Feedyourzune : What microsoft failed to deliver.
Nov 21Great Story from Dave Gray , over at the Roosters Rail and The Global geek podcast blog about the player no one wants. The presumable Ipod Killer from Microsoft : The Zune. Welcome to the social is their catchphrase if you want to believe the Zune Homepage. But Balmer sports no love for us podcasters. Since no doe is to be made from the podpeople Podcasting is as nonexistant in the Zune software, as are its drivers in Vista. A vacuum in developement leaves room for : FEEDYOUZUNE.
Great As regular readers of this blog would know the Zune will ship without podcasting support software. But that is okay, what Microsoft could not or would not deliver an independent 3rd party developer has managed to do just fine. Not as hard as Microsoft would have you believe. But then podcasts are free quality content, there is no money in that. Feed Your Zuneô is a featured RSS reader and a media player. It has some great features and looks to be very slick and well designed. It is a pity there is not more about the features on the site or some larger screenshots. With this development so close to the release of the Zune it beats me why Microsoft failed to deliver a product that could give the user access to features such as:
- Automated downloads of video and audio content and synchronisation to your Zune
- RSS playback of Video Podcasts, supporting all video formats
- Built in channel guides from Network2 and FireAnt (with the promise of more to follow)
- Open web architecture supporting RSS, Bit Torrent and permalinks
- The ability to create playlists, favourites and manage disk space
The program is a pretty hefty 12MB download. But it looks very shiny with a clean design and lots of functionality. The interface looks simple and uncluttered with a typical looking RSS feed layout. Clearly some time has been invested to bring a quality product. Did I mention that it is free? It even looks a bit like Windows Media Player 11, I wonder if this was a jibe. Or was it good marketing, to give the user a strong brand association with a product that they know? We talked about the Zune release on the latest episode of The Global Geek Podcast. My co-host Knightwise; suggested that perhaps the lack of Zune podcasting support was due to the fact that podcasts are free. Microsoft would not be interested in promoting free content when they are trying to push their own online music store. With the quick release and functionality of this client it does not seem to have been beyond the reach for Microsoft to have provided something like this on release. So perhaps his opinion has some weight. Money may well come first for Microsoft, at the expense of making podcasts more accessible to the user. This could also make way for other 3rd party applications to be developed in the near future. I hope so. As has been proven time and time again it is often the first iteration of a product in which users make their choice, anything else is a clone. Digg and YouTube are good examples of this trend. In which case users may well disregard and openly reject any offering from Microsoft that supports podcasting in favour of the applications that they are used to. Microsoft could have just shot themselves in the foot. Or will it be another case of the browser/operating system scenario? Where built in software overrides any other third party application to the point it is impossible to use anything but theirs. If nothing else it will make the space well worth watching. So until Microsoft decides to counter offer have a look at Feed Your Zuneô to keep your Zune happy and well fed.
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Get smarter with Google Lectures !
Nov 20Aaah, another great weekend has come and unfortunately gone. A weekend full of fun stuff, and also full of rest and relaxation. Some part of that relaxation was spent in front of the TV. Still a dominant channel of entertainment in most homes (i do say MOST homes) it offers sparse recreational value in the form of Sitcoms, Reality shows and of course movies. But being the digital sluts that we are, it has become hard for us to sit down in front of the tube, set our brains to runlevel one and start zapping or consuming this linear form of entertainment. Most of the time WHEN we even watch tv its allmost always with our laptops perched up in front of us. Peering over the computerscreen at the tv realy shows that it is only a secundary form of entertainment for us.
Old things and boomin stuff.
But sometimes we DO watch the weirdest things. Only yesterday, the Antiques roadshow on the BBC grabbed our attention. This is a show where people come with their old stuff and have it valued on tv. Most of the time THEY think its worth something while in reality it is not. Yet sometimes the roles are reversed and stuff that was deemed ripe for the looney bin gets estimated at thousands of pounds. Its about the nerdiest lamest show on the BBC, yet it caught our eye yesterday. After that it was a breathtaking documentary about the biggest eruption of mount PinaTubo in the Phillipines. Now National Geographic is a wonderfull source of info. But with this documentary the human mind just could not fathem the size of the event. The millions of tonns of ashes, the temperatures and the pressure that where associated with this eruption are just beyond the realm of imagination. The best quote to visualise the terrential rains mixing in with the ashes in the atmosphere was that " It rained concrete ". It kept us glued to the tube !
Google Lectures !!!!
So in hindsight i must say : We are information junkies. We like some brainless shit-com from time to time, but if you DO want to keep us occupied feed us some information. So why not go to the one stop information shop on the net ? Google ! I'm no G-slut (well , perhaps I am) but they offer their own internal educational lectures up on Google Video. This lets you be one of the boys over at google and watch lectures about all kinds of things. You can see a full list HERE. So thats pretty darn cool ! I've browsed through some topics and must say this is realy something to watch not only to spend the time, but to get smarter in the process. This information crack-whore is going to get her fix here ! You can even download them !
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For me to poop on !
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Msn Messed-up-inger.
Nov 15
I'm one of the last people who likes to walk in the blue Microsoft line. Its not that i'm anti MS, I just think Steve Balmer in all his sweating glory foaming at the mouth while screaming 'Developers', looks like a walking EVIL version of Jaba the Hut. ( And let me point out : Evil version , Cause the Mighty Jabba is pretty cool). One of the things that bugs the crap out of me is when I "need' to walk in the blue line. I need to navigate my open-source-linux-mac-minded brain through the illogical reality that is the Microsoft Dominated world.
And so people send powerpoint presentations, create .doc files, and shower me in .wmv streams. And thanks to more then one year of "switching" experience, where I completely changed every computer in our house from Windows to Mac or an open source variant of Linux. Using operating systems like Ubuntu, Mac OS, but also free open source alternatives to most software like The Giimp, Neo-Office, Adium, Gaim, Skype and many many more.
But as much as you want to change the world , you can only start with yourself. So i'm stuck in a blue lined world where a lot of the people I know are using : MSN MESSENGER. Yes sure , it can be condemmed as the wire of the noobies but .. still . I don't hang out with geeks ALL the time. And the other 'normal' people just use msn.
Gone are the day of ICQ (THOSE where the days !), now everyone is on MSN. This program has evolved of being just another chat client to some kind of orgasmic over-pimped version of a lovechild between Myspace and a box of Play Doh . They call it : MSN LIVE. Populated by idiotic emoticons, flash animations and all kinds of horrible graphical extra's. Top it all off with some insane activex controls that alow people to shake your screen and you have a hackers ice cream sundae ! Needless to say . I despise having to USE msn even more then MSN itsself.
And not because its Microsoft. No , I hate the program because its a carcrash between Ali G and a drag queen. But I hate Microsoft for refusing to open up the one vital component that is a switchers dream : MSN Webcam support. Untill now the only reliable and fast way to set up a connectoin between two computers running the msn messenger protocol , is using MSN Messenger. If you are on LInux ? Tough luck, If you're on Mac, Tough luck. The only way to get it working properly is by using their lame excuse for a peace of software. Before ANYONE screams "Mercury" as an open source Webcam alternative for chatting to MSN Messenger users from a REAL computer, think again buddies, Mercury is a good stab at it .. nothing more.
Yet today these troubles are far from my mind, because Msn Messenger is DOWN , and it looks like its global. " Service temporarely unavaiilable' says the msn messenger website. And the social repercussions do seem to be quite farreaching. My MSN list (I use Adium) is populated but nobody is talking. Reason ? Somehow msn users are unable to send any messages to eachother. I'm experiencing not only a new social plain of existence ( I have no one talking to me) but a mental "maré tranquilatis" as I can work away unbothered. Surely MSN will be back in a bitt and the catter can commence … I thought this small moment of instant messaging repose, was something worth mentioning.
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Oh Ow ! I'm going 2.0 !
Nov 14It is only a recent phenomenon. And I do blame Dave from the Globalgeekpodcast for it, but i've turned into a web 2.0 slut these days. I catch myself in the middle of the day, surfing to my NETVIBES homepage and looking at my RSS feeds, reading over my mail accounts and trying to decide what color I would like to use for my Gmail calendar. Later that day I download a cool desktop picture from wallpapr or resize it using resizr . And as I sync up all my bookmarks between my browsers with Googlesync I am beginning to see that no longer my cd-bag, but my bookmark collection is becoming my biggest bag of tricks.
I think its a natural evolution. By doing the Global Geek Podcast for about 2 months now I have been exposed to a great deal of web 2.0 sites and services. Some of the ones I review, stick around and before I know it I start using them. And then there is of course Dave's never ending fascination with Firefox Extensions. Until not to long ago I thought them to be silly, and none standard. Some of these little add-ons for your firefox seemed trivial at best. At the most some flimsy thing you play around with for ten minutes, then forget all about it, only to have it eat away hard disk space for the rest of the day. To me a browser was just what it was. A browser. Ok , with Internet Explorer its also a save haven for all the stuff that wants to fuck-up your pc (basically your windows-XP-html eating suicide kit) but nothing more.
And yet , things evolve. The browser is becoming my tool of choice more and more. Wether it is to write this blogentry, resize pictures, or even draw flowcharts online. Its all through trusty firefox. And it gets worse ever weekend. When Dave drags up yet another bunch of excellent "sites and services" to use on the WWW. Every week I add more and more bookmarks (and i'm very picky about what I bookmark) yet my "web 2.0 toolkit" is gaining weight like Oprah on a Donut Diet.
What HAS taken me by surprise is the way I have adopted Google Documents (let's just call it Google Writely) as a place to store online documents. Not that I write up essays, but just quick peaces of information, configuration settings I should not forget, and mostly a lot of stuff I create or need on the road and am just to darn sloppy to hold on to. (EVEN on my laptop). I'm horrible with paper, and I'm bad with .doc files. So storing them on line is a great way to keep track.
What it all ends up on is that i'm becomming a web 2.0 slut and that the broadband connection running into my house is my heart-lung machine once again.
More information : What is Web 2.0
