Walk Through The Park

iPod/iPhone 2.0

Well, I figured I’d better write a post. It’s been a little while!

I’ve been using the 2.0 firmware on my iPod touch now for a couple weeks. So far things have been going really smoothly. The enterprise WPA works beautifully at my university, although setup wasn’t that fun (instructions here). Stability at first was a bit of an issue. Some of the apps kept crashing (it was actually less stable than my jailbroken iPod). In fact, sometimes an app would freeze up and make my music skip.

Some of the apps are great, some are not. The Facebook app is pretty decent, at least now you can view people’s walls. The Lastfm app would be a lot better, however, Apple doesn’t allow background processes, so unfortunately it doesn’t support scrobbling. As expected, Super Monkey Ball delivers and is really great, but is also very challenging! A fun little game is JirboBreak, which is just a breakout clone. The NYTimes app is pretty good, although a bit unstable at times. Tap Tap Revenge is great, it’s like guitar hero type deal for the iPod/iPhone. There’s a wordpress app, which I haven’t had a chance to use yet, and the best is the Remote App. Remote lets you use your iPod/iPhone as a (ed:) [G.D.] flickerbox for iTunes, allowing you to browse your music and change the volume, scrub, and pause tracks. Very useful for parties.

Exchange support is here, however, I don’t (yet) have any use for it. One thing iPod touch users will like is the beeping on mail. As soon as it gets new mail, it’ll beep at you, alerting you of your new mail. It doesn’t seem to be as quick on the draw as before, and doesn’t always tell me if I have new mail. I’m not sure what the issue is, but I wish it would tell me every time!

Push notifications aren’t anything really interesting. Mail checking can only be set in 15 minute increments. Since all my accounts are IMAP, they only support fetch anyways. I’d rather have 5 minute increments for mail checking, but I guess 15 minutes is fine.

The only thing I want back from my jailbroken iPod was Lastfm scrobbling support. I’m hoping someone will find a way to make this work, but until then, I guess I’ll just have to live without it.

Mobile Computing: Past, Present, and Future

Our concept of mobile computing has change drastically in the past 5 years. Five years ago, it was all about the laptop/notebook. Notebooks were carted all over the place, but they all didn’t have internet access. Wireless internet has reshaped the way we access our data. We now have the ability to move around, and keep in touch without being tethered to a wall.

The PDA used to be the center of ulta-portable computing. A number of advanced has push the PDA back, and out of the limelight. The iPod allowed people to listen to all their music, anywhere. Soon after that, mobile phones got faster, and soon could do a lot of the things a PDA could, while retaining their true heritage as a phone.

Once again, Apple pushed the boundries, and blurred the line between phone, laptop, pda, and iPod. There’s no doubt that if you have an iPhone or iPod touch, that you feel like you’ve got a small computer in your hand. Now with the iPhone 3g announced at WWDC, the price point is coming closer to the average consumer, with speeds that rival that of wireless access, meaning you can load those pages and exchange internet anywheres where there’s cell coverage.

The last step that we’ve seen is the introduction of the Asus Eee PC and the Macbook Air. Both of these computer start from the laptop side of the equation and push it towards the even more mobile side.

So where can we go from here? We can expect to see cheaper, faster, and more widely accessible devices. People are going to start getting used to having their everything in the palm of their hand. E-mail, music, web, movies, and the list goes on. I can see Blackberry users converting, for the fact that the blackberry lacks in some aspects. The Blackberry feels very outdated by todays shiney interfaces. The touch screen revolutionizing the way we interact with data, and it’s here to stay. Mobile Safari lets people view webpages like they’re supposed to look, unlike the Blackberry browser.

Step by step, our lives are becoming more mobile, and people like it.

Media Here and Now

Most people will tell you that they’re lazy. I know, that’s shocking, but lets look at the facts. Most people want things as quickly and easily as possible. This means, ordering out, renting a movie, and downloading songs.

Wait a second, downloading songs? It’s pretty much accepted that downloading music from sites you don’t pay for is illegal, especially if it’s from limewire/bittorrent. Lots of people are even starting to figure out how to download tv shows and movies this way. But what’s the fix? The fix is to make pay for media easier to access than content you don’t have to pay for. There’s one company that’s ahead of the gang, and that’s Apple.

As you may or may not know, the iPhone and iPod touch both have a built in iTunes store, which you can browse and buy songs and albums, usually cheaper than you can get it from a brick and mortar store (albeit in lower quality, and a lot of times DRM’d). Before you throw your hands up in the air, and denounce iTunes for carrying DRM music, lets remember that Apple is trying to move away from DRM, and pushing up the quality of the songs… at the same price. So far, only indie labels and EMI have jumped on board, but I believe there’s a big push in some consumer markets against DRM. The accessibility of music using my iPod and iTunes now makes it easier to obtain music, sometimes easier than it would be if you ‘acquired it’ through other means.

Now that music is available, what’s next? Apple has been providing movie rents in the United States for a while now, and soon it’s rumoured that it will arrive in Canada. In fact, now that you can rent or buy a movie without leaving your computer is a big bonus. iTunes currently rents both standard and HD movies, and probably delivers them faster than what you could get them from bittorrent, and at prices cheaper than you can rent them from a store like Blockbuster. In the case of movie rents, you have to worry about DRM… or do you? Most rental stores require that the movie be returned by a certain date/time, which is what DRM accomplishes, and to be able to order the movie, you’ve got to have iTunes anyways, so DRM is not that big of an issue in this sense. You’re renting the movie, not buying it.

When you rent a movie, you get the added bonus of being able to watch it on your iPod. This means I can rent a movie for a flight and watch it without having to worry about figuring out how to reencode the video. People that don’t want to use iTunes at all, can still enjoy watching and purchasing media with an AppleTV. AppleTV is a sleek little set top box device, which you can think of like a DVD player, only digital and high definition. If you do in fact have another computer running iTunes, you can stream music to the AppleTV, much like you can stream songs between iTunes clients, so you can have full access to your music and movie library from your couch, which is were most people would want to listen to music. The AppleTV features both component and HDMI connectors to your TV, as well as analog and digital sound (for 7.1 goodness). What’s more to like?

The only downside to using iTunes, is that it’s available only on Windows and Mac, which is solved by dual booting. Unfortunately, those on Linux are left out until the Wine project can get iTunes working and watching movies, those with iPhones and iPod touches have to resort to jailbreaking to sync.

Daft Punk’d

I’m pretty sure I’m a Daft Punk addict. Last.fm says so. That’s alright, I guess. There’s much worse things to be an addict of.

I now offically own all but one of the Daft Punk Albums:

• Homework
• Discovery
• Human After All
• Daft Club
• Human After All - Remixes
• Musique Vol. 1
• Alive 2007

The one album I need to pick up to complete the collection is Alive 1997, which I’ve found on Amazon for $85. I’m thinking I might just find a copy this summer to complete my collection. I’m especially proud of my Human After All - Remixes, that I picked up for about $40. It’s a rare Japanese only album. It’s one of 3,000 every made. Unfortunately the CD has a lot of DRM, so it wasn’t quite easy to import into iTunes, but linux got the wave files last night, so I just gotta encode them and slap them on. It’s actually pretty nice, I’m glad I picked it up. I got the actual CD off eBay through a seller in Australia, and it came really quickly.

I’ve started toying around with Last.fm a bit more, the radio feature is quite nice, and I’ve found a few songs I’ve liked already. Mmmm, instrumental jazz….