Stop the mavenization of Spring!

Argh! They’re moving the entire Spring build to Maven 2. Hellish prospect.
Sure, there are dependency problems with Spring, but not shipping the required Jars makes the whole download and build process that much more fragile and massively time consuming in some cases. In 5 years time your local backed-up-onto-archive-CD copy of Spring may not build for whatever strange reason related to Maven or repository obselence.

With ANT and a distro that includes all the required JARs you can be sure your projects won’t be obstructed in the future.

Yes you can do local repositories with Maven but then you lose the “big selling point” don’t you?

Please vote on this issue in an attempt to save Spring from Mavenization.

Apple, Front Row, and our living rooms

Well it should have been obvious to most people watching that Apple was going to move to try to take over our living rooms with some kind of device. The code-named “iTV” media center box looks very promising.

Bundling a souped-up version of Front Row, and it appears not including normal “computer” functionality, this dedicated box could win a lot of friends especially as it will work with PCs – although I imagine the photo viewing will not be available then as iPhoto is not on Windows (yet?). It looks like the price will be low enough too ($299). It appears to lack a DVD drive, which is interesting as it signals that they see a purely download future for this. Most people have a DVD player already I suppose… but with the bought videos being lower than DVD quality (due to download bandwidth issues I would say) this could be an issue for some.
However there seem to be some things they really have to jump on quickly if this is going to be mass market. First, they have to solve their global (non-USA) content problem in the iTunes Music Store. If you can’t buy movie or TV content outside the USA the market for this will be diminished somewhat.

Second, they need to introduce pay per view. I don’t want to buy movies. I’m too busy, I rarely have time to watch them. However an impulse pay per view circa $3 or so will definitely have my wife and I watching the occasional film when we find an evening where both kids are actually asleep for long enough for us to have a break!

Third, Front Row should be made extensible for 3rd party developers. There are great TV tuner products out there that currently cannot integrate with front row. With an Apple device in the middle of your living room connected to your TV, it is insane for it not to be able to actually show normal TV as well. Kick out the set top box!

Apple could be very well positioned to change the way we use media content in the living room forever. By securing key content (presumably exclusively for certain channels) and providing smart downloading and purchasing of TV shows people actually want to watch, they could hit the “video on demand” holy grail.

However the first iTV device, as shown so far, sounds unlikely to do this just yet as it seems to rely on a PC/Mac elsewhere in the house to do purchasing and download etc. This could be a strength though – as most people have a PC or Mac in the house. I suppose the question is then do they have iTunes.

Which naturally makes you think that their primary market for this device initially will be iPod users. Non-Apple fans who have just bought into iPod and appreciate the simplicity and aesthetics. They already use iTunes, probably the iTunes store, so they’re more than half way there.

So it looks like the Apple foot in the door (iPod) could well lead to high “iTV” take up, and then eventually they will try to use this I reckon, to shoehorn people into getting Macs to replace their Windows PCs. If it comes true it could be the stake in the heart of MS

I’m just wondering if the “iTV” will have bluetooth or USB for a keyboard and mouse… and whether it has full OS X hidden behind. If so it could be the full interactive TV and Windows “ouster” in disguise.

Oceansize

I wetn with some friends to see Coheed & Cambria play at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire the other week and this gave me a chance to finally see Oceansize play live. I’d not been drawn into their stuff previously as I’m not really a psychedelia/space rock kind of person (if that’s what you can call them) but live they really carried it off, and their new material is dare I say more “proggy”.

Tim Smith of Cardiacs produced some of their early material, and its great to see that Oceansize themselves are fans of Cardiacs… I did notice the lead vocalist doing Cardiacs “tiptoe bouncing” (when will Silvery be recorded?!) at one point.

Next day I immediately bought the album “Everyone Into Position” on iTunes and frankly it is brilliant. Really refreshing sound and with such truly epic songs. Ornament / The Last Wrongs has to qualify as an epic pop prog classic, if there were such an award. Annoyingly all online sources of it I can find, to attempt to back up this claim, are only 30s long and of just the intro which is very quite as it is merely the foothills of the mountainous 9 minute epic.