone.  And you do so with any ads stripped away and the text formatted for quick reading.

ReaditLater’s only qualm is its individual nature.  Material must be added from a single web page.  It needs an option to add RSS feeds or subscribe to everything on a site via Feedburner.  The basic notion here is to enhance ReaditLater by also making it a bullshit-free RSS reader.

One way to accomplish this would be for ReaditLater to give its users their own unique ReaditLater email addresses to use when subscribing to mailing lists.  For example, Twitpic.com gives its users an email — like  username.3749@twitpic.com – to tweet photos via email.

No clue on how they’d do RSS.  Perhaps a custom field on ReaditLaterList.com to paste in a site’s RSS feed?

Music

• Lossless Audio upgrade subscription service

Since storage for music is hardly still an issue, why doesn’t iTunes offer upgrading your music collection to true, lossless, CD quality tunes?  Seems like many can’t tell the difference between a CD and an MP3, but some can and want better sounding stuff.

Or if Apple won’t do this, a web service could offer to scan your music library and upgrade your tunes with better sounding lossless versions like FLAC, Windows Media Lossless and Apple Lossless.

• iTunes local

Any older folk remember the record store where you’d actually walk inside this place and buy music sans computer?  When done proper, record stores still turn you on to great tunes and usually with plenty of patrons ready to engage in back-and-forth band banter.

Why can’t the local record store be revived and be revived with the help of the music behemoth that is Apple’s iTunes?

How? One big way would be for iTunes and music labels to offer exclusives and early releases available — for a set time – only at local record stores that partner with iTunes. Bring in your iPod/iPhone to load it up with this music.

And perhaps provide incentives to pack bodies in the music shops.  One possibility would be offering credits to play 30 sec preview clips or full songs for everyone in the store to hear. Get more of these jukebox credits when you buy something from the stores.

Subsequent installments of “The Dreaded ‘Idea’” will address Computing/Internet/Telephony and various miscellany that eschews its own category.

I’ve been using Songbird for some time now. It’s basically an open source iTunes with Firefox built in.  Today they released version 1.0.  If you want to know more, check out their website or the TechCrunch post/review.  It is a fine piece of cross-platform software for music and audio lovers — particularly ones who like to procure free tunes from music blogs (because Songbird scrubs the page for audio and offers up mp3s for easy download).

Wanted to point out this little error by Apple. Not really even worth mentioning. Nevertheless, the iPhone iTunes store says it can not be accessed without a Wi-Fi connection.  This is not true.  It only takes, at minimum, a Edge connection to get in where podcasts under 10 MB can be downloaded.  Any podcast over 10 MB requires a Wi-Fi connection.

I’m not sure, but believe regular tracks from the iTunes store require Wi-Fi.  At least that’s how it use to be.  Things may have changed with the new 2.2 update.  Not sure.  (The above screen capture is probably just the same one left over from version 2.1 where every connection to the iTunes store on iPhone required Wi-Fi.)

I know, I know, I bitch and bitch about my iPhone here all the time, but I really do love it.  For the most part.  Until shit like the above screen grab happens.

I’m pretty sure, when I sync my iPhone to iTunes, all my apps are properly updated and transferred between computer and device and vice versa, but I get the “unknown error” pictured above every time.  I check the version number of the apps on the phone and computer and both say I have the latest version. Still this error message pops up on every sync.

Simplify Media is an awesome application.  It allows you to listen to music from your iTunes library remotely.  If installed on your home computer, you can basically leave that computer running and then access all the music on it from your work computer, your iPhone, wherever Simplify Media is installed.

But when I went to install version 1.1.1 for the iphone an epic fail occurred.  Not only does the icon appear with a non-functioning status bar (as pictured above), the app store still shows I have one update to install, and the phone throws the following message:

“You’ve already purchased this item but it hasn’t been downloaded.  If you’re having trouble downloading it, open iTunes on your computer, select Check for Purchases, then sync your device to your computer.”

What the hell am I doing wrong here people?

Hopefully, the iPhone 2.1 software will do away with both of these issues.

Click Screengrab to Enlarge

This is a screen grab of my iPhone application updates in iTunes.  One simple question: Why are applications showing up two, three times?  Seems like this shouldn’t happen.  And I have no guess as to why except maybe something is screwing up if I choose to update them on the iPhone and then again in iTunes?

So here is my conversation with a fellow first generation iPhone owner.  As of 10:12 am, central time, my iPhone is a brick.  The IM below tells the whole ugly story.

(9:31:12 AM) MB: getting software now…
(9:31:13 AM) MB: so exciting
(9:31:28 AM) dipps (me): dude my iphone is having major issues
(9:31:33 AM) MB: oh no
(9:31:34 AM) MB: whats up?
(9:31:41 AM) dipps (me): oh man
(9:31:47 AM) MB: im sorry man
(9:32:05 AM) dipps (me): clicked to check for update about 8:30
(9:32:15 AM) dipps (me): it dl the software
(9:32:23 AM) dipps (me): then it said backing up iphone
(9:32:28 AM) dipps (me): but then, get this
(9:32:42 AM) dipps (me): it said “couldn’t restore iphone”
(9:32:46 AM) dipps (me): wtf
(9:32:47 AM) dipps (me): so
(9:32:52 AM) MB: whoa

(9:33:05 AM) dipps (me): it was stuck on the apple emblem on the iphone
(9:33:13 AM) dipps (me): i rebooted the computer
(9:33:27 AM) dipps (me): then had to unplug iphone
(9:33:38 AM) dipps (me): now my only option was restore
(9:34:12 AM) MB: wow dude
(9:34:12 AM) dipps (me): so the status bar says it was done restoring and now it says verifying iphone software
(9:34:26 AM) dipps (me): so i’ll let you know in a min what happens
(9:34:38 AM) dipps (me): how are the app you have?
(9:34:56 AM) dipps (me): i think i’m gonna do something for nearly a nerd if it ever gets updated
(9:35:27 AM) dipps (me): now it says restoring iphone firmware
(9:35:38 AM) MB: mine is still installing
(9:35:47 AM) dipps (me): 2.0?
(9:36:49 AM) MB: yeah
(9:36:54 AM) MB: verifying now
(9:39:40 AM) dipps (me): can you get the itunes store to work?
(9:41:53 AM) dipps (me): nevermind
(9:42:15 AM) dipps (me): now it said to wait while the iphone restarts
(9:42:42 AM) dipps (me): but on the iphone it says to plug it into itunes, but it is already
(9:43:29 AM) dipps (me): and itunes says accessing itunes store but nothing is coming up, but it shows my phone in the devices row
(9:43:32 AM) dipps (me): hmmm
(9:43:50 AM) MB: mine too
(9:44:59 AM) dipps (me): wonder if downloading those apps yesterday has anything to do with it
(9:45:10 AM) MB: i dont know man, but this is not *ucking cool
(9:45:18 AM) dipps (me): wonder if i should unplug the phone and plug it back in
(9:45:37 AM) dipps (me): maybe hit the eject first in the devices
(9:45:39 AM) MB: i did that, and it didnt help
(9:45:49 AM) dipps (me): hmmmm
(9:46:38 AM) dipps (me): maybe try deleting the apps in itunes and get them later?
(9:47:01 AM) dipps (me): what’s yours doin gnow same thing?
(9:48:17 AM) dipps (me): maybe the app store is down
(9:50:26 AM) MB: my phone isnt installing the software correctly, its like it has no OS
(9:50:52 AM) dipps (me): http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/007248.html
(9:51:14 AM) dipps (me): i’m *ucked along with others
(9:51:50 AM) dipps (me): why didn’t they just let first geners update yesterday?
(9:53:11 AM) MB: my software installed, but the phone itself is just a piece of metal and glass
(9:53:25 AM) MB: it doesnt DO anything…mother*uckers
(10:01:04 AM) MB: I tried restarting it…same deal
(10:01:37 AM) MB: basically it says that everything is fine with my phone
(10:01:57 AM) dipps (me): damn
(10:02:58 AM) dipps (me): mine says we could not complete your itunes store request. unknown error (-9838). Try again later.
(10:03:09 AM) dipps (me): when clicking on iphone under devices

UPDATE 1:  Around 12:10 pm, I finally was able to connect my iPhone to the iTunes store.  Took a while to restore the phone.  Now it is wanting to access the iTunes store again, I guess to load the apps onto the phone or whatever, but I’m still getting an error.  Looks like the 2.0 software is on my phone however.