waffle

Jesper

this has always fascinated me

when we used to do gate operation charts in electrical engineering class I felt like I was home

Scott Stevenson

wait stop

whatever you say after that won’t beat that sentence

The next version of ThisService will contain “Pack Up”.

You select “Pack Up Service” from the File menu and you get a list of all current ThisService-generated services on your Mac. You can pick an instructions file and rename it if you’d like, and when you click Pack Up, a zip file is generated, containing the service, your instructions file (if you selected one) and a generic “What do I do with this file?” document. If you created a this-script-is-referenced-instead-of-copied-style service (as was introduced in 1.1b1), it also resolves the reference and copies the script into the service.

The zip file is all you need to distribute. You don’t need to tell people to get ThisService, you don’t need to tell them to create text files and rename them to have funny extensions, you don’t even need to write instructions for how to install the service. I believe enormously in shortening the pipeline between “I have made a useful service” to “Other people can download my service”, and Pack Up is a way of making that happen.

To be honest, when Hosey wrote what he wrote about ThisService, I was flattered but I thought it was a load of hyperbole and wishful thinking in the end. These days, however, people are sending thanks nearly every day. Occasionally money changes hands, but mainly people are telling me that the sun blazes less harshly in the summer, the cold bites less bitterly in the winter, pleasant rain falls more often and that, oh yeah, ThisService is really neat and saves them a bunch of time and hassle regularly and that I should be commended and made president of a wondrous island somewhere in the Pacific (presumably one with high-bandwidth Internet connections, lest they want to give up on support).

I am incredibly grateful that I have been given the opportunity to brighten so many people’s days, not to mention weigh down their application menus. I really can’t tell if services have grown more popular, if the insular circle of prospective code monkeys that ThisService is currently aimed at have recently decided to give it a twirl or three, or if it’s just a case of people randomly paying it more attention at the same time. What I can tell you that it’s more than I imagined when Gruber proposed an app back in late October.

Paul Thurrott: “And yet, Apple jumped right into movie (and TV) sales, right after music. Though Apple is no doubt now the most popular online service for movies, it’s had a slow start. The problem is, unlike music, most people don’t want to watch most movies more than once. $10 to $15 for a standard definition digital movie is too much money.”

You know, he’s right.

How many times in your life do you listen to your favorite song? How many times in your life do you watch your favorite movie? People buy music. People rent movies. This is not about technology, this is about actual usage.

It’s also about peripheral activity. You very rarely listen to music and don’t do something else. You very rarely follow a movie or a TV show by just reading lips or hearing the dialog. If there was ever a truth to Steve Jobs’ famous statement that “people don’t want to watch video on iPods”, it’s this: watching video is immersive. You’ll have to drop what you’re doing regardless, so who in their right mind would watch it on a small screen rather than a big screen (and all TV screens are bigger than iPods)?

It turns out, no one, if not for a) the novelty factor and b) the convenience of having the stuff right there inside the little thing. Getting anything to the TV involves rigging up cables and apparatuses. People hate that. All full-size iPod docks since the iPod grew a color screen has included video-out, and the people that regularly use that can get together with the Zune owners and squeeze into a cab.

Just like eventually, cell phone music players will stop sucking, people will stop watching video on their iPods. Apple’s launches this January are, among other things, ways to make sure they have their ass covered.

MPAA: “We are committed to fair use, interoperability, and DRM”.

You know, like Idi Amin announcing that he is committed to free will, non-violence and beating dissenters to a bloody pulp.