On The Radio

One major recurring theme on the show is how to stream WGN on various devices. While on the air last show we were trying to figure it out for the iPhone when we got emails from Gary K. and Ben H. suggesting a couple iPhone Apps that could do the job. I’ve checked some of these out and am happy to be able to recommend an App from Nullriver called Tuner Internet Radio. Clicking this link should bring you to this App’s page (assuming you have iTunes running on your computer). From there you’ll need to purchase the App (for $6) which will automatically download it. Once the download is complete, sync your iPhone in iTunes (which will transfer the App to the phone).

From here we need to configure the Tuner App to stream WGN… Unfortunately it’s not one of the stations offered among the presets… WGN isn’t found by using the search function either… instead I employed my keen investigative skills, akin to killing an ant with an anvil, which led me to the following info which should work for you…

1. From the Main Menu on your iPhone, find the icon (of an old-fashioned radio) that says Tuner and tap it.
2. From the Genres screen (should be the default), the Top 500 screen or the Search screen… click “Open” in the upper left.
3. Into the Title field type WGN AM or whatever suits you for bookmarking purposes.
4. Into the URL field type the following address : http://provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/WGNAM.pls (this has to be entered in exactly, down to the finest detail).
5. Click “Done” and you should be on the air… If so, click the bookmark icon in the upper right to save it as a preset (you’ll never have to enter in that pesky URL again).

A little convoluted… but if listening to WGN on your iPhone is what you want to do… you probably won’t consider this that big of a deal… and for any of you that might want to know how I sleuthed out that URL, drop me a line and I’ll let you know… I decided it was too tedious to include here.

Happy streaming.

I guess I should have seen this coming… a little sub-surface investigation would have raised the warning flags, but being a long-time advocate/participant of the open-source vibe, I suppose I still insist on seeing the world as a primarily altruistic organism with its glass half full as opposed to half empty… this week however, Apple has pushed me a little closer to disenchantment as reports hit the wire that Apple has no intention of allowing the Flash player to run on its most popular line of iPhones.

We talked about this on the air a couple months back when Patrick had just attended an Adobe summit. When I asked him what he knew about any impending release for Flash Player on the iPhone, he claimed to be sworn to secrecy… although I doubt this turn of events was what he was keeping secret.

As it turns out, supporting Flash would be a move that directly impacts the profitability of Apple’s new App Store… Flash, which started life humbly as software that allowed you to build those nifty web-animations and banners, has evolved into a full-blown platform capable of spitting out applications of its own. Long story short, developers would simply need to write their App in Flash, post it to a web page and thus totally circumvent the need to deal with Apple or its App Store at all… big problem for Apple…

But so what… This is just plain wrong… so much of the web today is Flash-based that viewing it with the Flash erased is noticeably incomplete… so much so that I rarely use Safari on my iPhone… for that reason.

A live by the sword die by the sword proposition I guess… I’ve always loved that Apple hardware was a proprietary deal, it has always made for far more reliable machines and my experience has proven this fact again and again… but I never anticipated that Apple would use their power to perpetrate this sort of censorship, which I guess just illuminates a particular naivete on my part… but is it so bad to expect a company based on the empowerment of the people to practice a little altruism?

I guess so… a read of the iPhone SDK Agreement clearly states the following;

“An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise,” reads clause 3.3.2 of the iPhone SDK agreement. “No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”

The jury is still out on what the eventual outcome of all this might be as there has been no official statement from Apple… but if the sentiments leaking out of Adobe and other sources are to be considered… It’s not looking that good… so one thing I’m not going to be doing while awaiting the ultimate decision is paying for apps at the App Store… to me that would be a vote against what I thought Apple stood for.

Wow, almost two months since I’ve posted anything… but I’ve been too busy for recreational writing and thus, short on topic ideas… but I just ran across an awesome article on Hulu.com… You might remember we talked about Hulu on the radio a couple months back. I played with the site for a while back then, but found too few TV shows and movies to keep me interested… however a couple months have passed (which is an eon in Internet time), so I decided to head back over and see how things were progressing… that ended up being a fortuitous decision as I found so much more content now that I have to admit… I’m hooked.

I’m sort of a perfect storm for this type of thing… I have a high-speed internet connection, dual-monitors on my machine, I make my living with/on a computer and I’m addicted to television/movies. Directly above my computer monitors I have an old 13″ Trinitron connected to a dual-channel TIVO box with a capacity for about 350 hours of non-HD programming… and I STILL fill it up! Which is where Hulu comes in… no need to keep it on my TIVO if I have access to it 24/7 over the internet, which is just what this is… your free-of-charge repository of online media.

On top of the ever-growing content that Hulu is getting online, the coolest new addition to this site has to be the power to “embed” their content, how cool is this…

…and I offer a massive tip-o-the-hat to Jeff Zucker and Peter Chernin, the heads of NBC Universal and FOX parent News Corporation respectively… here’s two heads of major media outlets that seem to finally be tuning in to how Web 2.0+ works… it’s all about being open… sharing… going viral… this is the best way in 2k8 to connect your content directly to its audience.

An interesting point made by Zucker in the article was that he didn’t quite know how all this would inevitably affect traditional distribution channels like dvd, pay-per-view, movie rentals, etc… but he knew that Hulu represented the chance to answer that question… he also has the still flailing music industry as a picture perfect model of what not to do… but I digress…

Another cool new feature of the site is being able to queue movies to watch later… this, along with a running history of the movies/shows/clips you’ve watched is available to registered users of the site… but as this is free… no problems right?

One caveat for those using dual-monitors… a current limit of the Flash Video Player that’s behind all this video delivery magic, is that you can’t use the Full Screen function to play a stream on one monitor while you work on the other. The workaround for the time being is to use the Pop Out option instead and then maximize it on one monitor… Almost the same effect anyway except you’re looking at the desktop beyond… also not that big of a deal right?

Anyway, I’m going to have more to write on this as I delve further into the content… but right now I have to watch the ending of the Fifth Element (for the 20th time)… free for the watching at Hulu.com.

Crazy happenings… the verified existence of Chrome, Google’s long rumored, never verified entry to the browser wars… has gone viral here over the past couple days… and I use the term “viral” loosely as Google is sitting on top of a gazillion computer servers… they could most likely launch your Aunt Sophie’s online collection of cat pictures global with any inclination… but Google’s vast, vast server farms are a big part of what makes their launch of a brand new browser intriguing… what might happen when the gatekeeper for the majority of internet search traffic also starts building the gates?

At first I’ll admit… I was put off by the fact that this new browser is being freed upon the world without Mac or Linux support… I was prepared to boycott, as I’ve done in the past, until such day came when all platforms were embraced…

…but then, as I’m sure happened to millions of others… I got sucked in by THE COMIC. As far as things go, an awesome brochure for Google’s new Chrome browser… but also a brilliant tutorial, in laymen’s terms, on what the key issues underlying everyone’s browsing experience are… it caused me to ponder that most internet users probably think in terms of bandwidth issues (connection speed) when their browsers slow down, or even completely crap out… but in reality, the issues are a lot more complex and widespread when you look under the hood. The team behind Chrome, especially after having read all 39 panels of the comic, seems to really have thought through things when mapping this one out… a bunch of radical new ideas at play here.

Of the 30,000 words I could spew out right now on why the ideas behind Chrome are so important… the best place to start in this initial post on the subject is probably why we indeed have room for this particular new combatant in the ongoing browser wars…

On a significant front, this can be boiled down to processes that happen on the Desktop (processed by the chip in your personal computer) vs. requests that are processed and returned to your desktop by THE CLOUD (which is a relatively new term referring to online computing/processing by remote servers). Google is betting that the browser is the new desktop, that it will become even more essential than your actual operating system… a lot of indications make this a pretty solid bet.

Existing browsers, even the highly vaunted (and still very cool) Firefox 3… were initiated in a time when browsing was simpler… jumping from html page to html page… many of them with pictures of course, some had sound and video (although it didn’t work that well)… but at the end of the day, pages didn’t do that much in terms of providing a service, they were more or less online brochures…

But we’ve now entered the age of searching, purchasing, online banking, Facebooking, twittering, chatting, video conferencing and file-sharing… all of which are online mechanisms that provide a service to internet users… Increasing exponentially is the use of online coding languages, primarily Javascript, to serve as the engines that power all of this internet activity… and with this also comes the exponential increase for things to go wrong… this is computer code that’s being executed… just like when you run your local copy of Excel or Photoshop… The best existing browsers can do to keep pace is to continually “add-on” to their code bases… but over time, the inevitable destination of this approach is “bloatware”… and my own opinion holds that FF3 is starting to show early signs of this… Further, a browser like Internet Explorer, even though the worlds most used browser, should barely have a seat at the table for this discussion… their ongoing glacial development cycle seems so mired in corporate malaise as to no longer even have relevance… yet their beat rolls on…

But Chrome looks to be positioned on blowing this whole thing up. Coming from the (enviable) standpoint of being able to create a new browser from scratch, unencumbered by much of the old baggage… they seem to have come up with some revolutionary ideas in terms of building a browser for today’s internet… and they’re keeping everything Open Source so that Firefox, Safari, Opera and any other future Open Source offerings can continue to mutually benefit from each others innovation. Evidently a giant internal issue for Google was to not look as though they were trying to upstage Mozilla and Firefox who they’ve had such a long-standing relationship with… Although it would be naive to discount the business side of things (Google’s trying to move everyone to the CLOUD, where they dominate…), there definitely seems to be an altruistic side to this in effectively moving the web forward.

I’ll stop there for now as this Chrome beta may come out tomorrow and spastically dart off into obscurity like a balloon escaping before properly tied off… But I doubt it… ’cause Google’s the new Microsoft… and they’re hell-bent on world domination…

…but perhaps we can all benefit this time around.

Give THE COMIC about a half hour of your time (if you haven’t already done so), it’s an awesome read, handsomely illustrated by Scott McCloud, for novice and expert alike… And for a bit more insight into the who, when, where, why & how… read this awesome overview in Wired by the always formidable Steven Levy.

This past Wednesday I mentioned on the air that my iPhone was on the blink, giving me an error message “No SIM Card Installed”. Mikey D, my PC partner in crime was quick to razz me on the fact that my Apple branded product had broken… But don’t all machines break at one point or another? It’s not so much that they break as it is what happens once they do…

So on Thursday I dropped by the Apple Store in Deer Park with my broken iPhone in hand. Within about 10 minutes I was speaking with Becca, an Apple-certified repair person. As the iPhone comes with a full 1-year warranty and the product hasn’t yet been out for a year… no questions were asked, she promptly replaced my iPhone with a refurb, transferred my phone number over and activated it. I was in and out of the store in a half hour. When I got home I simply needed to dock my phone to my computer, which restored it to the exact place it was before I started.

If you ask me, this is the only measure of a company that matters, because all gadgets and machines will break from time to time… but what kind of service are you going to get when they do? As much of my business is done using my phone, could I have afforded to be without it for any significant length of time? Apple seemed to understand that… my problem was quickly resolved in any event…

“We evangelize that which serves us with grace and style.” Sorry to those made weary by my cultish devotion. To be truthful, in my 20 years of using Macintoshes, I have had slightly more painful interactions with Apple… but at the end of the day, they come through 9 out of 10 times… and for my money… I can live with that.

On the air last week we were talking with Juan who was looking to create a photo slideshow that he could play back on his living room DVD player.

Initially I guessed it would be a combination of iPhoto and iMovie that would handle this task… but after a little research, it turned out that iDVD was the tool for the job.

I was all prepared to offer up the complete ‘how-to’ here on the blog… but why bother when the process is described so well right here on the Apple site.

I will say that I fired up iDVD and gave it a try and turned out a pretty slick looking 30 image slideshow in about a half hour.

Could it be any easier? All praise to the giant Apple. Happy editing…