The Scottish accent gives Siri a wee bit of trouble:

I’m sure by now you’ve heard the story of the guy whose ringtone stopped a performance of the New York Philharmonic

The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.

In addition to the public humiliation of the moment, the Internet proceeded to fall our hapless music lover’s head. It sounds like he was actually the victim of poor user interface design from Apple (unusual!). From the same article:

He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode.

Ouch! I certainly understand the design tradeoff: would you rather put people at risk of public humiliation when their silent phones makes noise, or would you rather have somebody sleep through an important meeting because they silenced their phone, forgetting about their alarm clock?

I’d vote for silencing everything when you mute the phone, but pop a warning if you mute the phone with alarms pending. Or maybe a warning that lets you choose whether you want to also silence alarms or not?

I dunno, I’d happily leave the details to the generally-awesome UI designers at Apple.

(As long as we are talking about Apple UI, there is a little tweak I want: I want AutoCorrect to make a little noise whenever it offers me a correction. I can’t really touch type on the iPhone or the iPad (can’t imagine I’m alone here), so I never see the little popups in time to either cancel them or to hit SPACE to accept them. Some subtle sound that cues me to look up from my typing would be lovely.)

Update: John Gruber points out that it’s not worth over-complicating things for edge cases, and yeah, he’s probably right.

Update 2: See also Marco Arment and Andy Ihnatko.

With Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO of Apple, it’s impossible not to think of his Stanford commencement address:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Ran into this recently, with a buddy of mine recommending an old Fresh Air episode that didn’t show up on the list of available episodes in iTunes. I wanted to get it on my iPod in with the other Fresh Air podcasts, rather than dumping it into the “music” folder (which would have worked, if you aren’t compulsive about where things go).

Download and install an MP3 tag editor that can view/edit extended tags. I use Mp3tag.

Download the old podcast you want, and open it in Mp3tag. Pick “extended tags” and create the following tags:

PODCAST = 1
PODCASTDESC = episode name
PODCASTID = episode URL
PODCASTURL = podcast subscription URL

You can look at the extended tags for an existing podcast to see sample values.

Save the tags, and then drag and drop the podcast into iTunes. It should appear where it belongs.

This ad by Dell goes after the Apple tax.

Wow, I’m pretty sure if I owned an iPad it wouldn’t be able to do this.

Really interesting article on Steve Jobs’ liver transplant and subsequent push to pass a law in California that will require the DMV to ask you if you’d like to become an organ donor (which may double the number of transplant organs available there):

But something about his whole experience still bothered Steve.

What bothered him was that while he, a very wealthy man, was surviving his liver’s failure, others were not so lucky. Specifically, he was upset because, while he was able to afford the costs of multiple-listing and a private jet that could ferry him to any hospital in the country at a moment’s notice, others in California could not; they had to stay in California and hope. He knew that 400 people died hoping.

And so, in a departure from a largely apolitical career, Steve decided to do something about it.

Oh what the hell, everybody else is writing about it. Here are the best iPad pieces I’ve read:

• Why the iPad may be just what we need for Digital Inclusion
• Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?
• Old World vs. New World Computing
• Stephen Fry’s total over-the-top infectious rave

Proving that it’s about the artist, not the tools, Jorge Colombo “painted” the 6/1 cover of The New Yorker on his iPhone.

Despite its obvious quality, I wasn’t going to link up The Onion’s Macbook Wheel report because EVERYBODY already did, but it makes for a nice two-fer with this xkcd strip.

Engadget embeds some Simpsons Apple mockery.