Moving house at long last.

In less than 2 weeks, me and Sarah will have bought and moved into our first house. This has been one of the most stressful times I've ever experienced. But I still highly recommend Shared Ownership to first time buyers living and buying in England.

In total me and Sarah have spent roughly just over 2500 pounds in solicitors fees, house deposit, mortgage arrangements, etc to secure the house from viewing to exchanging contracts. Not bad if you consider stamp duty alone could have cost us 1500 pounds plus if the house was not in Woolwich. Our solicitors Barnes Morley were pretty good. There online transaction checker was good but slow to update, I dont think its really integrated into there way of working yet. But the emails back and forth were always answered quickly and fully at stupid times of the day (for me answering emails at 7-8am would be a nightmare come true). Even when we asked the most simple and basic questions, our solicitor totally understood and made it as clear as possible for us first time buyers.

So from Novemeber its goodbye leafy Beckenham and hello urban Woolwich. Some of the things to look forward to is the near future for Woolwich. The Woolwich Arsenal DLR which has started work already and is due to end in 2009 will provide a train link straight into Bank DLR/Tube station. Then we have the olympics in the east end of London in 2012 which will include the woolwich area. I think there's some river things planned for charlton and greewich which is the next areas along. And the last thing which is also going on is the Thames gateway scheme, which includes a bridge a little bit down the road in Thamesmead and a whole host of other projects.

So all together, theres quite a lot of things going on in the area and us buying a place there might have been a really good idea for the future.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

I’m feeling better thanks…

hope you feel well card

If you dont know I've been kidnapped by my blog just recently. But seriously I had a operation and was told to stay at home and away from people, air con, smoke, steam and extreme heat for at least 2 weeks. So i've been reading lots of blogs, while listening to tons of podcasts (including this amazing one by Paul Graham about Blogs, Opensource and the workplace, which I'm going to blog soon) and of course checking out some of the best iptv offerings. It was kind of ideal being off in bed with my laptop while Pop!tech was streamed live over last weekend. Anyhow thanks to everyone who emailed, im'ed and texted me. I'm fine just getting headaches now and then. Thanks for the Donuts World Service New media, me and Sarah enjoyed them and there going to last us about a week.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Sunshine, wireless and holiday geeks camps

A long long time ago I went on a geeky holiday in Ibiza. It was my second time on the island and its was just after I finished my Interactive design BA at Ravensbourne, so I was in need for a break away after the years of stress. The holiday was simply a very last minute cheap package holiday costing 40 pounds a person for 2 weeks which included flights and 3 star hotel. Because I could not get someone else to come with me on such short notice (next day), I had to pay a single suppliment fee of 30 pounds. But 70 pounds for 2 weeks away in the hills of Ibiza wasnt bad at all.

Anyway, I took my laptop with me and spent most of the holiday working on cubicgarden.com (should have just setup a blog all that time ago) and learning more XML technologies like Xlink. And although it was very geeky, it was kinda of nice because some of the people in the same hotel were from the IT field and didnt really think of it being super strange me sitting at the outside hotel bar with my laptop drinking and messing with CSS.

I had thought about running a couple of holidays along this same type of idea, geek holidays or something. But never found the time. Well I'm starting to think its a idea maybe worth revisiting with all the BarCamp, FooCamp, etc Camp's going on. Yes I know most people go away to get away from it all but theres a small but long tail of people which dont see it holidays like that, me included. Geek Dinners is another one of those things which should not make much sense on paper but it does in reality. The key thing in all these things is getting like socially minded people in to a venue and providing aspects of the tradional experience and there lifestyle. So in the camps you still got tents, fields and nature. But you've also got electricity, wireless and computers.

This isnt that new however, there's a camp event which has been running for years which I keep wanting to go to but keep forgetting (need to actually add it to my calendar or todo list one day). Its called What the Hack? and involves people coming together for a hacker event in the middle of a grassy field. I always thought about what the hack, as the Burning man for geeks and hackers. I can imagine something just like what the hack? but for bloggers, geeks, techies, etc?

The question remains if I can convince Sarah to come to such a holiday? I mean she loves camping but I think this would not count as “real camping” for her. Our friends in Sweden already offered us a relaxing holiday in a place they have in Gotland? They said theres no electricity and no internet access at all. I thought they were winding me up, but no they were serious. Now I know some of you will say it sounds so nice, walks in the forest, no electricity, candle lights etc. And I would agree for a couple of days at most, but a week plus? It sounds as scary as going to Sarah's grandparents house in the middle of no where illinois and having no mobile phone signal of any kind.

A lot of you maybe shaking your heads, but I know a few of you are thinking this is a little consistant with what you see in a holiday too. Hey and don't forget theres already holidays and camps for clubbers, trekies, blues fans, etc. A geek one strikes me as a really good idea.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Does presentation matter in a world of RSS?

So Ben Metcalfe asks the question Does presentation matter anymore? This is exactly what me, Miles, Harry and Dave talked about one night over dinner. Honestly I think it does but as Ben identifies its moved around the chain now. If we take it that RSS has a huge audience and that its not changed a lot from its current form (aka no JS, CSS, Ajax, etc in RSS or ATOM) for a moment. The presentation shifts to feed promotion and the news reader style. For example Great News which I'm using for my desktop aggregator supports CSS and I can actually define a style sheet per feed if I want to. This was useful today when Google news was delivering me all the WorldService and ArabicTV stories, as I could use the brief stylesheet to show a lot of entries on one screen. While I use the readability stylesheet for reading Ben's blog and most of RSS content.

But it goes deeper than that, design isnt just about presentation. A designer should have a hand in the structured elements of the RSS feed, the useability of how its pushed and pulled around the internet and the accessability of the feed and its content. Its what I prefer to call the whole process the Flow of the content. Its part of what I do and I feel its part of the emerging role for new media designers. I mean is it too much to ask for a designer to build a client side XSL page for a RSS feed?

Just stepping away from the world of huge RSS audiences now. There something which smart designers understand well. The media, there designing for. web media isnt print media. Sounds obvious, but were talking about the vision for how the site should look and work being thrown out the window. I'm not talking about just browser quirks, screen resoultions and font size differents. I'm talking about the range of toolbars, extensions and the like which deconstruct the website beyond the control of the tightest web designer. Then if you go down the Greasemonkey path, you have something where you can actually share your deconstructions. Smart designers understand and embrace this and actually push for CSS driven sites to make this even easier. There are a few even testing the waters with Client side XSL transformations for all content with CSS for style.

I've included a screenshot of how I currently see BBC news story pages and how its meant to look. I custom built this simple script because it makes loading up bbc news stories from my RSS reader quicker and is easier to read for myself. Others would disagree, but then I would suggest you write your own greasemonkey script.

So back to the question, yes presentation does matter and the role of a designer is very important but like everything, roles shift with the times and media. Branding is another issue which I wont go into right now either…

I found this great little post about WIndows Longhorn/Vista's redline designs. Ryan suggests Redlines are a throw back to another generation of design, and I have to agree. Dactylx asks this question in the comments
I'm down with that idea, but then how do you as a designer communicate how the design should be rendered to a developer? What can we use to replace the redlines? and Ryan replies with a slightly optimistic but good answer.

Here is the first step. Do not separate the teams. There should be no technical team and design team working separately (on different floors or on different continents). They should sit right next to each other and *understand* the problem just as great as the designers. Design is manifested in code, so if the coders don't understand, then the product is inevitable to fail.

I'm once again in total agreement, in my experience the best projects are always when everyone is involved in the problem. Not passed around like a rugby ball on a winters day.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

AvantGo finally supports RSS

So funny, I've been hearing rumours about AvantGo supporting RSS like Russell has for quite some time too. Like him I was told not to blog it but I'm sure it wasnt the same person or group of people. Even without the heads-up, it was certain that AvantGo would have to do something at some point to stay relevent with the huge demand for RSS content on mobile devices. Is it enough to make me switch back to using AvantGo over PocketRSS? No. But is it good enough to recommend to others? Your damm right…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

World Service cuts run deep

I wrote a nice long piece about the worldservice language services closures and Arabic TV. But somewhere along the line it got deleted by myself. I really need to invest in some decent Blogging software because using a Bookmarklet is not good when your writing a long entry. Anyhow, I'm not going to repeat or remember the entry. Plus it was timed just after the press officially found out about the cuts, while this obvioulsy isnt. Here's the main points of the day.

  • Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Thai language services will end by March 2006
  • There will be more investment in developing New Media
  • Increased funding for global FM distribution
  • Extra marketing for the other 33 languages services
  • Modernising bureaus in priority markets
  • Further exploring of TV service partnerships within other languages and countries

And here's the front of BBC news at 1pm today.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Finding RachelC and my own blog mistakes

I just spent about 10+ mins looking for a decent picture of Rachel Clarke. I want to remember what she looked like as I spoke to 2 women at the last geek dinner with the name Rachel, no offense Rachel I'm pretty sure I remember you but wanted to be sure. So I looked through her flickr stream and blog and the best I could do was this picture. But just above it was a blog entry (dont worry it all relates) about mistakes bloggers make by Jakob Nielsen (I stopped subscribing to his alert boxes since I learned about RSS, and Jakob still has no RSS! Crazy but true).

  1. No Author biography – Yep I'm now going to sort that out. Its one of those things I've been thining about and i'm going to link to my o'reilly profile tonight
  2. No Author Photo – Dont worry the profile has my photo and I use the same photo across all my social networks
  3. Nondescript Posting Titles – I'm not so bad about this. I sometimes do get quite abstract with the titles.
  4. Links don't say where they go – no i'm really good about this and I use to add more titles for addional info.
  5. Classic Hits buried – right hand nav is very clutterd but the posts are quite clean and I tend to only to the key things.
  6. The Calandar is the only Navigation – Nope got, tags, rss and the post amounts
  7. Irregular Posting Frequency – No problem there, think the longest I've left the blog unposted is a week and a bit, if i'm holiday I will say so
  8. Mixing Topics – I'm not buying this for my blog so much. I mix topics but the categories can help somewhat.
  9. Forgettting I write for my Future Boss – Oh no, I know for well I'm writing for my next boss, no problem there.
  10. Having a Domain Name owned by a blog service – Indeed, cubicgarden.com is mine and mine for ever!

So back to RachelC and number 2. Rachel says this,

No Author Photo. mmmm – not sure if I want one of those. I'm one of the people in the photo a few posts down and I'm occasionally in my own photos on Flickr. Otherwise – I'll think about this.

Well sorry to tell you Rachel, I looked through your flickr pictures and tags and couldnt find one of you at all. Dont take this to heart (take this whole blog entry with a little tongue and cheek on my behalf), its been great looking through your stuff online and its made it clear to myself what I need to do for my own profile online. I'll see you at the next geekdinner Rachel.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

The game: Lost

Riven screenshot

I was listening to the excellent Pop!Tech live stream over the weekend and one of the things I heard which I need to blog at least was the thought by (i'm sure) Edward Castronova that Lost takes most of its queues and ideas from games? The example he gave was the trend setting Myst and Riven games. And honestly when he said that I instantly started thinking about screenshots like this type of thing. But Edward was more getting at the depth and interactivity (yes you heard me right) than anything else. One of the points included the numbers which keep appearing throughout the series, something which encorages extra thought and people to do things like this and this. This type of behavour tends to be more common with games. When IT Conversations puts the audio online I'll put a link to it and it will all make a hell lot more sense, than me trying to do it from memory.

Without indulging my Lost thoughts, I find this all pretty interesting when you read Lost Boy's blog post about Lost: the game. The linkage between games and lost is all there and when you think about it more it makes more and more sense.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

PIM Overview please enable URL’s

PIM Overview

Quick thought, I was messing around today looking at new widgets for Konfabulator for my laptop and workstation computers. I havent really messed with Konfabulator since Yahoo! bought it, I just simply downloaded the updates and kept all my old widgets the same. Anyhow, I had a good look through them today and found this really nice one by Yahoo called PIM Overview.widget. What it does is look at your Outlook or Ical file and displays the data as a Windows mobile type today screen. This is great if your running Outlook as it just picks up the outlook pst file and goes from there. If your using ical you need to point to a place where the ical files actually exist. Luckly I've been playing with Mozilla Sunbird, so I was able to point to somewhere on the local machine.

But what I dont get is, why is there no option to look at a remote calendar? A simple URL out to Eventful or even Upcoming.org would be so useful to people who dont use Outlook and may not use a application as such. This would make so much sense for Yahoo! as Konfabulator is now a Yahoo application and Upcoming.org is a Yahoo! service. I mean what more of a reason do you need Yahoo? Hell, I might even try doing it myself, I've been meaning to build and hack a few widgets for a while.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Should we kill TV but keep the shows?

So I was almost done with my RSS aggregator for the night when I read Jon's entry titled I Watch Shows, Not Tv. As I was reading through, I was in total agreement with Jon. Some choice quotes which made me laugh.

The medium had become totally uninteresting to me. Reality Tv was everywhere, sitcoms sucked, and ads were worse.

Enter Bittorrent, Hd rips, and RSS. Ever since I set up my system, not only do I watched more shows, but I watch a LOT of shows. I probably have at least 10 shows I watch weekly without missing a beat. But not only do I get to watch them at my own convenience

The only television I watch is the television I watch. That makes sense, I swear. When I’m done with a show. That’s it. I don’t flip to the next channel to see what else is on. I finish and move onto another project. Just sitting in front of your Tv leads to watching Hugh Hefner’s Whores jumping around pretending they have enough content to constitute television. I’d rather sit down catch 42 minutes of Lost or 28 minutes of Curb and be happy.

Totally! I have a very simlar setup to Jon, xbox media centre and all. And he's so right, me and Sarah watch a lot of shows including Lost series 2, Prison Break, Daily Show, etc, etc. When I was in hospital recently, the lovely nurse asked if I wanted the TV on, and without thinking I replied “No, I don't watch TV.” Bang just like that without thinking about it, then I realised what I just said. Honestly me and Sarah turn on the TV for the BBC news 10min update at about 8am in the morning then we turn off and listen to the slashdot review podcast if there is time. When we get back in the evening, we may turn on Channel4 news for 1 hour and maybe once in a while leave it on and watch grand designs or something like that afterwards. But usually we turn off have dinner together and maybe put on a show or listen to a podcast while we catch up with news, emails, etc. Even with the daily show on more4 every day now, Sarah's not interested because shes use to timeshifting it. She does'nt like the idea of turning on the daily show at 8:30pm every day and sitting in front of the TV.
Hey and why would we? With TV RSS we can store them and watch a whole load together with friends on a weekend or watch it the week after if we choose to.

Moving on, I read the related link and found the tons of comments mainly in agreement.

But I say all this and I know something doesnt quite fit.
I've heard about studies in the BBC which went down this route of the show being more important that the channel and TV its self. But these studies say when that is the case, people look for brands they can trust. Channels are a odd thing, if you live in the UK, you may think of BBC one as generally massmarket but higher class than ITV (my view not the BBC's view), BBC two more documentary's and nature programmes but still some comedies and mass market contnet. BBC Three, for people 35 and younger, somewhat like BBC two but with lots of comedies and reality tv. BBC four, highbrow documentary's and some news.
People use these types of thoughts to decide what channel they should wait on or check out. Remove the channel and people try and cling on to many other things like brand to tell them more about the programmes and there expected audience.

So although I'm with you Jon, I need to err on the side of caution because people need to make money without killing the distribution method (as they do now). Itunes video is a good move away from tv and towards shows and programmes.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Why I dont want a Ipod or PSP

Going digital

This post to slashdot by Zonk sums up my thoughts too,

As the owner of a PocketPC PDA I am a very happy camper, with wifi internet access, Skype Voip, video playback, and of course the ubiquitous mp3 playback. In an era were everyone seems to talk about the Video iPod, and the next generation of mobile devices, it leaves me wondering – I already have all those abilities in a PDA that costs about as much as an iPod. My question for Slashdot: Given that modern PDAs have almost all the functionality of these separate devices, how has Palm and Microsoft/PocketPC developers failed in making PDAs a force in this new era of portable media devices? It is the poor marketing, bad media apps, public perception, or do people simply not want an all-in-one for mobile media?

And as I expect, its horse's for course's as my dad says.

Gumber says

Because more functionality isn’t aways better, especially in a smaller device.

You might as well be asking why people buy screwdrivers and pliers instead of a single Leathermen.

Some more comments for thought,

From ciroknight

PDAs might be cool toys, they do a lot that a PC can do, and you can carry it in your pocket. Pretty cool eh? But when it comes down to it, what does the device actually do? Hard to define; it can do calendars, it can do media playback, it can do telephony, it can do internet-related tasks. But on the overall, it's a very obscure device.

– Indeed, its one of the things which makes it difficult to explain to people. One moment I'm using it as a mp3 player then a video player next moment a skype or im device and at the end of the day I'm using it to take notes at a meeting. It works for me but its a hard concept to sell and it requires installing many pieces of software and some configuration.

There was lots of talk about storage too.

Unless you sprung for extra storage, the space on your PDA is measured in tens of megabytes. On an iPod, it's measured in tens of gigabytes.

I dont think that's the main issue, because the psp has equal storage levels to a modern PocketPC (1/2gig maximum). Yes its nothing compared to the 100gigs which are now possible. But I expect Flash Drive pocketpc will be arriving soon, as hard drives are still very power hungrey.

The impact of Crackberries (backberries) has also had an effect on the image of pocketpc in the business world just like how most pocketpc have moved into the mobile world. Hence the change of operating system name, WindowsCE to PocketPC to Windows Mobile.

As someone said,
People who make generic statements such as “PDAs have failed” are just simply wrong.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Flock finally revealed to the public

flock logo

So at long last Flock is out in a form that the general internet public can download and play with. And honestly after all the hype and secret squirrel secrecy, its a bit of a let down. Let me outline what it is and what it does differently.

He's my screenshots of the Flock and everyone's Tagged Flock pictures.

It looks to be a Deer Park alpha build of Firefox (might be wrong but its at least a beta) with additional features. What are the extra features? Well…

Add a blogging tool,
Add del.icio.us bookmarking but remove regular bookmarks,
Add a Safari RSS type aggregator and remove livebookmarks,
Add a nice, well designed skin and little tricks here and there.

And you pretty much got Flock.

tagging up star items in flock

I think if Greasemonkey was not available I would be very much more impressed. But lets be clear, its a early alpha and can be steered in different directions. I like that fact they have put del.icio.us bookmarking deeply inside and its certainly better than the firefox plugins you can get which do simlar things. But the flickr intergration feel more like a poor after thought in comparison. Its nice to have a blog app right there, but right click and blog is a little sucky and I couldnt get it working for Blojsom under the Atom, moveabletype or even metaweblog API's at all. Which is strange because I thought at least metaweblog would work. I checked the blojsom logs after David's comment, nothing is coming through from Flock or any other besides my own wblogger client. Oh yeah heres the nasty html error I get. Try and make some sense of that…

So at the end of the day version 0.4 alpha is not bad, I won't replace firefox because Flock is certainly not amzingly stable. People have already took pictures with boxes being cut off and the like. Here's a few of my grumbles. It could be that I'm running Flock on my tabletpc computer but I dont think so. Greasemonkey can do a lot of the little tricks Flock has, but there not as smooth or well thought out. Flock is worth keeping an eye on for later.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Should you use social software at work?

Basecamp icon

Where’s the line start and end with social software?

Currently I'm using these and more social software services.

Flickr
Audioscrobbler
Eventful
Bloglines
Del.icio.us
Reader2
Myprogs
Ideabank
Listal

But just recently I've been testing out basecamp. Now basecamp is a product by 37signals camp and I was impressed by the talk which was given. But theres something different between the other social apps I'm using and basecamp. See the rest I use in my personal life and projects not at work. But Basecamp is a project management tool, fitting somewhere between a adhoc wiki and full on microsoft project ummm project? Where do I have to manage the most projects? Work of course.

So is it correct of me to use a online tool to project manage internal BBC projects which I maybe working on? Its a tricky question and I'm not certain of the answer. Some would actually suggest that I shouldn’t be discussing this in public on my own blog. But I'm not revelaling anything which is secret or private to the BBC, so I'm sure I'm on good grounds with this entry.

So back to the question. The only time I've come across this type of dielmma is when using del.icio.us. There are a lot of urls which I would like to store in my bookmarks and del.icio.us means I can access and store them anywhere but should I store internal urls in the public del.icio.us? Yes I know del.icio.us like flickr and a few other services have a private tag which means it will not appear in the public. But is that a good idea? Anyhow the question of bookmarking was solved for me when someone setup del.irio.us inside the BBC firewall. So all my internal urls are now stored there and external one's on del.icio.us.

But back to basecamp, this certainly quite a step up from storing bookmarks. Storing project metadata externally is a risk too far. The logical solution would be to download a opensource version of basecamp and run it inside the firewall but then you lose some of the flexibility of social software. I don’t believe basecamp is even available to download and the other project management tools in this area tend to be too structured (alas Microsoft Project) or too unstructured (alas a fancy wiki). If someone can suggest somthing they have seen which is dead in the middle please do add a comment.

The next step for me is look at the public and private aspects of Basecamp and of course the End user licence. I already noticed you can export all the data as one large xml file but it didn’t quite work for me. I got a lot of structure and no data except the actual project title. I'm sure its a bug or something. Theres also RSS and iCal data which can be subscribed and used as a restful api if the export is not up to the task.

I'm sure many other businesses use basecamp small and maybe large. But they may use the paid version which has more features and maybe a slightly different end user agreement? no its the same one. I'll check this out later but I'm actually writing this from my hospital bed and believe it or not there is no wireless and i'm not allowed to use my mobile to dial up on 3g (hint of cheekyness of course).

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Pop! Tech 2005 streamed live via IT Conversations

Pop!Tech 2005 Grand Challenges

This is so unheard of, a super conference streaming live to the world. Only Doug Kaye at IT Conversations could have pulled this off. If your not already listening, I highly recomend you do. Currently its 19:45 in the London and there on the Mind and Body sessions so its about 14:45 in Maine. Pop!Tech is a real mix bag of inspirational speakers and real world challenges. Can I also just say the QuickCast option which bundles up all the Pop!Tech presentations in one large zip file well before they get podcasted again on IT Conversations is a pretty neat deal at 100 dollars for the whole lot.

If your like me listening on there xbox you simply need to create a *.strm file and stick http://www.itconversations.com/livestream.asx
in the first line. Then point the xbox to the *.strm (poptech 2005.strm is mine) file and your away. I've told my xbox to cache about 8megs worth at a time so I dont get any breaks at all. I thought about recording it with xbox media centre but it seems to be greyed out for some reason.

Its kinda of weird listening to Pop!Tech live, you cant just pause and go back if you missed something. So use to time shifting now, its hard going back I guess.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Syncing podcasts and videos between machines

synctoy folder pairs

Slowly I've been adopting the use of FireANT for my podcasts and vlogs (video blogs?) downloads. I'm still mainly using Azereus with the RSS plugin for its TV RSS method which has saved me a lot of time and effort downloading TV shows and the like. It was very good today, finding Lost ep5 seeding without any human interaction on my behalf.

Anyhow, I have FireANT running on both my laptop and main workstation. They both use the same OPML file from Bloglines which means they both download the same media! This is not ideal and bandwidth killing as you can imagine, specially when you get some of the larger Channel9 videos downloading. So I was looking around and found Microsoft's synctoy.

Now although this Sync toy isnt as powerful as Rsync on the unix platforms its actually quite neat and has all the modes needed for full syncing.

  • Synchronize: New and updated files are copied both ways. Renames and deletes on either side are repeated on the other.
  • Echo: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right.
  • Subscribe: Updated files on the right are copied to the left if the file name already exists on the left.
  • Contribute: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames on the left are repeated on the right. No deletions.
  • Combine: New and updated files are copied both ways. Nothing happens to renamed and deleted files

You can also Schedule it using the standards Windows Scheduler, Preview a sync, use UNC paths, sync deep folders (perfect for backup) and tell it to move files to the recycle bin instead of deleting them.

So with all this in mind, I've setup Fireant to download and for Synctoy to sync across to my laptop before it downloads on my laptop. This seems to work, because the stupid file names are at least unique across all Fireants. I've been trying to convince the people behind Fireant that the human readable podcast download names are unique enough to do the same thing, but its still a on going debate. If the human readable filenames were in place, I could then sync files to my storage card, pocketpc, mobile phone and laptop without human interaction. Using filetype filtering in synctoy, its possible to sync audio files to the phone while videos files go to the pocketpc. Hey and if Fireant used human readable filenames and Synctoy regular expressions the limits would be endless.

fireant and synctoy working together

So in summary,

Microsoft's Synctoy should be renamed Synctool and should add regular expressions to the filetype filering. I'm also hoping syncing to the PocketPC's storage card will be a option soon and there certainly should be a option to divert sync if the removeable storage card is not in place.

Fireant can keep its sync option but should give people the option to automaticly save as human readable filenames.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]