Brian Fitzgerald avatar

Brian Fitzgerald

News Now on Wii

An update to my Wii last night gave me the new Wii News Channel. Some thoughts:

The Good

  • The interface is clean and easy to read
  • I like how it shows you on a very nice map where the story is from.
  • The animation when you change text sizes is cool
  • It does a real neat effect where as you zoom out on the globe, the stories stack up so you can see where the most news (biggest pile) is.
  • It is SO easy to navigate with the wii remote
The Not-So-Good
  • The news is provided by a two-year contract with the Associated Press. It seems strange to be reading news created for print on your TV. While there are photos with some stories, there is no audio or video.
  • It is slow to load. While the wii weather channel front page at least tells you the current conditions without the need to actually load the channel, the news front page tells you nothing. A nice feature would be a list of new stories so you could then decide to load it.
  • Many of the stories have URLs in them. The Wii has a web browser. Seems like a click would take to you the address? Nope.
Now I wonder what is next for Nintendo. They said that the weather and news were coming, now they are here. What is there to look forward to now (besides the final version of the wii browser) -- and Duck Hunt!

Here’s a demo of the channel from YouTube:

links for 2007-01-25

links for 2007-01-24

If Microsoft Designed the iPod Packaging

This is kind of old (as evidenced by the model of iPod shown) but its spot-on. The side with the man listening to headphones against a red background looks similar to the Zune packaging.

links for 2007-01-23

links for 2007-01-22

links for 2007-01-21

links for 2007-01-19

links for 2007-01-18

The Influence of TiVo

This article on the O’Reilly Radar credits the TiVo with forcing cable companies to demand better equipment/interfaces from those that produce their set-top boxes.

I think that a similar effect may be the best thing that will come from the release of the iPhone. While phones in other parts of the world, especially southeast asia, have seen dramatic improvements, phones in the united states have seen few interface improvements in recent years. As consumers and carriers see what Apple is doing, they will start to demand better interfaces. Motorola, Nokia and others will have little choice but to adopt interfaces based on more dynamic technology such as Flash to compete.

e-learning 2.0 Infiltrates the Classroom

Here’s an article at read/write web with good information about some current web 2.0 e-learning products.

links for 2007-01-17

Bye Netflix!

We signed on with Netflix last summer sometime. During the time that we have been members, its been embarrassing how few movies we have watched for what we have paid in membership fees. Except viewing the Ken Burns baseball documentary (which I really enjoyed), I think we could have bought the movies that we watched for nearly the same price that we paid in membership dues.

Today, Netflix announced that they will begin offering downloadable movies. This is really one feature that I had been waiting for. I figured that if anybody could do this well, that Netflix would be able to. There have been rumors in the past of them partnering with someone like Tivo to provide a direct-to-tv experience from two companies that demonstrate that they understand customers. The details of the download feature were very disappointing. It will be to computers, not to televisions and will be for windows only. Sounds to me like just another movielink/amazon unbox product.

It feels right now like there are two solid options for incorporating internet media into your home entertainment center: xbox 360 and apple tv. Of these two, only apple tv supports independent media such as podcasts.

Cyberduck update - 2.7.2

Cyberduck - the free ftp client for macintosh has been updated to 2.7.2

links for 2007-01-15

  • Firefox Magazine
    An online magazine devoted to Firefox. A good place to find news and add-ons.
    (tags: firefox)
  • Piggy Bank
    An extension for firefox that can grab news from many sources (including via screen scrapes) and display it in one interface that can then be shared with others.
    (tags: firefox add-ons)

Dumb start to the week...

I’ve been telling friends and family for a week that I didn’t have today (Martin Luther King Jr. Day) off. I was pretty surprised when I drove by the parking lot at the office this morning and found it to be empty. I went to one of the coffee shops I frequent and checked the calendar and sure enough, the office is closed today.

It’s been a nice chance to catch up on some news. I might head over to Target and pick up the new WarioWare: Smooth Moves.


powered by performancing firefox

Web Developer Toolbar 1.1 Available

Chris Pederick has updated the invaluable web developer toolbar for Firefox and Flock to version 1.1.

Apple TV - Reaction to a Reaction

iPod Observer: Analyst is Skeptical of Apple TV

I’m not saying that Apple TV is going to be a big hit. I really don’t know. I do think that this analyst is missing the point. The Jupiter analyst doesn’t see the point of such a device when one can get the content over the air or via cable/satellite. I think that the iTunes store coupled with Apple TV causes one to question the need for shelling out $50 to $100 or more each month on cable or satellite. How many shows can one really watch? I’ve counted up the shows that my family watches and there are really only five. They are all available on iTunes. If I purchase a season pass to all of them, that averages out to around $14/month over a year for commercial-free, on-demand entertainment. The savings, just from moving from Time Warner’s basic-plus package would be almost $450 a year - easily covering the cost of the Apple TV.

I’m just saying I guess that Apple is not looking to supplement cable/satellite. They are looking to supplant it. They only thing this solution is missing is the ability to watch live events such as sports, but it can display streaming video and I think that it would be perfectly capable of displaying it once Apple starts to deliver it. The telephone companies have had to face the awkward situation of providing DSL to customers that use it to get their telephone service from other sources like Vonage. The cable companies may soon have the same scenario as they provide internet to customers that then get their TV programming from another source.

Looks like a bright future to me.

iPhone - Thoughts

It’s been a day and a half since Steve bestowed the iPhone unto us. Here’s the thoughts that I’ve had on it.

  • A souped-up nano seems like an odd choice for Apple's first widescreen video player
  • It would be easy to drain a battery while flying and not have a phone when you get where you're going
  • It would be nearly impossible to dial without seeing it. I hope that it either has a very good voice dialing feature or another way to very quickly dial someone in your favorites. As I see it right now, a phone call to a favorite would require a push of the top button to wake it, a slide of the finger to unlock it, a screen press to get to the phone, another press to get to your favorites and finally another press to dial the number. I can dial any of my speed dials on my current phone with one button (which I can find without looking at it).
  • The wi-fi seemed slow (like wi-fi on every pocket-sized device I've used). They didn't demonstrate using internet applications over EDGE, but I'm sure that it would be almost painful.
  • Steve mentioned that they have plans to support 3G. That may be worth waiting for.
  • I love that they put a physical silent mode switch on the side of the phone. I think a lot of people don't silence their phones because they simply don't know how. David Pogue of the New York Times said on MacBreak Weekly that you can tell whether it is in silent mode or not by just feeling it in your pocket. Briliant.
  • A lot of the limitations feel like things that Cingular may be imposing. Why no iChat? Because Cingular makes a dime on each message you send with SMS (unless you have a data plan). Apple said that only Apple-supplied applications will be able to run on the iPhone (at least in the beginning). I think that this is in Cingular's best interest more than it is Apple's.
  • It is not odd to me that you would not be able to purchase tracks from the iTunes store on this phone as many are saying. You can't purchase from the Apple TV either. I do wish however that you could subscribe to RSS and receive podcasts.
  • $500 to $600 seems like a lot with a two year contract. But I was just walking into the office yesterday with a $400 iPod and a phone that typically sells for $200 with a 2 year contract and thinking how nice it would be if they were one device.
  • David Pogue also mentioned that it was really very difficult to type on. I wonder if there is any chance of OS X's handwriting recognition 'Inkwell' being incorporated or a bluetooth keyboard being offered.
  • The iPhone has Bluetooth 2. Could some decent sounding bluetooth headphones be around the corner?
  • My current cingular contract is up in November. I wonder what the landscape will look like then...

Star Trek on iTunes

They’ve added the classic star trek shows to iTunes. Get your ‘Trouble with Tribbles’ and ‘Space Seed’ now!

Gmail all the way...

I like gmail. I like it a lot. The interface is clean. It’s available from any computer. It handles attachments well. It offers a ton of space. It has great utilities available for OSs and browsers to inform you of new messages and it is very fast with search speed that you would expect from Google.

I’ve expressed my dissatisfaction with browsers on the Macintosh here before. Thunderbird’s only appealing feature in my opinion is its sameness on different operating systems and Mail.app looks nice and is tied into services on the macintosh but starts to act funny as it takes on more mail.

The only thing keeping me from moving completely to gmail was the need to manage many email accounts. I have my work account, a couple of personal ones and another couple related to projects that I work on outside of work. Using a client like mail.app or thunderbird allows me to pull them all together in one view and now gmail does too.

I have heard that gmail was working on providing pop access to external accounts, but had not seen the feature show up in my own account until yesterday. I immediately hooked it up to my .mac account and my project accounts and in seconds my mail was all coming into gmail with appropriate labels applied.

The only mess that I ran into was that I had years of mail stored in mail.app that I wanted to upload into gmail. I found instructions to convert my mail.app messages to mbox format and uploaded them overnight. This morning, ALL of my mail was in gmail (only using 20% of my storage). I had to create and run some filters to create some of the organization that I was used to in my mail client, but after a very short time I had created something that was far better than I had been doing.

Now my email is available anywhere (of course this can be said of any web mail client). I am notified either via the google mac notifier or the google firefox toolbar, it is available on my phone via google’s fantastic mobile client and I get a small view of my mail on my google start page. This is just another example to me about how the social web is not about people socializing but about applications being able to socialize.

links for 2006-11-30

What is a social site?

I created a post a few months ago about the social web. I’ve just come to the conclusion that my definition of the social web and the one that seems to be generally accepted are different. I do not consider a site that simply allows people to communicate to automatically be part of the social web. If this were the case, the social web would be anything but new as forums have been around for years and usenet predates the web (I think) and is still arguably the king of topic-centric discussions.

In my opinion, the social web isn’t about people socializing. What has the web ever been if it wasn’t about sharing ideas? The social web is about web sites socializing. Any web sites that pitches itself as a “web 2.0” site but doesn’t allow you to either integrate information from other sites into it or use information from it in other places is just a pretty face on an old site.

I’ll use myself as an example to show some of these ties. Some things that I like to do are create bookmarks, upload photos and create documents. I use delicious for my bookmarks, flickr for my photos am trying out both Google docs and ThinkFree for my documents.

If you want to know what people on the internet are linking to, delicious is the place to go. Their front page shows the currently popular links and can get show you some of the most popular link collections. If you only care about my links, it is the place to go as you can browse all of my links in very powerful ways. Want to know what I linked to during the NETA conference last spring regarding CSS? It’s there. The same could be said regarding internet-wide vs personal resources at Flickr and ThinkFree. What if you wanted to know everything that I was uploading? Without a single aggregation point, you would be forced to track my IDs at each of these sites. Instead, a simple visit to my blog aggregates my personal resources at all of these places into one view. I could, for example, create a page for a workshop or conference that would aggregate my postings to each of these services that was related to that event.

The geeky finale to this is that many consider blogs to be the start of web 2.0 and the simple conclusion is that it is because they allowed for the sharing of ideas in a new and personal way. This just isn’t the case. The start of web 2.0 was the creation and adoption of web service standards such as RSS, ATOM and other XML formats. The social web started when web sites began talking to each other easily. There are a few sites that really get this, but too many “web 2.0” sites just don’t.

Starcade on Brightcove

I don’t remember if I actually watched this show or not, but it looks familiar. Either way, its hilarious now.

links for 2006-11-28