Like you didn’t know, it’s iPad day in the US, and here I am posting about my new iMac. But it ties in, I swear!
Anyway. After 10 years of buying laptops I bought a 27” iMac a couple weeks ago. I’m still deciding whether this was the right decision, but I’m pretty sure it is.
Apr 03, 2010.
Development of my media center app of choice, Plex, has seemed stagnant of late, with their blog only updated with new plugins for Danish sports channels and the like. But all was not as it seemed. Deep in the dark, there were rumblings. And lo!
At the end, we decided, just like with our plug-in framework, to throw out the existing code and rewrite it from scratch… The ground up rewrite not only results in an extremely powerful library for personal content, but also sets the stage for providing many benefits beyond just the library itself.
Plex’s new Library, Alexandria, is thus teased. Hopefully it won’t be burned down by the Christians and blamed on the Romans, like the real one.
Mar 25, 2010.
Andy Ihnatko on the iPad – what that guy said. I had a post drafted about the iPad from a few weeks ago but it didn’t seem to add much to the talk at the time. Despite initially feeling underwhelmed, the product quickly made sense. Traditional computer interfaces don’t work on small screens (they barely work on 12” screens let alone 10”), and rather than start from scratch Apple is building upon the touch OS that when you think about it is already quite an achievement in usability, much more so than the Mac OS. There are a lot of super-non-nerds I know who recently got iPhones and they understand it in minutes. In a couple days they are showing off their new apps. This never happened with the Mac or Windows.
Mar 04, 2010.
Here’s an article by Shawn Blanc about iPhone feed readers. I find him pretty forgiving. I’ve tried NetNewsWire, Byline, and Fever, and am now using GReader’s mobile interface because none of the others did it for me. All of them are slow, Byline has interface problems, NNW is (was?) buggy, Fever… Just not a good iPhone solution is how I’d put it. I quite like GReader mobile. It’s fast, and as you’re probably going to be bouncing things to the browser I don’t mind the web-app-ness as much as I often do. Also, it’s fast.
I would like to try Reeder, though. Maybe when I haven’t blown my iPhone app budget on plants, zombies and waaaay too many to-do apps.
Mar 01, 2010.
What did you think? I’m moderately impressed. During the keynote I felt underwhelmed, but once we learned the price was $500, I changed my tune. Apple was clever to leak the $1000 price point ahead of time.
Perhaps the disappointment is that this is a glorified iPhone with some extra eye candy and none of the revolutionary new interface hype we had been inhaling over the past little while.
The price reinforces my feeling that this is primarily Apple’s response to the growth of the netbook market. However, the netbook and the iPad both menace laptops in general. Since I got the netbook, my 15” MBP remains on my desk, and for the first time I am considering buying a desktop to replace it. Netbooks make two-computer life possible to those of us who aren’t among the richest princes in Europe. My dream portable remains something like the MacBook Air, but that thing seems dead in the water now, especially at three times the price of the iPad. I expect they may eliminate the Air altogether and perhaps introduce a new model that is essentially the iPad with a keyboard, with a laptop form factor. Or maybe that’s just me dreaming.
The clunky peripherals are a surprise, especially the keyboard dock. It seems very un-Apple. I also hear from Gizmodo that it can be used with Bluetooth keyboards. That’s awesome, and makes me think I could stand to have it instead of a netbook.
As an ebook reader? I imagine hardcore readers will stick with proper e-ink readers and/or actual books, but casual readers may well like the eye candy of Apple’s presentation and not worry too much about eye strain and the higher prices of books. But the Kindle and friends are going to have to come down in price, stat.
My biggest problems with it: the encroachment of the closed iPhone app ecosystem into general computing. Also, still no multitasking? Granted, if the apps launch super-fast and save their states, perhaps we don’t need it as much. But still.
Anyway, that was a fun day. I have a million little questions about specific implementations that I guess are going to have to wait a couple months. I think I can deal with that.
Jan 27, 2010.
This is one of the facets of the ongoing Apple tablet megarumour that really intrigues me – an Apple 3D interface patent.
In “Systems and Methods for Adjusting a Display Based on the User’s Position,” Apple proposes a display that can automatically adjust the point of view and angle of 3D objects, or even 2D objects arranged in 3D space, based on the changing position of the viewer in relation to the display. Example: imagine you are viewing some 3D object on your monitor. A sensor could let the computer know when you move your head to the left, and the object would subtly change position and/or rotation so you could see the left side of the object. Alternatively, you could move your head up so you could see the top better.
Head tracking. Fuck yeah. There was another 3D-related patent filed in January, and while it didn’t have any head tracking, it does lend credence to the notion that, come Jan 27, shit be poppin’ – in 3D. (Well, hopefully without the glasses.)
For interest’s sake, here are a couple of old posts of mine in which I drool over 3D interfaces: one two.
Jan 18, 2010.
Some questions about this tablet thing, that have made me doubt its existence. Questions that the excellent Daring Fireball article also addresses, but does not answer – no one has answers right now.
What is the screen like? If it’s LCD, is Apple really expecting to succeed in the ebook market? The single defining feature in a suddenly-cluttered, apparently reasonably successful market is the e-ink screen, notable for the absence of backlight and close resemblance to print, but also for many side effects that make them bad for other uses (low refresh rate, monochrome, poor contrast). Apple may well view readers with some condescension – “no one reads any more” – and if so, they may settle for an LCD, which is good for everything except reading. But if they have actually tried to solve the problem, they may have something cool up their sleeves. Perhaps two layered displays? Does the backlight turn off when a book is opened? I’m very curious.
How are you supposed to type on its presumed on-screen keyboard? Do you hold it in one hand and type with the other? Do you hold it with both hands and type with your thumbs? The latter is actually more than doable on a 7” screen, and would probably work on 10” as well. But that leads to the next thing-
Is it really going to be a grand? That’s laptop money even for Apple (and at the netbook price range, three laptop money). While that makes my heart sink because it means I wouldn’t buy it, it also makes me a little excited because it means that Apple may be trying to replace the laptop, not slide in alongside it in a rather crowded gadget matrix – phone / “smartbook” / netbook / laptop / desktop. That’s ballsy stuff, although I remain skeptical of the value of a keyboardless computer. I sure as hell head to a computer when I have to type anything more ambitious than “LOL” on my iPhone, despite being comparatively good at thumb-bashing.
I think Apple may well have arrived at the tablet form after experimenting with netbooks – one can imagine they are both trying to solve the same problem. I’m just concerned that throwing out the keyboard throws out more good than bad. Then again, the Nexus One’s lack of a hardware keyboard may indicate that smartphones are evolving away from such dangly bits, like the arms of a tyrannosaur. So will we learn to stop typing and love the screen?
Whatever, it’s exciting stuff for the gadget nerd. I’m almost as hyped as I am for the final season of Lost, and that’s saying something.
Jan 06, 2010.
Because I have to get back in the blog posting habit.
First, about 10.6.2 breaking Atom-based Hackintoshes – lots of FUD like this article. Really, everyone? “Puts an end to the hackintosh”? Was 10.6.1 that bad? In my experience, your apps aren’t going to go incompatible with a x.x.x release. Nevermind that the mydellmini.com champs are surely on this shit right now and it will be sorted within weeks.
Second, because of this, and ‘cause ranking shit is fun:
1. The Wire
2. The Sopranos
3. Deadwood
4. Lost
5. Breaking Bad
6. Mad Men
7. Arrested Development
8. Tim & Eric
9. Battlestar Galactica
10. Firefly
With props to Dollhouse (sorry to hear you’re cancelled). It had massive problems, but on the strength of “Epitaph One” alone, deserves to enter the TV pantheon.
Nov 12, 2009.
Recently I read this guide to Hackintoshing a Dell Netbook on Gizmodo, and after seeing mention of the larger keyboard, the still-miniscule size and of course the dirt cheap price of $300, I impulse ordered a Dell Mini 10v.
Nov 11, 2009.
Man. I had a post ready about how I deal with feed overload.That all changed on the weekend as on Ram’s recommendation I switched to the new self-hosted feed reader, Fever.
I’ve been rocking NetNewsWire since way back in the day. I paid money for it when it first came out of beta. It’s great, it’s now free, and totally packed with features. Problem is, it hasn’t seen any new development in quite some time. I think the free Google reader took the wind out of the feed reader market. At the height of it all NNW seemed about to sprout a bunch of feed management features. Ranchero was bought by Newsgator and they had a ton of ‘other people are reading x’ capabilities and everything seemed promising and then… nothing.
To step back: the problem with feedreaders is you wind up adding too many damn feeds. You realize a feed reader allows you to check more news than you could by manually hitting all those websites. So you add more feeds. Gradually, those unread counts pile up. We’re conditioned from email to imagine missing an item as THE END OF THE WORLD, and so those unread items translate into stress.
So, inevitably, the net was awash in articles a couple years back about how to cull your feeds, sort them into priority lists, etc. etc. And at the same time, feed reader development ground to a halt.
It seemed the best way to use a feed reader was to not use it at all.
It could have gone a different way. I mean we’re sitting here using computers; perhaps the computers could step in and lend a hand and do something a little more taxing than displaying lists. The computer could determine what news is being talked about across all your feeds. Like Google News, except without the Kansas City Star and Voice of America and all the sources you don’t give a shit about.
Fever represents a step in this direction. You dump in your existing feeds, which are in typically gimmicky fashion referred to as ‘kindling.’ You are encouraged to add ‘sparks’, which is to say, link-heavy, high noise-to-signal feeds you might otherwise ignore. Fever then scans the feed data to determine which links are being referenced the most. It presents this to you in the ‘hot’ list, which is sorted by most inbound links:
The idea – and it is a noble one – is that you can at a glance get a sense of the biggest news items being talked about, sorted by priority. The other associated ideas are a) this diminishes the need for unread counts (although they can be toggled on globally or individually), and b) this works better the more feeds you throw at it. Get it? you “feed a fever”. This calculus of optimal sources to perfectly tailored hot list is actually really fun to set up. Presented with a list that was too tech video game heavy, I went looking for film and news sites. Fever isn’t a feed reader, it’s a feed management game.
Ready for the downsides? Fever, an idiosyncratic app if ever there was one, has many. It costs $30. It’s a web app that must be installed on your own server. The only portable option is a less-than stellar iPhone web view. And for best results, and for the iPhone version to be at all useful, you have to set up a cron job. I had never had reason to do that before.
I can live with all of those issues. (I’m confident the iPhone view will see improvements – hopefully its own app.) The biggest drawback though, as mentioned here, is that Fever only sorts according to links. Sure, this is the web and links are the currency. I duly note the idealism. However, actual real life feeds often fall short of our ideals. For one, find me a newspaper feed with a goddamn hyperlink in it. For two, many feeds (like the link-rich Greencine Daily) only give excerpts, and Fever sees only that and not the full post. Fever works well on tech news and the like, and falls short with real life news where there may be no definitive hyperlink.
This could be fixed. Can small developer Shaun Inman add headline-parsing algorithms that rival the goliath Google News? It would be awesome, and I hope so, but I have no idea. Frankly, I feel we need legitimate personal data sorting tools that don’t involve huge friend lists and massive privacy violations. News is not the only area of our lives in which we grapple with data overload, and Fever is an excellent new weapon that just needs a few tweaks.
Now does anyone know any good news blogs with lots of links?
Jul 27, 2009.
I took my computer apart this weekend.
Having filled my 160gig internal, and with a new camera on the way, and realizing that 500gig 2.5” drives were now here and quite affordable, I had ordered a replacement hard drive, with the intention of paying a technician to install it. I had read the guide and it involved many steps, specialist screwdrivers, and a great number of differently-shaped screws. However, as Computer Systems Centre never called me back, and routinely put me on hold for 5 minute intervals, I decided to go it alone.
A trip to Canadian Tire later, I had all the nerd screwdrivers I needed, and was ready to start. This Macworld article had invaluable advice: print the instructions and then tape the screws to the pictures that indicate their provenance. Without this, I would have a frankenstinian monster on my lap right now, but with it, the procedure was long and repetitive, but not hellish at all. Although it gets scary when you crack open the top case (it actually goes ‘crack’), and see your computer’s guts just lying there.
So it worked, and my free space is now a cavernous 300+ gigs, plus I feel like I really upgraded my nerd cred a whole lot. Fucking A.
Jun 24, 2009.
This is a simple but effective time-saver if you use your Mini for the downloadin’ and find yourself checking in frequently to see if your downloads are complete yet.
The notifier preference pane Growl can be set up to send an email instead of showing a little notifier box on your screen. Amongst other things, BitTorrent client Transmission and also Hazel work with Growl, so you can get email updates letting you know when files have finished downloading, and confirming they have been processed by Hazel.
Jan 22, 2009.
Hazel is a preference pane that watches folders and carries out actions on files based on rules you set. It’s presumably stuff that you could do with folder actions and applescript, but for non-scripters, it’s handy as heck. It can take a while to get your head around, and figure out the right rules you want, but once you have it set up, you can automate a lot of the fiddly file management that comes with digital media. I have mine set up to watch my downloads folder and do the following:
It doesn’t work perfectly – Plex etc. can be fussy about filenames. However, it cuts down on the fiddling drastically. The auto-iPhone-updating alone is worth the $22.
Jan 20, 2009.
I’ve been falling behind with the series of posts about getting the most out of your Mini as a media center. I’ve made some tweaks, and figured I should share the joy. So expect a few updates in this vein over the next week or so.
Plex is my media center app of choice, and the recent versions introduce Harmony Universal Remote support, now with less fiddling. There’s a profile within the harmony setup app for Plex now, and it works well. Now I can put the Apple Remote aside and actually use only one remote. Sweet. Instructions here.
Jan 19, 2009.
On the 18th, TUAW reviewed the just-released SimCity for iPhone and found it to be good, saying
This is one of those games that will help make the iPhone be viable as a portable gaming unit alongside the Nintendo DS and PSP. For those hesitant to try out games on your iPhone, give SimCity a try. You won’t be disappointed.
One week later, they re-review it, and find it to be bad. It crashes every five minutes, it takes two minutes to load, the controls are bad, and it “keeps draining the battery even after connecting the iPhone to a power source”.
Not that game journalism in general has very high standards, but iPhone game journalism in particular is setting some new lows. Yet another reason to avoid TUAW like the plague. (via funkaoshi’s iphone blog)
Dec 29, 2008.
I just rented a film off iTunes for the first time. The service only became available in Canada in June, and when it first started the selection was far from compelling, so it’s taken me until now to give it a shot. I chose the middling spy thriller Spy Game.
The iTunes movie experience has some good points. I liked that my download was watchable fairly quickly, which compares favourably to either bittorrenting or actually getting off my ass and going and renting a flick. The quality is decent (let’s say slightly below DVD quality). The price was good, too – $4. And at 48 hours, the rental period is more reasonable than Rogers on Demand’s 24. The ease of getting the flick onto the iPhone is a plus, too.
But other than that it’s all bad.
Dec 02, 2008.
So I was going through the referrer logs for once and discovered that people are still reading my post about Front Row replacements and the one about alternate Apple Remote software, both of which are fairly out of date. Thus a couple notes to reflect the current state of the Mac media centre world.
Nov 25, 2008.
As I’m sure we’re all aware, the iPhone (and its shy cousin the iPod Touch, pictured above) represents the newest, most promising games platform. The hardware is at least as powerful as the Nintendo DS or Sony’s PSP, and the unique input controls present the possibility for new gameplay forms. So inevitably the App Store is swimming in games, some great, most horrible. The bulk of the games are casual, which is probably as it should be, but traditional gaming genres (racing, sports) are filling out gradually.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is price. The most money you will pay for an iPhone game is $10, generally reserved for “A-list” titles from the large publishers like EA and Sega: Super Monkey Ball, Spore Origins, Asphalt 4: Elite Racing, Star Wars the Force Unleashed. In the broader context of video game pricing, these are absolute steals – top shelf DS and PSP titles go for $30 to $50 CDN, and games for the 360 and PS3 can go above $60. However, the iTunes store has a hell of a lot of free apps, and many games in the $1 to $5 range which often rival the more expensive games in quality. Also, the cheaper games tend to show up in the “Top Paid Apps” list, which appears at the top level of the iTunes Store, and must generate great traffic and thus sales. As a consequence, games seem to be getting cheaper, and gimmicky sales are now the norm.
Anyway, it’s impossible to be exhaustive about this on account of the hundreds of games now in the store, so I’ll just make mention of the games I’ve tried enough to be able to comment on. Prices are moving targets, I can vouch only that these were the prices at the time of writing.
Oct 17, 2008.
There don’t seem to be too many iPhone app reviews out there, so I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring. Here are some reviews of everything I’ve tried so far.
Aug 17, 2008.
Finally received my iPhone. I wasn’t going to line up overnight before launch day, I figured I could stroll into a store the next week and pick one up. Unfortunately that was nowhere near the case. Two, three weeks after launch, it was still next to impossible to find a 16gb iPhone in the city. So I finally ordered one over the phone around the end of July, and it has just arrived (coinciding, it seems, with ample supplies in-store as well).
I’d love to rattle on about it, but I’m a little late to the party. I’m not sure what I could add that you haven’t already heard. A lot of the apps seem too buggy and crashy, but I’m sure that will be sorted. There are a lot of complaints like that (battery life!) that really pale in comparison to the majesty of the Mobile Safari browser. That, and I couldn’t believe how many different activities I was juggling while riding the streetcar. It was a big change from staring at the floor listening to music.
I’ll probably write a bit more later about some of the apps I’ve tried out.
Aug 14, 2008.
So, then… the iPhone, eh?
OK, here’s how I look at it. This plan is good, at least the data part: 6 gigs is esentially unlimited, so the $30 rate is comparable to the US $30 for unlimited. So, no question I’ll be getting one. The three-year contract length is loathsome, but it’s pretty much standard fare in Canada.
That’s not to say that there aren’t problems. You will still be nickel and dimed, Rogers-style (loonied and toonied?). Visual voice mail is $8, and there are obviously extra charges for texting, voice mail, caller ID etc. – all stuff that should be included in the base plan. And let’s not forget our old pal the “System Access Fee,” Lord of Arbitrary Charges.
But it is the sheer impermanence of the 6GB for $30 plan that is the biggest problem. As soon as labour day rolls around, it will vanish like a dream in the morning, replaced by the harsh ringing of the disputed, horrible plans that Rogers originally announced.
Essentially, Rogers is buying the nerds off.
Jul 10, 2008.
Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate by August 31 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of 6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any in-market voice plan.
It ain’t unlimited, but it’s waaaay better compared to what they were originally offering, and to other Canadian rates. Here’s a Globe article.
Jul 09, 2008.
Here’s the executive update on what’s happened since our last post. (July 7 – now even more updated!)
Jul 04, 2008.
When I try to access the newsmaking anti-Rogers petition site, I get a 403 forbidden error. However, I’m still seeing referrals coming in from it, so some people are getting through. Hordes of angry commenters are assuming that Rogers themselves are blocking the site, which is hilarious but probably untrue as I’m on Bell and can’t get through. I’d assume the traffic took the server down, and then it was misconfigured upon return, but that doesn’t explain how people are still visiting it. Hmm..
UPDATE: It’s back, and it was a server issue.
Jul 01, 2008.
No, not that Neil Young. Rather, an ex-EA man who had a hand in Majestic, Facebook games and Boom Blox, and Gamasutra has an interview in which he explains the appeal:
The iPhone, from a performance standpoint, is pretty close to a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it’s got a touchscreen, accelerometers, a camera, it’s location-aware, it’s got all of your media on it, it’s awake with you, it’s always on, and it’s always connected to the network. So if you think about the types of games and entertainment experiences that you can build on a platform like that, it’s got to get pretty exciting pretty quickly.
Frig yeah! That GPS is gonna spawn some interesting augmented reality games.
Jun 30, 2008.
One of the more interesting announcements from yesterday’s Stevenote was MobileMe, the .Mac replacement, now taglined as “Exchange for the rest of us”. That is, it features ‘push’ syncing between devices, eliminating the need to manually sync. The idea being, your data lives ‘in the cloud’ (man a lot of quotes going on here), and is accessed from whatever device you happen to be using at the time, any Mac or PC, iPhone or iPod Touch. The web app versions of mail, iCal, iPhoto etc. are particularly refined.
I use macs at home, will definitely get an iPhone in a month, and have to use a PC at work, so these sorts of cross-platform syncing tools are something I keep a keen eye on. I’m quite happy with Google’s suite, with a few exceptions (no to-dos, no cloud document storage other than office docs). There are a few holes in MobileMe too (no notes or to-dos?), and some big questions (can you use your own domain?), so it will be interesting to see how this shakes out. I like the direction things are going though.
Jun 10, 2008.
So there was the big WWDC keynote today. There were big announcements – 3G iPhone for $199, app store not ready yet, .mac is now Mobile me and looks actually worth the money now maybe – but the biggest for us in the .ca is this page. iPhone coming to Canada July 11. It’s listed in the Canadian Apple Store site, but it doesn’t let you buy it, just says it’s available at Rogers and Fido locations. There’s still one big question: data rates.
Jun 09, 2008.
Finally, eh? Movies, in both SD and HD, both for rent and to own, are now up inz the iTunes for the gentle-yet-rugged people of the True North.
As for pricing, Apple is charging $9.99 for catalogue title purchases, $14.99 for recent releases and $19.99 for new releases. iTunes Movie Rentals are $3.99 for library titles and $4.99 for new releases, with high-definition rental versions for an extra dollar. The rentals can be previewed, purchased and watched on iPod classic, iPod nano with video, iPod touch and on a widescreen TV with Apple TV.
Gizmodo claims the viewing period is now 48 hours, a huge improvement over the crippling 24 hours the service was offering in the US, but I’m going to assume that’s an error. Also, prices are from $1 to $5 higher than in the US, despite the dollar being at par… make of that what you will.
Jun 04, 2008.
As part of an ongoing quest to get the most out of my Mac Mini media centre setup, I took a couple things for a spin recently: XBMC for Mac, a Front Row replacement, and Sapphire Browser, a plugin for Front Row. Be warned: both of these apps are in beta, and aren’t polished final products. But they are certainly interesting.
One thing I was specifically looking for was something that handled HD content a lot better than front row. The mini is no slouch processor-wise, but it ain’t no Mac Pro, and perian -enhanced Front Row seems to have issues playing back HD files – dropped frames, curtailed fast-forwarding use until the entire flick is loaded, and worst of all for me, it outputs surround sound as regular old stereo. So I have to play files out of VLC if I want to give all my speakers a nice workout.
Hell, I don’t even know how I got into this one. I guess I saw on Lifehacker that there was a new beta that supported the Apple Remote, and I figured I’d give it a shot. It’s the open-source media centre developed for the oldschool Xbox and now ported to Linux and Mac. It’s got a lot going for it, which I will sum up in delightful bullet point form:
HD playback is a huge advantage right there. The Mini lifted 720p like a champ; word on the street is that it will sometimes have trouble with 1080p files, although I didn’t have any to test.
Unfortunately, the audio is another matter. I couldn’t get surround working at all. This has to do with the amp itself – mine refused to decode whatever XBMC was putting out. However, most people apparently have no issues, and the feature is going to see improvements a couple betas down the road, which might be a couple months away.
XBMC supports skins, and there are a few nice ones out there – to my eyes, nothing as refined as Front Row itself, but not bad and hell, you could make your own skin if you were really fussy. And that’s the nice thing about XBMC – it’s an open source project, with all the advantages with go with it.
XBMC has a lot of detailed configuration parameters, and there is great power and versatility in them. You can fine tune the details of your playback down to the scaling algorithms, and you can even do this while playing something back.
But, alas, with great power comes great… complexity. Who’s kidding who, it’s pretty complicated to set this thing up properly.
A note on the concept of “library” in XBMC. This must have been an evolutionary layer that grew on top of the original, simple XBMC interface. The library is the mode that scrapes the web for metadata (something not apparent to me at first glance), and it isn’t enabled by default. Until you figure that out, the XBMC interface is completely bereft of visual frills, even lacking thumbnails of the videos: something that is undoubtedly awesome to get working on an Xbox, but pointless on a Mac with a hardy competitor in Front Row built in.
Once you get the library thing sorted out, things are a bit better, but you’ll be impressed by one feature, annoyed by another. Possibly the biggest strike against XBMC is that it doesn’t recognize your iTunes metadata, so all your carefully-curated album art is out the window and reconstituted, badly, by a lengthy allmusic scrape. The cover art for DVD rips and such looks great though, and the plot summaries and cast & crew details are great to have.
Ultimately, I set XBMC aside because the surround sound issue was too important for me. I’m going to keep an eye on it, though; the app is under active development and seems to be progressing well, and I may well be using it heavily in a couple months.
Sapphire browser is a Front Row ‘plugin’ that will do all that scraping for you right within Front Row, giving you the film/TV show art, summaries etc. just like XBMC. The idea is beautiful, and if I could review the idea, I’d give it top marks.
However, the reality don’t live up. I won’t bother getting into too many details, but the scraping process did not work well at all. It takes forever, hangs repeatedly, and ultimately messed up some fairly easy categorizations. When sapphire hits upon a file it doesn’t know what to do with, it asks you to identify the correct name out of a list of results. Unfortunately, it chooses whether files are ‘movies’ or ‘tv shows’ automatically and doesn’t let you correct it other than saying ‘this isn’t a movie’ – you have no way of saying ‘this is a TV show’, so your show won’t show up in its listing at all. Only one out of six Star Wars films actually made it through this failed screening process, which is a pretty sad result. To say nothing of the several different seasons of different shows I had to click through saying ‘this isn’t a movie’ for each episode.
Again, Sapphire is in beta, so it may very well improve in the future. But right now, I can hardly recommend you try it unless you really enjoy repetitive and fruitless clicking.
So that’s it for this latest bout; personally, nothing sticks this time around, but your needs may be different. And regardless, I’ll be keeping my eye on both of these, especially XBMC. The Mac version developers have recently liberated themselves from the main project, so more good things could come of that. I’ve pretty much exhausted my look at mac mini media centre apps – there’s still MediaCentral to consider, but the price is a little steep for me. Maybe someday!
UPDATE See this more recent article, which takes a look at the new XBMC for Mac, now known as Plex, and the new app Boxee.
May 26, 2008.
I’ve gone on another Mac Mini media centre bender. This seems to happen periodically; I get sick of how my 21st-century media experience is turning out, and I try a bunch of different stuff to see if I can’t improve the system. I’ve just tried out a few utilities designed to extend the power of the Apple Remote, as doing more things with your remote is a must if you want to get the most out of your media centre Mac.
Along with Mira, the Apple Remote extender I was using off and on, I’ll tell you about the competition: Remote Buddy, and Sofa Control.
My mini is hooked up to the TV and I use Front Row to play shit back – movies and music both. This machine also functions as a torrent hose, and that’s what set off this latest round of testing – there is a lot of fussing to be done before a downloaded torrent is ready to be played in Front Row, stuff that I have to screen share in from my MacBook Pro to do, while I’d rather do it with the remote, from the couch. Namely, I want to do some limited file management with the remote – unpacking zips and rars, adding music to iTunes, and moving files to different directories.
By default, the Apple Remote is more or less tied to Front Row. It can control iTunes too, and DVD Player. But it can’t switch apps or playlists or do anything elaborate. The idea with these extenders is that when you press ‘menu’ on the remote, instead of Front Row starting, you get a pop-up menu with a bunch of different choices. This is implemented a bit differently in each app, though.
I had been using Mira. It’s got a whole slew of applications pre-programmed with remote controls. You can customize your initial pop-up menu, and you can re-map buttons in any app that already has actions defined. You can even assign applescripts to buttons – more on that later.
Anyway, for one reason or another, I’d stopped using it. I decided I’d bust it out again, so I checked the site for the latest version and discovered to my horror that it hasn’t been updated since forever and is having issues with leopard. Well, that won’t do.
Remote Buddy is the quicksilver of the apple remote: it can do just about anything, if you can figure out how to convince it to. It can control any app, can browse through your media collection or file system, has a virtual keyboard and mouse, and can be scripted and expanded.
It’s also relatively expensive at 20 Euros, and is unfortunately too ominous and complicated for my girlfriend to use. For example, the default action when you press menu is to show a menu with tasks for the currently active app. To get to the ‘main menu’, you have to click left to navigate back up to it. Seems simple, but since you can browse your music (in a clever way BTW), it’s possible to get several menu screens in, and when you click menu to hide Remote Buddy’s display, it doesn’t revert to the top level when you press it again. So my lady would have to keep hitting left about seven times to get back to where she could choose front row. Which she’s not going to do; she gives these things about three seconds to explain themselves, and then shrugs and walks away, and I’m trying to encourage her to use the technology, not scare her off. However, if you’re flying solo or the SO is a crazy nerd like you, I’d give this one a shot. You’ll be using your Apple Remote to launch tactical nuclear strikes once you’ve figured it out.
Oh yeah – I should mention that Remote Buddy not only supports a variety of different remotes, you can also use a Wiimote or iPhone to control your mac with it. Bitchin’.
This is another Apple Remote extender – in fact, it’s remarkably similar to Mira. In fact, I don’t know which one to recommend to you; they’re the same price and do much the same thing. Mira’s menu is more customizable than Sofa Control’s, but then again, Mira’s having issues with Leopard. Sofa control does have a virtual mouse feature, which Mira lacks and which can come in handy in a jam. And it allows for customization via scripting, so pretty much anything you could do with Mira, I’m sure you could do with this one. But I haven’t bought Sofa Control yet and so haven’t tested it enough to know it rocks fer sure.
Upon seeing how similar Sofa Control and Mira are, I concluded that I might as well stick with the app I already own, so I went back into mira to see if I could make it work. The answer is: yes, with some button remapping and a lot of help from Automator.
I am starting to love Automator. I tried to love Applescript before it, but it was far too complicated for a brain like mine (I’m “creative”, okay?). Automator is where it’s at. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me start with a simpler problem and a solution that doesn’t need automator.
Problem: I sometimes forget to stop all the downloadin’ before I get on Xbox Live to play with my homies, and then it’s lag city and I have to get up off the couch (outrage!) and screen share into my Mini to pause downloads in Transmission.
Solution:
Now how about something more elaborate that requires Automator.
Problem: newly downloaded video files need to be moved into the Movies directory before Front Row will see them.
Solution: First step is to create a passable way of navigating around the finder. We’re going to need to mod the ‘finder’ control set in Mira. I’ve set it up so that up and down on the remote use the “duoPress” thing in such a way that up makes your selection move up one, and holding up triggers command-up aka move up one directory. I’ve made the play button ‘open’, and the back button sends a file to the trash.
You’re going to want to add common directories to Mira’s main menu, too. Add your downloads folder, that way you can easily navigate to it and then select the files you need. You may also want to add your home directory and the finder itself. I’ve also added the Movies directory in case a video isn’t playing well in Front Row and I want to launch it with something else.
Now, create an automator workflow that has the following steps: “get selected finder items”, “move selected finder items” to the Movies directory. That’s it. Save it as an app.
Finally, put this in your Mira main menu, or assign it to a button in your finder control scheme.
I saved the right button in my finder setup for a slightly more complicated but far more common task, which is adding music to iTunes. Same deal as before, but the automator actions should be as follows:
So with all of these controls set up in mira, I can now do all the routine file management stuff that used to require a screen share.
(The smart reader may point out that folder actions could handle these chores automatically, and while that’s theoretically true, I’ve had little luck with folder actions myself. They run whenever files are added, which can potentially be while the Mini is already shuddering under the weight of HD video, and they are frequently confounded by partially-complete torrent downloads. But I’m still exploring this. I’m definitely considering an action on the MBP that will scan my MBP’s downloads folder for torrent files and move them to a folder on the Mini that Transmission watches for torrents, auotomating a lot of the stupid busywork that goes along with, you know, not paying for stuff.)
Finally, I should add that while my Mira experience under Leopard is relatively painless, there are still periodic problems. Ghost presses are sent, and sometimes one press results in two. I’ve contacted the developer as he hints on his site that workarounds are available; I hope this is the case as until I get them and/or he updates Mira for Leopard, I can’t really recommend it to you, as much as I’d like to. I would say that you could certainly set up either of the other apps I’ve mentioned here to do much the same thing, should you want to.
Next, I’ll have a look at XBMC for Mac, a Front Row replacement, and Sapphire Browser, a plugin for Front Row. Both scrape the net for metadata in really interesting ways, but both seem to have their share of problems, too.
UPDATE See this more recent article, which points out that Mira now works with Leopard.
May 17, 2008.
And as Waylon Jennings says, ladies love outlaws. But is it worth it? I’ve been looking into this because I WANT IT BADLY, and I thought it worthwhile to share the fruits of my research.
The iPhone is not officially available here. Why? Glad you asked, Jimmy! Rogers is the only network that could carry the iPhone, as it’s a GSM device and only Rogers and subsidiary Fido are GSM in Canada. So odds are the negotiations between Apple and Rogers have stalled. The arrangements Apple wants are not typical in the industry; Rogers does not currently have an unlimited data plan and is probably reluctant to offer one.
The iPhone trademark in Canada is actually held by a different company, so that could be an issue too, although I find the Rogers explanation more convincing.
All that said, you can still get an iPhone and use it in Canada. You can go buy one in the US and then unlock it via software, or take it to be unlocked somewhere (I’m looking at you, Pacific Mall), or you can buy an unlocked iPhone off Craigslist – at about a hundred dollar premium. Once the phone is unlocked, a Rogers or Fido SIM card can be put into it and it will work perfectly (well, visual voicemail won’t work, but everything else will).
There are downsides, of course. First of all, you will have to use the phone on Rogers, and the data plans are truly fearsome. There are no unlimited data plans; the “unlimited” browsing plan doesn’t apply to the iPhone; the top data plan (as far as I could tell) costs $80 for 500 megabytes a month, which you could crack pretty easily depending on what you’re doing with it.
Also, you will get no support from anyone, and if it stops working, you’ve got a very expensive brick. And it’s more than possible that future software upgrades will indeed brick the phone – it’s happened before.
Finally, there’s a decent chance a legit Rogers-version iPhone will be released in the coming months. There are currently rumours of a 3G iPhone coming in June to Rogers – not only would the data be much faster on such a model, it could very well come with a better data plan than your grey-market gadget would ever get. That would also mean your resell value would plummet.
Then again, rumours have been swirling for the past year that the Canadian iPhone release was imminent, and it has yet to happen. But I’d be surprised if it wasn’t released before Christmas this year, as that’s prime phone-selling season. Also, Apple wants to bring the iPhone to Japan around then, which would mean they’d have to make a CDMA model, which would mean Telus or Bell could grab the iPhone instead of Rogers.
So what should you do? Depends on what you want. Occasional Robot contributor Nigel wanted his phone and iPod to be one and the same, and didn’t care about the data stuff – so he got an iPhone and is thrilled with it. I’m more interested in the always-on rich net access, so I’m thinking of going with a Touch for the time being. If only HydroOne’s Toronto-wide WiFi network wasn’t such garbage, at $20 a month it would certainly put any Rogers data plan to shame. And if the legit Canuck iPhone is released, I can still sell the Touch or give it to my lady friend.
Maybe I’m just not an outlaw at heart.
Apr 08, 2008.
CrossOver Games lets you run Windows games on Linux or Intel Mac. You could do this on the mac with boot camp, of course, but you don’t need a Windows license to use CrossOver. Might be worth a look for some peeps.
Mar 26, 2008.
Apple gave details of the new iPhone software developer’s kit today. 3rd party apps have only been possible as web apps so far, but now devs can make all kinds of stuff, and it will be distributed through the iTunes store.
A couple test games were demonstrated, one by Apple and one by EA. This could be pretty big. It’s not just the touch screen, the iPhone also has an accelerometer that detects the movement of the device – so for games, it’s like a DS crossed with a Wii. Even more interestingly, the iPhone can figure out its position in the world via cellphone tower triangulation, opening the door to some pretty crazy potential big game action. It’s a whole new platform!
Mar 06, 2008.
Inside the iPhone Gray Market, from Business Week. One of our writers has a grey market iPhone (do I name names? It’s not illegal). Anyway it strikes me that this article misses the point, wondering as it does why apple tolerates all the unlocked phones. Hell, Apple gets paid no matter how you use it – that’s the beauty of selling hardware. It’s the carriers and the negotiations therewith that prevent the legit iPhone from gracing us with its perfectly legal presence, but the article doesn’t mention that.
I’m thinking about getting one. Thinking pretty hard about it. But it’s the mobile internet that really interests me – I don’t need portable video and I already have an iPod and a phone. I heard about Rogers’ unlimited plan and got all excited until I realized it was a pretend unlimited plan. And I don’t want to jump on an unlocked iPhone and then have it locked out when the legit iPhone shows up.
Again I say, it’s hard up here for a nerd.
Feb 12, 2008.
First off, speaking of Sid Meier, Sid Meier’s Pirates will be released as a download in the Xbox Originals category next week, along with Black and Ninja Gaiden Black. I’ve been meaning to play that bastard for some time, but have been unable to track down a copy, so I’ll give it a whirl upon release.
In other sort-of Xbox news, Xbox Media Center has been ported to Intel Macs. I say sort of because you don’t actually need an Xbox to run the software. It’s free, open source media center software developed for the original Xbox, but has been ported to Linux and now Mac OS X. Why would you run that and not Front Row or the AppleTV? This interview with lead programmer Elan Feingold gives some reasons:
So there ya go.
Feb 07, 2008.
Remember Dark Castle? I sure do. Well, you can play it in OS X now. Awesome.
Superheroes in Real Life, aka comic book fans whose membrane between real and make-believe shriveled up in a jaw-dropping way. Awesome. (via Z)
And via Penny Arcade:
Awesome doesn’t really do it justice.
Jan 23, 2008.
Can’t you see it now? Apple, the purveyors of the Reality Distortion Field, starting their own Alternate Reality Game? Clues are seeded early on, and truth is revealed at a Macworld keynote. It would totally work, wouldn’t it?
Well, people are playing it already, as we do every year in the lead up to the Stevenote (which is tomorrow). But wouldn’t it benefit Apple to actually design that experience, instead of leaving it up to the players? Or maybe they do … (cue creepy music)
Jan 14, 2008.
You’ll note that the new iMac is rocking a silver n’ black look. I was expecting Apple to start doing this on the MacBook Pro, as Sony has been flaunting it for years on the Vaios. Time will tell…
Tangential idea: Sony Baio.
Aug 08, 2007.
Those lucky Americans have already gotten their iPhones. Here’s John gruber’s first impressions, and those of Steven Frank. Combine those with the critics’ takes that I linked to during the week, and… dude. It sounds pretty good, that’s for sure. There are weaknesses, such as the speed of EDGE and the virtual keyboard, but nothing deal-breaking.
We don’t even have a date for when this thing launches in Canada. No earlier than the fall, and it could be a lot longer than that. Also, Rogers’ data plans – and voice plans for that matter – are on the exorbitant side ($130 a month for a blackberry? no unlimited plans?). So we will all admire from afar. Which is not the worst thing in the world, seeing as the iPhone will definitely be revised within a year. Although the only things I’d be hoping for, realistically, would be faster data speeds, larger memory, GPS and third-party apps.
Oh, and I’ll do like the title says and shut up about the thing now. Maybe. It’s hard, it’s in my geek DNA.
Jun 30, 2007.
The issue of whether third-party developers would be allowed to write apps for the iPhone is a heated one. Steve Jobs threw some wood on the fire by announcing to Mac developers today: sure you can! Make web apps with AJAX!
Frankly, I consider that a better answer than many do, since I’ve been of late pleasantly surprised by Google’s excellent posse of apps. And hey, there are some nifty widgets out there, and those are just li’l web apps too (sorta). And we assume there is some work being done on getting web apps to work offline. Which is one of their huge disadvantages, and if it’s solved in some meaningful way, one would have even less reason to hate Jobs’ latest statement.
But isn’t it a bit odd for a maker of platforms (PC, iPhone, iPod) to argue in favour of web apps? Aren’t web apps the things that make platforms increasingly irrelevant? If you made an awesome web app for the iPhone, people could conceivably use it on their PCs or Windows Mobile phones. Wouldn’t Steve be better off advocating iPhone-only apps?
Yes he would, and he will. This is only a stopgap. But its presentation leaves something to be desired. Presumably the motivation for the AJAX announcement is to give developers something to work with now – having heard them clamouring to develop for the iPhone, he threw them a bone (kinda). But the way he announced it, without stating that a proper SDK is on the way, makes it sound like he lamed out on them.
Jun 11, 2007.
Here’s “an article about Vudu, a movie-downloadin’ box that will compete with AppleTV and the Xbox 360. Distinguishing features:
Looks interesting. Will it work? Consumers aren’t dumb. So the cost of the downloads will be crucial. They will have to be substantially cheaper than DVDs to justify the purchase of a $300 box.
And from what that article says, it seems Vudu doesn’t do TV shows. It strikes me that the compelling reason to buy into the iTunes-iPod-AppleTV system is getting TV shows right after they air. If you get your shows from iTunes, you can cancel your cable altogether. The downloaded films aspect seems much less compelling – hobbled by high prices, poor selection and lack of extras. So I’m not sure relying on films alone will be a smart move, especially since both competing systems offer much more.
May 01, 2007.
Released yesterday. I gave it a shot. It’s a spotlight-alike, for instant searches of your local files, invoked by default via the clever command-command doubletap.
I installed it yesterday and gave it a shot. (Warning: suspicious installer.) I de-installed it later that day. Basically, there were a bunch of runaway crazy processes eating up all my CPU and RAM, and Google Desktop was the only thing I’ve installed lately. It couldn’t have just been the indexing, it was in effect hours later. Also, for the avid quicksilver user, it has little to offer.
I will say, though, that despite using it very little, there were a couple neat things. 1. It must be live-indexing Safari’s history, since sites I had browsed minutes ago were showing up in the search results. 2. It indexes mail messages, which spotlight does but quicksilver does not (or at least I can’t figure out how to get it to do that). Which is nice.
Not 20% of CPU nice, however.
Apr 05, 2007.
From the would-love-it-to-be-true department, via matthowie, multitouch everywhere. The comments on that SBJ link are interesting, especially the anecdote about Jobs attempting a multitouch on a Cinema Display, and the one mentioning that Fingerworks had been bought by Apple. And yeah, it’s worth watching the video again.
Mar 01, 2007.
I can’t say I’m super-jazzed about this thing. I understand it’s the early stages and it’s primarily intended to give iTunes show-downloaders a way to watch their stories on their couch. But iTunes shows are standard def. And the Apple TV only works with “widescreen” televisions. Unless the thing is targeted at people who were tricked into buying EDTV sets a couple years back, that means HDTVs. And what do current HDTV owners tell you? That their gorgeous displays are great for what little HD content there is, but it sucks watching SD on them. Ouch for Apple TV!
Of course, in the future everything will be awesome, and I’m sure the Apple TV will follow suit. Once you can download HD content from iTunes these problems vanish. But no matter what, it’s unlike Apple to ship a shitty 1.0 product, so I can’t view this box as anything but a misstep.
Feb 22, 2007.
I now have a Mac Mini cooking under the TV that I use for downloadin’ and viewin’ of videos. It’s also my main iTunes box, and functions as a server as well, both for the other computers in the house and via FTP for the outside world. Herewith, the details.
Feb 21, 2007.