TidBITS#562/08-Jan-01
=====================

 Macworld Expo is upon us, so we'll be slogging through the crowds
 this week to gawk at the latest from Apple and others. In the
 meantime, we have money and music on our minds. First, Adam
 explores the PayPal person-to-person payment service and laments
 its lack of utility for micropayments. Then Travis Butler sings
 the praises (and some blues) about the Nomad Jukebox MP3 player.
 Also, Palmtop Publishing has posted a Macworld show guide for Palm
 handhelds.

Topics:
   MailBITS/08-Jan-01
   Worthy Web Sites: PayPal
   Portable MP3: The Nomad Jukebox

<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-562.html>
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Copyright 2001 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved.
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* WinStar Northwest Nexus. Visit us at <http://www.nwnexus.com/>.
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* Small Dog Electronics: LaCie 12x/4x/32x SCSI CD-RW refurb: $219! <- NEW!
  iBook G3/366 Special Edition (Graphite) 64/6 GB/CD/56k: $1,199!
  PowerLogix BlueChip 500MHz PowerBook (Wallstreet) Upgrade: $649
  For more values: <http://www.smalldog.com/> -- 802/496-7171

* Aladdin Systems: If you're in San Francisco for Macworld Expo, <--- NEW!
  stop by our booth (#1707). Adam Engst himself will be on hand
  for a book signing, Tuesday at 2 PM. Check our Web site for new
  product announcements at the show: <http://www.aladdinsys.com>

* FREE NETOPIA TB2 PRO & LOW $$ when you purchase Farallon GIGABIT <- NEW!
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* Need to draw a diagram or an org chart? Try ConceptDraw - the
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  ---------------------------------------------------------------

MailBITS/08-Jan-01
------------------

**Macworld Expo Pocket Show Guide Returns** -- After an
 involuntary and unfortunate modification for last year's Macworld
 Expo NY, the free Macworld Expo Pocket Show Guide from Palmtop
 Publishing has returned in full, complete with exhibitor listings,
 booth locations, and a floor map. There's also a schedule of
 events and show and conference hours, organized by day and track.
 If you're attending Macworld Expo in San Francisco and have a Palm
 OS handheld, I strongly encourage you to get this tiny utility
 (it's a 32K download and takes up only 67K on your handheld).
 [ACE]

<http://www.palmtoppublishing.com/macworldexpo/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06033>


Worthy Web Sites: PayPal
------------------------
 by Adam C. Engst <[email protected]>

 In all the fuss over the rise and (seeming) fall of commerce on
 the Internet over the last few years, I never saw significant
 movement toward _micropayments_, which many people (including
 myself and Jakob Nielsen) consider the necessary evolution of
 payment schemes on the Internet. The idea behind micropayments is
 simple: as a sustainable business model for Web content, imagine
 pages with interesting content costing one cent or less (so little
 that you pay attention only to the aggregate amount over a month,
 just as with your electric bill or telephone bill). Unfortunately,
 there remain a number of barriers to adoption of micropayments,
 not the least of which is a payment service that would accept and
 aggregate payments and disburse them appropriately.

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980125.html>

 Although it will undoubtedly be several years before micropayments
 have a chance (Jakob has been revising his predictions forward for
 some time now), we're starting to see some payment services
 gaining the level of popular acceptance that would help make
 micropayments possible in the future. Based on sheer community
 size - which is all-important in person-to-person transaction
 situations like payment services - the leader seems to be PayPal.

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/1998_not.html>
<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991226.html>
<http://www.paypal.com/>


**Greenbacks Online** -- At its heart, PayPal is dead simple - it
 enables you to send or receive money via email. It's quite a bit
 more complex behind the scenes, of course, but using email makes
 PayPal easy to understand.

 PayPal offers three types of accounts, Personal, Premier, and
 Business. Personal accounts are completely free but are more
 limited than Premier and Business accounts, both of which offer
 additional features and charge small percentages for receiving
 money, mass payments, and daily payment sweeps from PayPal to your
 bank account. It's easy to choose which account to use. If you're
 an individual and aren't participating in ecommerce on a regular
 basis, a Personal account is right for you. If ecommerce is the
 backbone of your business, you need either a Premier account (for
 individuals) or a Business account (for businesses).

<http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/personal_vs_business-outside>

 To send money, you must first sign up with PayPal, which is a
 simple process of filling in your name, email address, and
 retyping a set of graphically displayed numbers that help increase
 the security of the process (since a program couldn't do it
 easily). You then receive email with a link to click to confirm
 your email address.

 Next, you must link your account with a source of money, either a
 credit card or, for U.S. customers, a bank account. I suspect most
 people will enter their credit card number initially and give
 PayPal their bank account information only after they've become
 comfortable with the service (and I strongly recommend you read
 PayPal's Terms of Use carefully so you understand the risks and
 how PayPal has addressed them, such as with a standard $100,000
 insurance policy against unauthorized transactions, buyer and
 seller protections, and more). PayPal's happy to work via credit
 cards, but only up to a point, since every credit card transaction
 costs them money - a small percentage of the overall transaction
 amount. That's in large part why personal accounts are limited
 from receiving more than $100 per month in payments funded by
 credit card; you also can't send more than $250 at a time until
 you've verified your account by linking it with a bank account.

<https://secure.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/terms-pop-outside>

 It's easy in this age of Internet paranoia to see PayPal as
 encouraging you to enter your bank account to enable future
 shenanigans, and if you're uncomfortable with doing so, there's no
 need. If you assume that PayPal is a legitimate business at all
 (and if not, why work with them to begin with?), though, such
 concerns don't hold water. PayPal isn't alone in the payment
 processing field, and they have a tremendous vested interest in
 making their service as safe and reliable as possible - anything
 else is corporate suicide. When you link your PayPal account to
 your bank account, that increases the trust level of the entire
 system (that's why PayPal refers to the linkage as "verifying"
 your account).

 Misrepresenting identity is easy on the Internet, and stealing a
 credit card number isn't all that difficult, but getting past
 PayPal's bank account verification scheme would be hard. After you
 enter your bank account number, PayPal deposits two small amounts
 under a dollar into your account, and to verify your account, you
 have to find those amounts on your statement and enter them into
 PayPal's secure verification page. If a miscreant had all the
 information necessary to spoof your account with PayPal, you've
 got bigger problems than just PayPal, so the likelihood that
 everyone is above board increases with the addition of verifiable
 information like the bank account (international users undergo a
 similar verification approach using the credit card statement).

 Whether or not you go through the bank account verification
 procedure right away, once you've linked your PayPal account with
 a source of money, you can send money by filling out a simple Web
 form with the recipient's email address, the amount, and a few
 other bits of information. One note: there's a confusing pop-up
 menu asking what type of transaction you're performing - avoid
 "Quasi-Cash" when using a credit card for the source of funds
 since it could result in cash advance fees. PayPal then acts as a
 trusted third party and transfers the money from your PayPal
 account (withdrawing from your credit card or bank account if
 necessary) and deposits it in the recipient's account. If the
 recipient doesn't yet have a PayPal account, they can either set
 one up (a viral marketing approach that's worked well) or request
 that PayPal send them a check immediately. The person to whom
 you've sent money never knows any information about your bank
 account or credit card; they just know PayPal gave them some money
 and said it was from you.

 To retrieve money from your PayPal account, you can either request
 a check, which take a few weeks to arrive, or, if you've linked in
 your bank account, have PayPal do an electronic funds transfer
 into your account, which happens immediately. Of course, you can
 also leave money in your PayPal account, at which point that money
 is used preferentially for money you send out. If you're bothered
 about the loss of interest, you can sign up to have your PayPal
 balance invested in a money market fund that earns (at the moment)
 5.2 percent interest.


**The Check's in the Email** -- PayPal doesn't cut the mustard for
 micropayments, because the minimum charge for Premier and Business
 accounts to receive money is 30 cents for transactions under $15
 (transactions over $15 incur a small percentage charge as well).
 But PayPal has been tremendously popular for online auctions,
 where it's a lot easier and more reliable than sending checks
 around. Plus, it eliminates the age-old "you go first" problem of
 whether you should pay first or the seller should send the product
 first.

 Where I find PayPal most compelling, though, are in small
 transactions among friends. How often have you gone out to dinner
 with friends and had to do complex mathematical calculations to
 determine what everyone owes, especially when some people declare
 they don't have enough cash and borrow from others temporarily.
 With PayPal, instead of maintaining complex tabs with your friends
 ("You bought me lunch last Thursday, but I still owe you for the
 ball game the week before"), you can swap money back and forth in
 the exact amounts necessary. It's also great for small
 transactions that would probably otherwise be lost in the noise,
 such as when I mailed a couple of old books to a colleague with
 whom I'd worked on them. Although he offered, I couldn't in good
 conscience charge him for the books, which I'd gotten for free
 from the publisher, so he just paid for the shipping via PayPal.

 The main downside of this use for PayPal is that you have to
 remember to go into the Web site and send the money (you can also
 bill someone via PayPal to remind them). A while back, PayPal had
 some Palm software so you could beam money from one Palm handheld
 to another. Unfortunately, although the thought of being able to
 beam money is tremendously compelling (imagine just walking up to
 a cash register and tapping a Beam button on your handheld to
 check out), it was apparently too difficult for PayPal to maintain
 the software. Now, if you want mobile access to PayPal, you'll
 need a Web-enabled cell phone, which can access PayPal's Web site.

 Although I haven't seen shareware authors using PayPal for
 shareware payments yet, I see no reason they couldn't. PayPal has
 a Web Accept feature that lets you accept payments on your Web
 site, but it doesn't seem particularly flexible or tailored to
 shareware the way services like Kagi are, though it does take a
 smaller percentage off the top. Nonetheless, if you run a business
 that needs to take payments online, it's hard to beat PayPal's
 simplicity, not to mention the large number of people who have
 PayPal accounts for online purchases.

<http://www.kagi.com/>

 Newly available on PayPal is support for payments between people
 in different countries. As of 10-Nov-00, people in 26 countries
 (see the link below for a list) can now sign up for PayPal and
 send money back and forth with other PayPal users, no matter where
 they are. Needless to say, due to the increased costs of
 converting between currencies and other aspects of moving money
 around the world, sending money from a credit card or withdrawing
 money from PayPal to a credit card (only Visa at the moment)
 incurs a 2.6 percent plus 30 cent charge. For frequent use, it
 probably makes sense to keep a fairly high balance in your PayPal
 account to avoid the credit card charges. Enough of the details
 are slightly different for international users that it's well
 worth reading through PayPal's International Account Help Center.

<http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/approved_countries-outside>
<http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/hlp/help_global_intl-outside>


**The First One's Free** -- In the past, PayPal has worked hard to
 sign up new users by paying $5 referral fees. Those are still
 available, but only if the referring account is a Premier or
 Business account, and only if the new user performs a slew of
 actions, including verifying a bank account, depositing $100 into
 PayPal via electronic funds transfer, and signing up for the money
 market account. Similarly, though I haven't been paying close
 attention the entire time, my impression is that PayPal has begun
 instituting more fees and generally trying to move from a
 community building approach to turning a profit. I'm sure PayPal
 was burning through venture capital, and in today's business
 environment, such tactics don't fly for long.

 I have no inside information regarding the health of PayPal's
 business, and I wouldn't leave thousands of dollars in my PayPal
 account, but I would encourage you to check out PayPal's service.
 Sending small amounts of money around the Internet via PayPal is
 so much easier than relying on the more cumbersome approaches of
 yesteryear. Advances like these are, in my opinion, well worth
 embracing because they have the capacity to change our lives in
 small but important ways. My experience is that it's a bit tough
 to use PayPal the first few times, but after that, it becomes
 almost second nature. I even have friends who have started using
 it as a verb, as in "Shoot, I forgot my wallet. Can you pay for
 the groceries and I'll paypal it back to you when we get home?"

 I've set up a TidBITS PayPal account (using our main public email
 address of <[email protected]>), so if you're interested in
 trying out PayPal, you can use the link below so we receive the $5
 referral fee, should you manage to jump through all of their
 hoops. And I plan to keep a close eye on PayPal to see if they
 ever change things so they could be used effectively for

 micropayments.

<https://secure.paypal.com/refer/pal=editors%40tidbits.com>


Portable MP3: The Nomad Jukebox
-------------------------------
 by Travis Butler <[email protected]>

 The MP3 format is revolutionizing our music-listening lives.
 Unfortunately, for those of us on the go, carrying the revolution
 along has been a problem - practical portable MP3 solutions have
 been some time in coming.

 If you already lug a laptop, it's an option - but a heavy one with
 limited battery life, and your MP3s must compete with your work
 for limited disk space. You could burn your MP3 collection onto
 CD-R discs to play on the laptop (and I have); but that often
 leads to disc-swapping, since the song you want on the spur of the
 moment is invariably not on the CD-R you have loaded. The laptop
 approach can work well if you're already carrying the machine with
 you, but it's overkill if all you want is a portable way to listen
 to music.

 Dedicated portable MP3 players have bred like rabbits in the last
 year or two, with even large retail outlets like Best Buy offering
 several different models. Almost all use solid-state memory for
 storage, which has several advantages: no moving parts, small
 size, no possibility of skipping, and low battery consumption. A
 year ago, I was given a Rio 500 (which I still think is the best
 memory-based player), and overall I've loved it. However, I
 probably would not have bought it for myself, because memory-based
 players have a significant disadvantage: flash memory is
 expensive, so the playing time of these devices is limited
 (typically just 30 minutes to 2 hours). I've been an apologist
 for my Rio in the past, but its playing time is a serious handicap
 for me.

<http://www.rioport.com/>

 Another portable option is the crop of newly arrived CD-MP3
 players, which are essentially portable CD players that can play
 CD-Rs containing MP3 files. Starting at around $100, they're
 cheaper than most memory-based players, and at 11 hours per CD-R
 you can listen to music for far longer time periods.
 Unfortunately, the early units have a lot of rough edges.
 Moreover, since they're essentially CD players with a hugely
 expanded per-CD capacity, they don't enable users to organize and
 manage their music collections on the fly. And as I noted before,
 putting your music collection on CD-Rs can result in frustrating
 disc-swapping. Nevertheless, I probably would have bought one
 eventually, if I hadn't received a new toy: the Nomad Jukebox from
 Creative Labs.

<http://www.nomadworld.com/products/jukebox/>

 Creative has produced some well-regarded memory-based MP3 players
 with previous Nomad models. On paper, the Jukebox looks ready to
 top them all. Instead of expensive flash memory, it uses a
 relatively cheap 6 GB laptop hard disk, offering up to three and a
 half _days_ of continuous music. This is by far the biggest
 attraction of the Jukebox - while 6 GB isn't enough to hold my
 entire collection, it is enough for my vocal favorites and a
 sizeable chunk of instrumental songs. Since it owes its lineage to
 the computing side of the fence and can read ID3 information tags
 on MP3 files, the Jukebox can better organize and present
 information about my music (like sorting tracks based on artist or
 album) than the CD-MP3 players. Finally, as a product from a major
 manufacturer (Creative also makes the SoundBlaster line of sound
 cards and other PC peripherals), one could expect a well-designed
 and polished consumer product. How well does the Nomad Jukebox
 live up to that potential?


**Queue It Up** -- The Jukebox's playing function is built around
 a play queue; songs are added to the play queue from the various
 Library search and organization features. The Library has four
 categories for accessing songs: Playlists, Albums, Artists, and
 Genres (Rock, Jazz, etc. - all pulled from the ID3 tags). With
 Albums, Artists, and Genres, you burrow through lists of sub-
 categories (for example, choosing Genres, then SoundTrack, then
 Cowboy Bebop OST 1; or Artists, then America, then America's
 Greatest Hits) until you reach the individual song you want. You
 can also use the Search feature to jump directly to a spot in the
 list, which can help with long lists. Unfortunately, there is no
 apparent way to get a simple alphabetical list of songs; you must
 go through two or three levels to see individual songs, then move
 up a level or two and back down if you're picking songs from
 different albums. This is especially bad if you mostly pick up a
 few songs from each album, as I do, instead of including entire
 albums. For that reason, I find playlists the best way to work
 with the hundreds of songs you can load on the Jukebox. If you
 have Macromedia Flash installed, Creative has a Flash demo for the
 Jukebox on their Web site that gives you an idea how this works.

<http://www.nomadworld.com/flash/Jukebox_Interactive.asp>

 There are essentially two ways to create playlists. Once you have
 filled the play queue, you can save it as a playlist; however,
 filling the play queue manually is sufficiently tedious that I
 seldom bother - particularly since there's a better method. The
 Jukebox comes with SoundJam MP, one of the best MP3 encoders and
 players, and SoundJam sports a plug-in architecture for
 controlling MP3 players (most, if not all, of the Mac-compatible
 MP3 players use it). The SoundJam plug-in, in addition to loading
 songs onto the Jukebox, enables you to build playlists - and
 thankfully lets you work with the entire alphabetical list of
 songs at once, in addition to organizing by Artist, Album or
 Genre. Thus, I find the easiest way to play songs is to use
 SoundJam to make either short, focused playlists I can load into
 the play queue or long catch-all playlists that the Jukebox can
 play in random order.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05988>


**The Speed of Sound** -- On the plus side, the player sounds
 great. I've listened to it through the wrap-around headphones that
 came with it, the bud headphones from my Rio (which tend to sound
 better), a set of amplified speakers, and plugged into my home
 stereo; to my ears, the sound quality is excellent on all four.
 Despite using a hard disk (a moving part), I couldn't get the
 Jukebox to skip from shaking it, thanks to a large RAM playback
 buffer. And unlike Mac-based MP3 software, I couldn't get the
 Jukebox to skip from program activity, like switching the system
 settings, searching for songs, going from the song list to
 individual song details and back.

 Unfortunately, performance in other areas was slow, sometimes
 downright glacial. Turning it on - or waking it up after an
 automatic sleep - takes a minute and a half on my filled Jukebox
 before it's ready to play. This is an eternity in contrast to the
 instant-on of my Rio - compare the lengthy wake-from-sleep of a
 PowerBook to the instant-on of a Palm, multiply by three, and
 you'll get the idea. I suspect a large chunk of this time is spent
 reading the song catalog for display: switching to the list view
 of a play queue with 860 songs takes a full 45 seconds, while
 switching to a queue of 50 songs is almost instantaneous. In
 addition, there is sometimes a lag stopping a song or switching
 songs, and the display often lags behind the player by 1 or 2
 seconds. None of these are show-stoppers, but they make using the
 player considerably more tedious.

 Battery life is also a disappointment. The Jukebox includes two
 sets of four high-capacity 1600 mAh NiMH AA batteries, notably
 stronger than most over-the-counter NiMH batteries - and the extra
 capacity is necessary, because even the stronger batteries last
 for only about four hours of continuous play. The Jukebox can
 charge NiMH batteries when it's plugged in with the included AC
 adapter, but very slowly - four hours with the player off, and a
 long 10 hours with the player running. I'm glad Creative used
 standard AA batteries instead of a custom battery pack - I can
 charge AA batteries with the NiMH charger that came with my
 Olympus digital camera, and buy alkalines if all the batteries run
 out away from AC power - but Creative needs to work on power
 consumption and charging speed.


**Sound Fiddling** -- The Jukebox doesn't just play music as-is.
 Creative heavily promotes their audio-enhancement technology,
 grouping several features under the EAX label: Parametric EQ,
 Spatialization, Environment, and Playback Speed. Unfortunately,
 although these features provide noticeable effects, I don't think
 they improve the sound, and most of them strike me as gimmicks.

 The Jukebox's volume range is a bit less than I'd like. The scale
 runs from 1 to 20; however, although 8 to 10 is a comfortable
 listening range in a quiet room, my office at work needs around
 15, and even at 20 the Jukebox is too quiet for me to use
 comfortably with headphones in a moving car. I'd like to see more
 volume at the high end, although I suspect higher settings would
 further reduce battery life.

 Finally, there are operational glitches I'd classify as bugs.

* When the Jukebox goes to sleep automatically, it doesn't save
 your position in the play queue. This can be annoying if you have
 a long play queue and didn't manually put the Jukebox to sleep
 since the start of the queue. Sleeping the Jukebox manually
 doesn't always work either; if the battery level is "Low or No
 Battery" (which can be as high as 60 percent charge, in my
 experience), it still loses your position in the queue.

* The Jukebox has two "mix play" settings: Random, which does
 "continuous random play," and Shuffle, which is supposed to play
 each song once in random order. Unfortunately, Shuffle does not
 work as I'd expect. For the office, I have an 860 song playlist
 that provides background music, and I want it randomized to avoid
 too-frequent song repeats. Shuffle seems to be made for this; I
 would expect it to go through the entire play queue through once
 without repeating a song, as long as the queue is not cleared or
 modified. Instead, over a two-week period of playing time, I have
 some songs that come up fairly frequently, and others that almost
 never come up. I haven't used Random as much, but it appears to
 mix the songs more evenly. My guess is that Shuffle resets its
 songs played list whenever the Jukebox goes to sleep, and
 something in its only-play-once algorithm keeps it from
 randomizing as well every time it restarts.

 This list of problems makes the Jukebox sound worse than it is. On
 reflection, it does perform a competent job of the core task of
 playing MP3s. Some problems and annoying quirks may be inherent in
 dealing with thousands of MP3 files; however, I'd have preferred
 Creative had improved the speed and fixed bugs instead of offering
 gimmicks like EAX.


**Interface and Design** -- Physically, the Nomad Jukebox is an
 example of polished industrial design. The case is about the size
 and shape of a portable CD player, presumably for familiarity, and
 I find the gently curved design a pleasure to look at and handle.
 It's solidly built, and the controls are conveniently located. In
 addition to the usual Play/Stop/Next Track/Previous Track buttons,
 the Jukebox has a pair of Up/Down buttons, for scrolling through
 lists; dedicated buttons for jumping to the library and system
 setting functions; and a set of "soft" buttons, labeled by the LCD
 display, which perform various context-sensitive functions. All of
 the buttons feel sturdy, and you can feel a comfortable click when
 you press them.

 My only serious quibbles with the physical design are the too-
 large size (the laptop hard drive at its heart is smaller than a
 pack of cigarettes) and the small LCD display (in song lists it
 shows only 6 lines of 25 characters - not enough for managing the
 number of songs the Jukebox can hold).

 Unfortunately, the interface doesn't quite live up to the
 industrial design. For instance, the Jukebox lacks a dedicated
 Pause button. In my experience, most players without a Pause
 button re-use the Play button: press once to play, press again to
 pause. On the Jukebox, you press the Stop button instead: press
 once to pause, press a second time to stop. Although there's a
 logical argument for this usage, the other convention seems more
 common and I'd have preferred it. There are other quirks in the
 search feature: left and right soft buttons move through the
 letters of the alphabet (something I usually visualize as
 scrolling up and down), while the up/down buttons move the cursor
 left and right through the song name. (Huh?) At least the
 Jukebox's operating system is upgradable, and I hope Creative will
 release a version which fixes these irritants.


**Nomad's Land** -- If I'd had to spend the money for the Nomad
 Jukebox myself, would I have bought one? At $500 (often discounted
 online to $450 or less), it's not exactly an impulse purchase, but
 I'd probably still buy it if I had the money. The ability to take
 a decent chunk of my music library with me - and have it instantly
 accessible - is quite intoxicating. So far, the Jukebox has only
 one major competitor, the HanGo Personal Jukebox PJB-100, and
 although on paper it seems to address many of my criticisms above,
 it's both more expensive and from a relatively unknown company.

<http://www.pjbox.com/>

 In the end, the Jukebox is not the no-brainer decision that it
 could have been. The device has strong basic capabilities, but is
 dragged down by a few serious flaws and other minor annoyances.
 The Jukebox could have been better - and from a company like
 Creative, I was expecting something better.

 $$

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