Following-up on Alex's posts, to me the most glaring hole in the MacWorld announcements was the lack of any update about DRM-free music.

Apple was a precursor of DRM-free music online with last year's EMI deal, but EMI, Warner, Universal, and Sony BMG, that is all the major labels, have since announced DRM-free mp3 downloads on Amazon.com while Apple got nothing new to show. A TechCrunch post mentions that "Amazon now has 3.25 million DRM-free tracks in their library, compared to just 2 million at iTunes."

iTunes must have another 4 million DRM-protected tracks, but I can't imagine any informed person buying any of those now, and that has to mean that people will start shifting towards using Amazon. Of course Apple has the benefit of its installed base, iTunes on every Mac, and consumer inertia (after all they just sold their 4 billionth song).

Maybe Apple has been simply too busy securing the deals with the movie industry for online video rentals - clearly a potentially quite disruptive move. Still I can't imagine Apple not caring about the situation with music downloads, so this means that Apple is having real trouble with the major labels. Is this the beginning of the end for the supremacy of the iTunes music store?

Many of my tasks, at Orbeon or personal, involve PDF documents:

• Sending invoices to customers (no way we are sending Word or Excel documents!)
• Archiving, viewing and searching documents scanned with the ScanSnap scanner
• Viewing faxes received by email
• Saving online articles for reference, further reading or printing (until we get good e-paper I prefer to read long articles on good old dead trees)
  

I was already using PDF a lot on Windows, but that required installing a free viewing tool (Adobe Reader) and a paying PDF printing tool (Adobe Acrobat).

When I switched to the Mac back in 2006, I appreciated right away the built-in ability to view and print PDF documents without buying a third-party tool. But Leopard adds even more to the mix:

• The new Quick Look feature in the Finder and Mail is not perfect, but excellent nonetheless: just press the space bar (Finder) or a button (Mail) and you have a super-fast preview of almost any document or attachment, including PDF. You can even scroll down multi-page documents and keep the preview open while navigating to other documents. (To be fair, OS X should have had this for years but better late than never.)
• The new Preview allows you to insert, delete, rotate, and reorganize pages in a PDF document and save the result.
• The much improved Spotlight automatically indexes PDF documents for (almost) instant content search.

Windows XP has nothing of the sort built-in. Vista has XPS, which sounds cool but, no matter how good it may be, is today nowhere as widespread as PDF and that alone does not make it a viable option for me at the moment. Leopard definitely wins this one.

I recently bought two Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners: one for the office (Mac version) and one as a gift for my brother (PC version).

For as long as I can remember, I have had a strong aversion for paper documents. You know, bank statements, invoices to pay, receipts, leases, you name it. Some of these things can be thrown away, but others should be kept for a while just in case. I also have the notion that in this day and age, we shouldn't need to destroy information.

The problem is that paper documents just seem to pile up in a disorganized way unless you make some very serious organization efforts involving old-fashioned hardware like staples, folders, binders, and cardboard boxes. In the end this takes a lot of space and you don't even know where the stuff is. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

So the obvious solution is to go paperless, which involves scanning those documents which you don't get in electronic form. Going that route with a regular flatbed scanner involves:

• Placing a sheet on the scanner
• Going to your scanning software and starting the scan
• If necessary: turning the page to scan the reverse side

Then repeat until you have scanned all the pages. After that, you may be happy with just plain image files, or you may want to fire your PDF-making software and/or your OCR software. If you are really lucky, things will be smooth enough. But in the end the whole process is just hell for any document with more than one page. I think you have to be somewhat superhuman to consistently go this route. I personally tried and failed.

Enter the ScanSnap:

• Put your multi-page front and back document in the tray
  
• Press the button on the scanner
  
• Voila: your PDF file is ready
  

The ScanSnap is able to scan in duplex, that is front and back (with an option to automatically remove blank pages). It also comes with OCR software which can create searchable PDF documents as an optional (but computationally intensive) step.

It's just amazing how fast you can scan piles of year-old documents with this toy. In fact, scanning actually becomes fun. The hardest task is to name the resulting PDF files and move them into folders (although in theory you could skip this step if you are happy with automatically-generated file names and if you plan to rely 100% on content search).

You know, like when all those cheap flights are listed, but Orbitz tells you that the flight is not available when you want to buy it? Systematically, our recent flight searches have come up with this issue. It seems that this is nothing new and has been going on for years.

This is not only irritating, it also removes a lot of the value Orbitz is meant to provide.

It's not just that you are out of luck and that the system is temporarily out of sync. After all, even after you check such a flight, it keeps popping up in your searches. And it often does the following day as well.

There is certainly a solution to that problem if Orbitz and the airline companies actually want to fix this broken behavior. Given the amount of time this has been going on, I can only assume that it is deliberate.

No matter whose fault it is, I am just wondering: how do we users put up with what only amounts to a permanent lie?

In the meanwhile, I am trying to book flights directly from the airlines whenever possible. Even though they may be the ones providing the disinformation, I have not hit this issue on their web sites, and I want to send a signal to Orbitz, however small.

Following-up on Michael Arrington's post "2008: Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without", here are the Web 2.0 tools and services I use whenever I am behind the computer (I'll pass on the super-obvious ones like Google Search and Wikipedia which I doubt will be displaced any time soon):

• Delicious: over 1900 entries and counting
• SlimTimer: impossible to live without it at work
• Basecamp: we use it at Orbeon to communicate with our customers (I even have a personal account for some To-Do lists)
• Google Calendar: all my scheduled activities (including a few shared calendars)
  
• Google Reader: about 200 feeds as of now (I switched a few months ago after being too frustrated with the reader in Thunderbird)
  
• GMail: I currently use it mostly through OS X's Mail app thanks to the recent GMail IMAP support
• Jott: an amazing newcomer (I just keep Jotting myself when in the US)
  
• Firefox: 'nuf said, using 3.0 beta 2 on Mac OS X at the moment
• Skype: VoiP and chat (I use SkypeOut and SkypeIn as well)
• iTunes: music player and podcast platform (but for sure I won't buy any DRM-protected music from the iTunes Music Store)
  

Here are some other services I use frequently:

• Google Docs: whenever possible (but there is huge room for improvement in the software)
• Wordpress: whenever I post a work blog entry
• Blogger: whenever I post a personal blog entry
  
• Feedburner: all my feeds go through it
  
• Google Maps: no comment
• Google Alerts: mostly for alerts about Orbeon, XForms and Mascagni
  
• Flickr: whenever I post pictures (I have a pro account)
  
• YouTube: almost every time I watch a video

Some tools I like but which I don't use often:

• Dopplr: I enter my trips there, but it hasn't been really useful to sync up with anybody yet
  
• MindMeister: just a very cool piece of software
  
• Amazon mp3 Store: I bought a few tracks to try it out, and I liked the smooth experience (just say no to DRM)

Incidentally, I have over 150 connections on LinkedIn and I am getting started on Facebook. So far I fail to find them either really useful or exciting. I bet I am missing something, but one reason could be that neither provides me with a comprehensive RSS or Atom feed of the last updates: I certainly won't bother visiting these sites every day until that happens.

I wonder how this landscape will change in one year. Hopefully there will be lots of improvements and good surprises!