PreCentral.net

The way that the Palm Pre works with iTunes is great, clever, intuitive, and just aggravating enough for me to want to try something else for syncing my media. The 'something else' I picked was a no-brainer and I'm not going back: doubleTwist.

doubleTwist, if you didn't know, is the new project from Jon Lech Johansen, who you may know better as 'DVD Jon,' who has found workarounds for nearly every meda DRM you can think of.  That's serious geek cred, sure, but it's also a signal and Johansen cares about openness, transparency, and simplicity and those virtues are abudant in doubleTwist.

doubleTwist is an application for both Mac and PC that allows you to easily transfer media from your computer to virtually any device you plug into it. It understands what the Pre can and can't support and automatically re-formats your media into a compatible format.  I may have mentioned RealPlayer SP yesterday, but trust me: doubleTwist is better.  For me, it's even better than the built-in iTunes Sync.

Read on to find out why and to get some thoughts on the webOS and the Pre from DVD Jon himself.

doubleTwist is Easy

I'm not knocking iTunes for being too chock full of features, but sometimes it's comforting to have an app that's straightforward.  doubleTwist automatically includes the directories most likely to have your music (and on a Mac reads your iLife apps, including iTunes).  

Full support for Playlists -- both on doubleTwist and with transferring -- would be nice to see.  I also wish that there were a real progress bar when transferring files instead of just a spinning indicator. Hopefully these features will come soon -- like webOS, doubleTwist is very early in its lifecycle.

Update: On Windows, doubleTwist supports playlists and automatic playlist sync as well as having a proper progress bar.  The Mac version should see an update with those features later this year.

The other 'easy' part of doubleTwist is that it does a better job understanding what the Pre can and cannot play than iTunes does -- iTunes thinks the Pre is an iPod so I've had it transfer video files over to the Pre that just wouldn't play.  I asked Johansen to expand a bit on how doubleTwist handles conversion:

doubleTwist knows which audio and video formats the Palm Pre supports as well as the restrictions on each format (max bitrate, max video resolution, etc). If you try to sync an audio or video file the Pre doesn't support, doubleTwist will automatically convert to a supported format before transferring the file to your Pre. Note that this is not specific to the Pre though - doubleTwist works the same way with all the devices we support (Sony PSP, BlackBerry, Android, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, etc). doubleTwist also supports most camcorders and digital cameras so if you've recorded a video of your kids you can transfer it to your Pre and always have it with you.

doubleTwist will  allow you to directly upload your photos to Flickr and FaceBook and your videos to YouTube. Plus, doubleTwist will download and convert YouTube videos (you just need to know the URL) so you can save them on your Pre.  You can also use the send feature to upload media to doubleTwist's servers for sharing.

There are also apparently a bunch of social features that I'm not using, but they're there.

doubleTwist is Transparent

Here's one of the main reasons I prefer doubleTwist: it's transparent.  When you sync with iTunes, iTunes treats your Pre like and iPod, and I'm not fond the results.  When iTunes transferred music to an iPod, it places the music in a hidden directory, actually it places the music in a series of directories within that hidden directory and renames the files with random letters instead of keeping the song-based file names.

So if I use iTunes to transfer music to my Pre and later I want to put it in USB mode and move that music to another one of my computers I'm stuck playing around with the same hacks that iPod users have come to know and loathe.

doubleTwist takes any music you transfer to the Pre -- including all your Music from iTunes -- and puts it in the Music directory on your Pre.  Movies go in the Movies directory.  Pictures go in the Pictures directory.

doubleTwist Works Both Ways

This is what sold me on doubleTwist.  Like Kevin C Tofel of jkOnTheRun, I find the experience of managing the tracks I've puchased on the Pre in the App frustrating.  With doubleTwist you can drag and drop any media from your Pre to your PC or Mac.  Presumably that's the 'double' in 'doubleTwist.'

doubleTwist isn't perfect.  It's not as full-featured of a media player as iTunes by a long shot -- but then it's not really meant to be (yet?). As a tool for moving media to and from the Pre, it's pretty darn good - I've replaced iTunes with it.

Jon Lech Johansen on the Pre, webOS

I also asked Johansen a few questions about the Pre and the webOS as a platform. 

PreCentral: What do you think of the webOS as a platform, specifically wondering if you think Palm is striking the right balance of openness vs.
proprietary.

Johansen: I've had my Pre since launch day and I think webOS looks really promising. That they've made the device easy to hack and flash with custom firmware is pretty cool. However, I think Palm's success will depend on how quickly they can engage developers (doubleTwist applied to the SDK program on day 1 and we still haven't been accepted). There's some really compelling Android devices coming out in the next couple of months and I think that's who Palm is really competing against rather than the iPhone.

[Palm: Quit pulling an Apple on us here - get doubleTwist into the SDK Beta. - Dieter]

PreCentral: Any interest in developing for webOS directly? For any other non-desktop or mobile platform?

Johansen: At doubleTwist we're looking at Android, iPhone, and webOS. Some of the things we're planning to do probably won't be allowed into Apple's store, so you'll probably see those on Android or webOS first.

PreCentral: Any thoughts on the iTunes / Palm Pre iPod trickery you care / dare to share?

Johansen: A clever hack, but not something that will last. There's no way Apple is going to let a competitor benefit directly from the iTunes ecosystem. If Apple doesn't block this, they're essentially inviting all of their other competitors to take the same route as Palm. Kudos to Palm though for recognizing that digital media is an important part of a mobile device. Some of Apple's other competitors completely ignore that aspect (e.g. the G1 came with no solution for getting your music playlists and videos onto it).