Month: September 2005

iTunes on windows mobile

Itunes 5 on the pocketpc

So when I first saw these screenshots, I was thinking those guys at Aspect software have done a great job with wifitunes. But no the screenshots are actually from a special build just for Windows mobile 5 devices. Apple are really gunning for the mobile market.

Looking at the blog post, there seems to be no iTunes sharing (zeroconf) but iTunes store ability seems to be just around the corner. This is all pretty straight forward when you consider that iTunes has had Mobile phone syncing cabilities since 4.9. But lets step back for a moment, maybe the whole thing is a hoax? Engadget are certainly considering it. I personally think its a early build and maybe true, specially if you consider the next Razr could include iTunes.

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My next mobile could be a Nokia…

People who know me well, also know I had Ericsson preference when it came to mobile phones. But I've been looking around for the next phone I should upgrade to, and honestly theres not much out there.

I said I would go back to Windows mobile but there are so few of them which support 3G (UMTS) and are not really mini pocketpcs. And I dont think any SPV type smartphone form factors are coming till after the new year. So I'm forced to look elsewhere.

So I spotted the Nokia N90, which was previewed in Engadget in April. I think you will agree this certainly looks like a phone for 2006.

Nokia N90 in camera mode

Nokia N90 fits in the palm of your hand

Of course its got the spec to go with it. Just the screen rez alone out does my PocketPC and current Sanyo 3G phone. 128px x 128px in 65k colour on the outside of the phone and 352px x 416px in 262k colour on the main screen. 2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens. Not big fan of RS-MMS because of the price and lack of compatablity with most of my SD enabled devices, but I'll live with it. Triband and 3G support tops off a quite large but very interesting phone. (Theres a huge review on mobile review by the way) But I'm wondering if I should just wait for the Hard drive enabled Nokia N91 instead? Which I hear has been delayed again, but sounds like a phone worth having

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Blogs? whats that then?

The revolution has begun

So just recently the British mainstream media have been touted a survey where they have discovered less of the British public know about blogging than dogging. In Blogging vs Dogging (yeah the title says it all really) the facts of the survey are teased out and require a subscription…

More than 1,000 people were surveyed, which included taxi drivers, hairdressers and pub workers for the advertising agency DDB.

Seven out of 10 people don't know what a blog is. While 40 percent say they understood the expression dogging. 10 percent said they knew about podcasting. 56 percent said they were aware of happy slapping. Less than 10 percent of people surveyed were aware of Flashmobbing.

My thoughts on the survey…

First up, its a survey of over a 1000 people. I'm not a big fan of these survey's and wonder about where they get the people from, I mean how many people do you know who were involved in these surveys? So I take these things with a huge chunk of salt. That a-side, blogging the word and movement is still in its early years. Paul explained it best the other day, “10 years ago, people never heard of the internet, now look where we are today.” And you know what Paul is so right, who gives a crap what people say right now. Its going to be huge and there is nothing which the mainstream media can do about it. Surveys, jokes, off the cuff remarks are all part of a dying beast turning in its grave.

A couple of related Cluetrain's

#20 – Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them. In the same way, I'm now laughing at this survey.

#57 – Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner. Luckly working for the BBC, I'm seeing this happen more and more.

#72 – We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it. Self explaining I would say.

Blogs may just be "inarticulate ramblings of wannabe journos" to some, but to a growing audience of socialable internet read/writers its a revolution. In actual fact, we like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

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Separated (or even lost) at birth?

Did Channel4 just copy the winning formula of the Donnie Darko website with there Lost untold website? According to my wife (sarah) the Channel4 untold site has more clues than the official ABC website, and fans are flocking to it because it contains tons of produced content (channel4 even got a news reader to do a piece for it). Copy or no copy, I guess the meme is out there and well established now. Talking of Lost, I'm looking forward to ep2 of the second series. I cant believe the UK is still half a season behind, what did we do before the internet? I'll avoid posting theorys and spoilers on cubicgarden for now.

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Do you Firefox beta or Deer Park alpha it?

I've been using Deer Park alpha 2 for quite sometime now, but recently with the Firefox 1.5 beta publicly available I've been tempted to change. So after reading Uche's review of Firefox 1.5 beta I decided to actually install both of them on my machine. I have not used SVG for quite some time, but svg plus xforms seems like a logical step forward for browser technology

I still have not got around to installing IE7 or even Opera 8.5 free edition. But I'm sure there time will come.

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Apple XML formats, oh he went there…

Oh dear, its been one of those things about Apple that we know but no one has really tackled. But Tim Bray on his blog post titled Apple File Formats, went there. Indeed, does anyone remember the terriable cockup of the itunes rss extension? So with that in mind, are we really suprised about what this anonymous person wrote in the comments …

The XML Schema for Keynote 1.0 was not actually developed in house; rather it was designed by a set of highly knowledgeable contractors. For the second round of applications (including Keynote 2.0), the XML Schemas were brought in house to Apple and this is where the headaches started. The schema was changed on an almost daily basis, breaking builds and causing mass amounts of confusion and bitterness. Also, by bringing it in house they lost the use of all this XML expertise that they had for the first version of the file format. There was no thought to standards or conformance at all. Rather they authored the schema in an ad hoc manner to suit their in memory file structure.

To sum up: the second round of file formats were constructed by amateurs.

Sad but true.

Yes very sad! Apple needs to put a little more effort into its file formats like they do with products.

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Changing the small things in software

Influence can be such a subjective thing, but just recently I've been able to shape or even influence the things around me so much more. Maybe that influence has always been there, in each and everyone of us?

So talking about influence and shaping, here's some things which I would like to shape.

Fireant
I've been looking for something to replace Blogmatrix Jaeger for downloading rich media via RSS for quite some time and Fireant seemed to be it. However there are a range of things which I think Fireant should take from Jaeger.

When Jaeger downloads a piece of media it names the file the same as the enclosure. However when Fireant downloads a media file it makes up a random filename like 9CBF0ACB9207FD9079A0342FA98EC69764756802.mp3 which is no good if you want to transfer stuff to your mobile phone via traditional routes (copying a file). Jaeger actually allows you to choose what type of filename you want, say a sequence of numbers, a date and time or just a filename.

Also, Fireant has support for copying files to ipods and psp's but what about removable storage cards, pocketpc, smartphones, etc?

I can understand why Fireant supports Torrents directly, but how about a option to use an external torrent application? I mean how bad is it when you got two torrent applications running at the same time unaware of each other? Yeah a recipe for a lot of trouble. I suggest a simple option which sends the torrent url or file to the other specified torrent application.

OPML import needs work, PocketRSS has a really nice feature which I actually suggest a while ago. It will go and grab a OPML file from a preset URL every week, month or whatever. So this means you dont need to manage two or more subscription lists. See the problem which you realise after a while, is that any blogger can add enclosures to there RSS. This means unless you provide the same list to Fireant, you may miss out on something interesting. Jaeger would actually automaticly download any enclosures from any subscription, there was no distiction between podcasters and bloggers (which I think is the correct way to go about this).
Somewhat related, is the fact that Fireant can be used as a normal RSS reader. This is once again good in theory but its really terriable in practice. It would be great to turn off all subscriptions which dont have enclosures, you know just let Fireant monitor all the feeds but only shows media items.

Blogging applications
I dont know what happened to Flock, but I'm still using a combination of Blojsom's Bookmarklet and Wbloggar. I thought about buying Ecto but I'm wondering why none of the blogging applications support the range of Microformats? And futher to that, if I drag a calendar entry from outlook or sunbird into my blog application wouldnt it make it make logical sense to automaticly create a Hclaendar link? The same should be true of contacts?
Wouldnt it also be great to be able to define some of those meta elements for entries in the blogging application? Say this entry is a certain creative commons licence and uses these tags. This should be common like how you can set the category and define trackbacks in most modern blogging applications.

Social software
I've outlined all my ideas for change in the bank of ideas. Feel free to vote on my thoughts and others.

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To the person(s) who put prisonbreak.s1.ep1 inside of lost.s2.ep1

To the person(s) who put prison break.season 1.ep 1 inside of the lost season 2.ep1 torrent today and yesterday. I was, (lets say it gently) slightly pissed off. This is the kind of thing you see on old school p2p networks like Kazaa not on Bit Torrent.

This is the first time I've ever downloaded something which was labled something else on bit torrent, maybe this is a growing trend? Has anyone else experienced this? I noticed the torrent in question has been removed from the piratebay. But I had already almost uploaded 3 times the contents of the torrent without knowing by the time I had got home today. So sorry to everyone else who was also duked. But to add aditional insult, I also downloaded Prison Break ep1 too, so I ended up with two of the same file. You can tell I was very very pissed off. At least Tom's recommendation for Prison break was a good enough choice to finally calm me down. Certainly no Oz, but interesting none the less. I'm just waiting for Fox to ruin it with some 24 type government propaganda.

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Geek Dinner is back with a bang

So yeah I hear Robert Scoble is back for another Geek Dinner on the 10th December via Ben's Blog. But I've got an announcement to say that I'm currently arranging with Tim O'reilly a geekdinner for thursday 13th October. I'm sure Tim will say yes and hopefully by the time I blog this, he would have agreed already. Lee Wilkins is fully aware of this and is stand by waiting for the final go from myself (just sent him the email).

Obviously he will also be doing some presentations and interviews around the BBC before. So if your a BBC member of staff working on the 13th October, try and keep your calendar clear on that day, so you can either attend a session in White City or Bush House with Tim. If your interested but have never heard Tim talk before, please check out this recommended podcast by Paul

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RSS enabled Windows Vista

PDC 2005 banner

So after a long wait details about Windows Vista's RSS ability are starting to emerge. Amar Gandhi (Group Program Manager of the Windows RSS team) presented “Windows Vista: Building RSS-enabled applications” at PDC 2005 just a few days ago. Sean is planning on putting more details on the Longhorn Team RSS blog soon. But till then I found the powerpoint presentation from Amar Gandhi online. Now if anyone has a video of the demo's that would be great.

On a related tip, Microsoft and Amazon have got together to launch A9 Open search into IE7. Two huge megacorps working together with open standards, this can't be happening? Or can it?

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Why are there so few uk bloggers?

So I was also in the "otherwise NDA’d BBC blog policy meeting" when Tom Coates suggested that the reason why there are few UK bloggers compared to our ummm friends in the states. Ben metcalfe paraphrases

Maybe the reason the UK public are a little behind our Amercian cousins when it comes to being across blogging is because it’s not very ‘British’ for the common man to stand and up and ‘have his say’ on something.

And as you have predicted, I have to agree. But I'm not so sure its quite as simple as to blame our British culture. I feel Geek culture is still kinda of looked down on while America geek culture is much more prolific. I'm not saying that's the only reason either but it like broadband pentration, etc have there part to play in the sum. But lets not forget the ability for the British to quickly change like in the case of House music in the late 80's.

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