Apple Teeny

So Steve Jobs made a triumphant return to the masses yesterday at Apple’s special event. He still looks a little delicate to me, but I wish him all the best. It’s nice to see him back at the helm.

One of the things I was most looking forward to in the announcements was the rumored release of what those in the Apple rumour business had dubbed ‘Cocktail’. As far as I can tell, iTunes LP is what the marketing bods have decided to call it. I can’t say I’m taken with the name but I see the reasoning.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m on about, here’s how Apple describe iTunes LP.

The visual experience of the record album returns with iTunes LP. Download select albums and experience a beautifully designed, interactive world right in your iTunes library on a Mac or PC — many are created by the artists. While you listen to your favorite songs, you can dive into animated lyrics and liner notes, watch performance videos, view artist and band photos, and enjoy other bonus materials. And become an even bigger fan.

Overall, the announcement left me a little underwhelmed. Not because it’s not a great feature (I’ve not used it yet so I couldn’t comment) but because I had a conversation with my old boss a few years back when I worked in the music sector about something very similar.

Back then, iTunes and the iPod had yet to take over the world and no one in the music business seemed to understand what this meant for them. They reacted first by ignoring it, and then by fighting it tooth and nail. The people I spoke to were split over whether digital downloads would kill or save the industry, but everyone seemed convinced that it would never rival CD sales. The rhetoric of the time was “people want to hold their music in their hands.”

In a way they were right. But they weren’t talking about the iPod. They were talking about having an actual CD that you could put on your shelf. They were thinking about the endless rows of music they could proudly display in their living rooms. They held romantic notions of sifting through their library of music on a lazy sunday afternoon, remembering all those forgotten tracks they’d bought years ago. Yet look at us now.

Back then, I was certain something like iTunes LP was on the horizon and I would talk at length about the ability to supply extras with your download such as liner notes and photographs like you got on most CD sleeves. How it would provide an incentive for legal downloaders and how Apple, through iTunes, was perfectly positioned to offer such a feature. But back then, that wasn’t a new feature. It was a pale imitation of something you already got for real when you bought a CD.

At the time, I was busying myself making websites for bands. Big record labels would sign them up in their thousands and come to the agency I worked at, where we churned out Flash websites for them. The record labels loved our work, and we enjoyed making them. More importantly though, the end users seemed more than happy to sit through whatever animations and pre-loaders we threw at them. Everyone was happy.

It didn’t take me long for me realize that we were making something that the fans wanted, but you couldn’t get it on a CD sleeve. Around this time, a few bands had released CDs with interactive features, but they never took off, in large part because Macromedia Director wasn’t actually any good. But Flash and action-script were great.

Here it was, something that you could sell with a digital download to add the kind of value that you couldn’t get anywhere else. What’s more, if they ever did do something like that, It would no doubt mean more work for me.

As time moved on, I was certain we’d see something like this from the boys and girls at Apple, and as I learned more about programming and Apple I started to speculate on how it would work. Clearly Apple would have to release some sort of development environment for creating these things. I started to imagine something as sophisticated yet as easy to use as Motion, but built around Webkit and a special Javascript framework like widgets. Something as awesome as all the other tools that Apple offers developers. So when I heard about Cocktail, I could barely hold in my excitement. I had been waiting almost ten years for this moment. True I was a little disgruntled that I’d not sold the idea to Apple years ago but hey ho, them’s the breaks.

Alas, my bubble of excitement was soon bursted. What we have been given falls far short of the interactive wonderland I had imagined for myself. And more importantly, there’s no word from Apple on how these things get made. My guess is that it is some sort of Webview implementation and some special HTML markup and Javascript functions. And who knows, perhaps they do plan to release a development tool for it. But even so, for now at least, I’m still disappointed.