iTunes “favicon” on 3rd party websites to add content to your iTunes “To Watch” Playlist
Here is a suggestion I posted to the Apple TV feedback site today:
I suggest you develop an iTunes “favicon” that becomes common place to host on pages that reference topics related to content that is available in the iTunes store (e.g. like icons for Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Readit, etc). Clicking the icon would either:
a) take you to the related iTunes store content for that related topic (e.g. an article about U2 might take you to the iTunes Store home page for U2).
or, preferably
b) might add reference to that content in some kind of “inbox” or “playlist” or “favourites” within iTunes to refer to the next time you use iTunes (Mac/PC), your iPhone/iPad iTunes, or available in a “watch queue” on your Apple T
This link could apply to references across any web site to the iTunes Music, TV Shows, Movies, Apps, eBook, Podcasts content. The link could also apply to any such content that could be viewed through Apple products (e.g. Safari, iTunes streaming, Youtube on iPhone/iPad/AppleTV). The link would allow you to open that content directly (e.g. the movie, photo, music, online video), not surrounded by a web page. It provides a convenient way to add content to a “to-be-consumed playlist” in your devic
The act of adding items to playlist might cause a Push Notification to your iPhone/iPad, or display the “ready to watch/view” dialogue box on your AppleTV (i.e. like ready to watch rented movies) to allow the user to immediately start playback on their current device if desired. This is all from clicking a link in a third party website. Taking this to the extreme, you could immediately start playing music on your home stereo (via AppleTV or similar) by clicking links on any 3rd party web site that support the iTunes favicon lin
You may support combine this with an affiliate program to give a small percentage of any potential iTunes Store sale (if relevant) to the link source. This would encourage such links to be added to third party web sites as a potential revenue source. It would drive traffic for content consumption/purchase to the iTunes store for Apple. Take the affiliate program further, you might allow individuals to host the iTunes favicon to the iTunes Store in return for iTunes Store credit (e.g. to spend on Apps).
Example Use Cases:
1) A news article about a band might link to mentioned songs, album, band in the iTunes Store. Clicking the iTunes icon would not open iTunes (although this could be a secondary option), but instead queue it to to “to listen” playlist. The user would then see this from their iPod/iPhone/iPad/AppleTV in a format friendly to immediately listen to or purchase the musi
2) A site like TED might include an iTunes icon link beside each online video on their web site. Rather than watch online, the user may want to browse talks online, adding them to their “to watch” queue, to later watch from their couch via AppleTV.
3) A blog post about an iPhone/iPad App might link to an app on the iTunes Store via this iTunes icon. Like today connecting to the iTunes Preview web site, clicking the link would (indirectly) open the App Store to purchase the application. However this icon provides an “official” graphical link (i.e. not a text based URL) and, if applicable, may provide a commission to the affliate web sit
4) A tweet might include a shortened URL to the equivalent of the iTunes link to achieve the same result (i.e. just without the graphical iTunes favicon). The linker gets affiliate compensation. The user immediately adds content to the to-watch inbox. You may have a format of the link that would directly open the content in the local applicatio
5) If Apple ever enhanced Apple TV to be more of a web consumption device (e.g. to read blogs, RSS feeds, etc) the favicon icon could be supported in a “TV remote” style of browsing to easily allow adding related content in the article to your “to watch” queu
You could have richer javascript supported versions of the favicon link that, for example provided a dropdown menu with links to any relevant keywords that were found in the iTunes content database related to the text on that web page. For example, a news story about U2 might return a dropdown list for content related to U2 alarms, U2 music videos, TED talks by Bono, etc. In other words, the web site didn’t need to individually link to iTunes content in the article, the link was a generic link and the iTunes website backend did a realtime search of the site (on pageload or icon click) to fetch the keywords). The link now becomes a generic link on all web pages _hoping_ for relevant predictive keywords relevant to the content on the site.
03.24.10Future iPhoto Suggestions
Some quick suggestions for iPhoto (submitted to Apple on 25/03/2010).
1) Timeline
We have alternative navigation paths to photos by people (Faces) and location (Places) but nothing particularly visual for browsing by time. Sure the Events or Photos library can be sorted by date, however this doesn’t give you a good view of the distribution of your photos over time, or easily jump to photos at a particular time.
Why not leverage the same timeline UI as Time Machine where the distribution of photos is shown in a histogram style graph down the side. Show the library of Events or Photo libraries disappearing into the distance (i.e. bottom of stack is further back in time, like Time Machine).
As your mouse hovers across the timeline, the main display will show the Key Photo for the event(s) on that day (i.e. don’t go any deeper to try to show individual photos). The idea is to find an event quickly, like a Birthday, then click on the Event or Photo library to display it’s contents in the traditional grid view.
Basically, leverage this UI metaphor across numerous forms of content in the OS. For example:
- Documents, based on version of document or backup (done, in Time Machine)
- Photos, based on date taken (as proposed above)
- Music, to browse music by era (e.g. to sort your iTunes library to view music based on when it was released)
- Web History, to view history of browsing.
You could alternatively use the Cover Flow UI (scrolling horizontally, list History in Safari) however I think that the “fading into the distance” metaphor reflects something over time better, so long as it is combined with a UI widget to also view/skip to a specific period of time (like the histogram in Time Machine).
2) Age of People
Not so great for adults, but for viewing photos of kids growing up this feature would be great. In conjunction with tagging photos with names (Faces), allow the user to configure the Data of Birth of that person. They, when you hover your mouse over a person in a photo, you could also calculate how old they were in that photo (e.g. “David (18 months)”). This feature would also allow you to search photos of a person based on their age in the photo.
3) Don’t Freeze
Hopefully this is just me, but iPhoto almost always freezes my entire iMac when I rotate photos too quickly using keyboard shortcuts (e.g. command R).
02.9.10Feature Request: One touch audio conferencing
A feature request for Apple or anyone else that cares that might also be in the business of mobile phone OS software…
When will someone realise what a pain in the a** it is to join a phone conference on a mobile phone. Here’s the usually process when dialling in from the road:
1) Reminder goes off;
2) You typically need to open the invite and copy the phone number;
3) Switch to phone app to dial (or, maybe if you lucky the number what highlighted for direct dial – depends on where number was stored)
4) Switch back from call to invite.
5) At this point you probably need to write the CEC down on paper as most phones won’t play the DTMF tones when you paste into the call app (separate idea there).
6) Switch back to phone app, manually enter CEC into phone app, hopefully in one go. At some point you probably need to actually listen to the IVR to learn what other numbers you need to press around the CEC that the meeting invite didn’t contain.
Sounds a little too hard for a basic task of joining a phone conference, right (please enlighten me if this problem has already been solved).
Here’s my feature list for modern day telepolygamy…
a) Make storing a Contact Record about phone conference number simpler
I save common Conference Entry Codes (CECs) as a contact with all the appropriate pauses (p’s) and hashes for one touch dialling. Please make it so I don’t need to do a Google Search and test dial 3 times before I get this cryptic magic number right.
b) Make booking a CEC simpler
When I’ve made my booking, email me back a vCard or similar with the contact record (point a). Include this vCard in the meeting invite.
c) Allow me to save the CEC with the appointment as another field like, but not instead of, Location
I usually have a room booked (or multiple) and then want to save / send the CEC for the call. Attaching a Contact record and sending as a vCard in a field designated by all PIMs should do the trick.
d) Allow me to dial the CEC from the appointment in one touch
(hmm, just realised I how now automatically refer to it as a touch instead of click)
When the appointment reminder pops up, allow me to dial straight into the call with one touch from the reminder window (e.g. buttons for “View”, “Close” or “Dial-in”).
e) Allow me to send the CEC to a nearby physical phone (e.g. polycom, speaker phone)
This might be low-tech, using DTMF tones, or high-tech using something like Wifi or Bluetooth. The point it in this day and age I don’t think it’s necessary to retype numbers between devices. The later, high tech, solution probably requires some standards between software and (conference) phone devices.
Let me know what you think…
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