July 12, 2008

iPod Touch and iPhone Update

After two days of frustration, I've now successfully gotten the new version of the iPod Touch software loaded and am now just doing the sync of the applications I've been acquiring since Thursday.

The time is now 00:44 on Sunday a.m.

The process of loading the new software and all the associated backups takes longer than you might expect (even on my mere 8 GB version of the Touch) at a good 30 minutes.

Just tried out the Remote app. Super cool! Change the volume on the iPod and watch it update the volume on your iTunes. Cool. The response time is impressive, less than a second, and that with the music streaming to an Airport Express. Only minor disappointment is that the cover flow view doesn't work when I'm looking at the album view but it makes sense given the bandwidth requirements that would be associated with that.

The Facebook app is an improvement over the browser one in many ways, although I do feel like I'm missing some functionality as it seems simplified somehow. The more frequent uses of images is nice, as is the the chat function now included.

The AIM apps seems to not make it easy to switch back and forth between accounts. Once I logged in with my AIM screen name I can't seem to get back and login with my .Mac account. It seems once you have picked an account type, you're stuck with it.

The PayPal app is very stripped down i.e. no choice of funds source, not enough confirmations, etc. I did my test sending $5 but I'd rather use a browser for anything more than that just to have some control over the transactions parameters.

NetNewsWire worked well in terms of synchronizing with my online account, but felt a little sluggish at times compared to the other apps I downloaded. That said, I'll definitely use it help my get through my feeds more often.

I downloaded Sudoku because my girlfriend likes it and I saw that Electronic Arts made it. The interface looks beautiful and functional so far and a big improvement over the browser versions I saw before now.

More apps and credit card transactions to come but this is a great addition to an already great device.

Now if only Apple could get their infrastructure together to handle the infrastructure requirements for this scale of launch. The software update for the iPod version 2 was 226MB which is no small amount, but if the iTunes store can handle music and video and Apple can normally manage big OS and app software updates, they should be able to handle this without the kind of hassles customers had to put up with in the last couple of days.

Still worth the wait, but I saw a little better management of this kind of thing on the XBOX360 servers, than I saw on this one from Apple. They better buck up a little next time round, Apple lost ground in my books on the technical gaffes on this launch.

Hopefully I can get a hold of an iPhone in the next week. I had not luck today although I didn't start until mid-morning. I'm convinced Rogers only brought about 50 into the city where I live (I heard 17 at one location and 5 at other), no doubt so they can brag about the "success" of their launch day. Too bad the rogers.com website was unusable most of the day, but I find it quite slow at the best of time when logging into my wireless account. I often get errors just signing into my account and looking at phone upgrade paths. At least the fido.ca site was functioning at much better capacity. I'm considering Fido instead, just to get more reasonable pricing on the voice plans now that we can add on Roger's face-saving 6 GB data plan.

Posted by Derek Leverington at 1:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 28, 2008

Kudos to MSN Video for Mac Accessibility

I'm done my fair share of razzing the good folks at MSN Sympatico over some of their apps either not being compatible on Mac or being released way after the Windows version.

So, I thought it's worth giving some credit where credit is due now that the MSN Video Beta is up and running. It works well on Firefox on my Intel MacBook Pro. It didn't seem to want to go on Safari, but if I was them I'd have looked after Firefox user first. It will be interesting to see if it does eventually run on Safari.

It's a bit surprising to see the use of Flash as the playback technology, given Microsoft's usual loyalty to use their own Windows Media platform as well as their rising star, Silverlight.

Regardless, the MSN video portal content is great, so it's nice to have access.

Posted by Derek Leverington at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 12, 2007

Canadian Programming on iTunes Music Store

Lots has been said about Canadian television and I don't have anything more to add that hasn't been said already, but one things is true:

Canadian television isn't any better just because I can pay to download it from iTunes.

This is especially annoying when my tax dollars go to fund the CBC in the first place. At least it's free to watch television (although who has rabbit ears anymore so it's not really free because you have to pay for cable to get CBC anyway).

As far as I'm concerned, any CBC content should be made available for free on the internet to Canadians. Same thinking as it used to be in rabbit ears days but the times have changed.

The messaging on the apple.ca home page sounds like some copywriter in New York iTunes who has never crossed the 49th wrote it:

"Your favourite TV shows. Now on iTunes."

Whatever... Do he think we all sit around here in toques watching Strange Brew and Degrassi??????

(At least he got the Canadian spelling of "favourite" right.)

Anyhow, I cancelled my cable awhile ago because there's no new episodes of 24 and Lost. If they get that on iTunes, I won't bother hooking it up again. I'm just as happy watching movies from zip.ca.

Apple: quit wasting your time on getting Canadian television on iTunes and get the iPhone launched in Canada already! And while you're at it, give us parity pricing for the U.S. dollar.

Jeez!!! I'm sick of feeling like a second class Apple citizen these days.

Posted by Derek Leverington at 12:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack