Archive for the 'Apple' Category

Page 4 of 6

My iPod is a girl

Published on January 17, 2006 in Apple, hardware and music. 2 Comments
  • the first time I saw her, I thought she looked absolutely stunning and I wanted to have her
  • there are others that are thinner, bigger or last longer, but I don’t want any other
  • I did not have to read any manual, handling her was very intuitive
  • every now and then I learn a new trick that I can apply to her and I feel very happy
  • sometimes when I push her buttons, she does not do what I expect, but I find that a proof of character
  • she has really improved my quality of life
  • I have learned a whole lot since we first met
  • she makes me dance when I walk
  • other guys can look at her but I don’t like it when they touch her
  • some days she’s very touchy, and it is impossible to let her do what I want. I don’t get mad, I just leave her alone and a day later she’s better.
  • I dread the day that she is no longer around

Q.E.D.

Technorati: –

Apple creates RSS the Microsoft way

Published on January 15, 2006 in Apple and podcast. 5 Comments

When Apple reinvented the photofeed, they actually were a bit sloppy. Instead of building upon standard RSS and the Media RSS extensions backed by Yahoo!, Feedburner et al., they decided to do what Microsoft has always been accused of: they made a different, non-compatible RSS format.

cf http://static2.podcatch.com/blogs/gems/snedit/rss.xml
It’s pretty bad. There are lots of errors, the date formats are wrong, there are elements that are not in RSS that aren’t in a namespace.
via scripting.wordpress.com (Dave Winer)

Apple photocast RSS
from static2.podcatch.com/blogs/gems/snedit/rss.xml

  • First of all, it looks like they made a ‘wallpaper-cast’ instead of photocast. The RSS extensions are called www.apple.com/ilife/wallpapers.
  • The RSS feeds are only accessible with a specific UserAgent, i.e. only with Apple Safari. Try to open it in any browser and you get an error message. (Update: actually, while I was writing this, the behaviour seems to have been changed to delivering the RSS with Content-Type: application/octet-stream. So this is more or less fixed – application/rss+xml would have been better)
  • The dates are not conform the RFC822 standard: “2006-01-11 16:43:22 -0800″ should be “Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:43:22 -0800″. Most RSS parsers will have no problem with this, but if there’s an official RSS specification, why not follow it.
  • They put the image URL in the link field, which does not allow extra attributes like type or size. Why not use enclosure?
  • For all the date related metadata (photoDate, cropdate), why not use Dublin Core dcterms?

Continue reading ‘Apple creates RSS the Microsoft way’

Apple reinvents photocasting in iLife ’06

Published on January 11, 2006 in Apple and podcast. 2 Comments

“Eigen lof stinkt” as they say in Dutch, but who told you back in August of 2005 that RSS + images made sense (‘Photofeed: image podcasting’)?

A major new feature of iLife ‘06 is what Apple calls “Photocasting.” Described as podcasting for photos, photocasting makes it possible to share photos over the Internet using one mouse-click. The photos are updated to your .Mac account, where users can subscribe to them using Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
from macworld.com

and

Take Photocasting, for instance. A brand-new feature in iPhoto 6, it lets you share full-resolution photos with friends and family who subscribe via an email invitation you send using your .Mac Mail account. As you update photos in a Photocast album, they appear in your subscribers’ iPhoto libraries automatically — ready to print or add to iPhoto books, calendars, or greeting cards. And anyone can subscribe to your Photocasts: even if they don’t have iPhoto, they can still access your photos via any RSS-compatible web browser.
from www.apple.com/ilife/dotmac/

Photocasting, photofeed, tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to, whatever. It’s great to be right! Just send that MacBook Pro my way, Steve.
Continue reading ‘Apple reinvents photocasting in iLife ’06′

Filling a terabyte iPod

Published on November 23, 2005 in Apple, bandwidth, hardware and podcast. 2 Comments

Muster said that within five years, Apple could release an iPod with one terabyte of storage — that’s almost 17 times the maximum amount of iPod storage Apple currently offers.
Munster envisions a one terabyte iPod as a portable, “coffee table” media center that would allow users to store hundreds of movies and thousands of photos and songs.
cnn.com

A 1000 GB iPod, that is

  • 200 movies or 370 hours of full quality DVD
  • up to 2000 hours (almost 3 months non-stop) at DivX/Xvid/MPEG-4 quality
  • using the H.264 video compression: 120 days or 4 months of video!
  • 1500 music albums of full quality CD (which means, no Sony XCP)
  • 15.000 albums if your rip/compress them to MP3 first, maybe 20.000 if you use WMA/AAC (that is over 2 years of audio to listen to!)
  • 2500 episodes or 100 seasons of TV series like Lost, L-Word, Desperate Housewives, Sopranos, … in compressed format (hey, it’s a 2,5″ screen, who cares about HD?)
  • If your terabyte iPod breaks down and you buy a new one, it will take you between 3 hours (FireWire 800 Mbps) to 2 days (Wifi 802.11g) to fill it up again (from the backup you of course had put on your snug little home 10GB RAID-5 storage cluster thingy).
    If by then all portable devices have 10-Gbit Ethernet built in: 15 minutes will be enough to fill ‘er up.
  • Our then-standard 48 megapixel camera would create 72MB RAW images, of which the iPod could store 14.000, or if you would compress them to 5MB JPEG: 200.000 pictures.

Other predictions: the iPhone (or Apple as mobile virtual network operator) and the iTIVO, a media-center/time-shifting/TV/video/DVD hub , all in the next 12-24 months. Let’s hope this inspires some people to seriously vamp up their design/user interface teams (Nokia, Microsoft, I’m looking at you!).

Technorati: – – – –