Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Ok, for months I've been reading about The Clone Wars without much interest. I didn't pay attention to any of it because I figured it would just be cheap crud...

Then this morning I downloaded the hi-def trailer from Apple.com, and my mind was changed. While I don't expect it to be awesome, the trailer is cool, and it appears that it will be worth the price of admission. Check out the trailer for yourself on the following link.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

TV Schedule Announced for 2008 - 2009 Season

The networks recently announced their line-ups for next season, and upon checking them out, I found myself getting a little excited. Since I don't have TV service at my house, and I only watch the shows I like on DVD, my excitement may have been a little premature. Chances are, I probably won't have the patience to wait 'till next year, and will end up downloading them for whatever price itunes is offering.

Here's to hoping another strange union strike won't throw a wrench into the middle of everything again.

Check out the following link to see if your favorites are listed.

Variety.com

AppleTV: Still lame (but cheaper)

Remember when I wrote about how lame the AppleTV gizmo is? The recent upgrade didn't do much to change my mind. And here is a video pro who agrees.

Come on, Apple. Bueller. Anyone. Give us what we really want! Real hi-def, downloadable to whatever device I want to watch it on, at a reasonable price. How hard can that be? My money is waiting...

PodcastReady: Not Ready

Like many people, I work with more than one computer on a daily basis. In my case, I have a Mac desktop at home, and a MacBook laptop that is my primary work computer. I also have an iPod. This makes for a hugely annoying combination, because iPods are very monogamous. Since my music collection is too big to fit on my laptop, I have to sync my iPod with my desktop. This means that when I'm away from my desktop, I cannot get new podcasts into my iPod through iTunes (or any other new content for that matter).

Someone recommended PodcastReady as a solution. Well, it is not.

PodcastReady is a web site and tool set for managing podcasts with "social" features (share podcasts with "friends", etc). One key feature is that it allows you to manage podcasts from any computer, not just the one you are synced with, hence my interest. It does this by allowing you to install its client application, myPodder, directly onto your portable media device. (It doesn't run on the device, just uses it for hard drive storage. You still need to run it from your computer.) Now the complaints.

First, the web site is whizzy "Web 2.0" in the most annoying way. DHTML ballons pop-up over virtually every link, covering the actual page content. Sometimes the balloons contain useful content, sometimes not. More than once one got stuck and could not be dismissed forcing me to reload the page to get rid of it.

Speaking of reloading, the site features one of the worst uses of AJAX technology I have ever seen. A tool in the profile application allows you to select your favorite categories from a hierarchical list. Clicking on a top level category uses AJAX, but not to load only a list of subcategories for that category. No it makes a background request to reload the entire content well! (Also, the universal "plus sign" symbol that, in every other application, expands the hidden content in a hierarchy, on this web site will add the entire category to your list. At PodcastReady, you must click the name, not the plus sign, to expand.)

But the myPodder application, the linchpin of the whole system, is where things get really annoying.

When you download the application from the website as a logged-in user, the download is pre-configured with your identity, which is a very nice feature. Or it would be, if it were used properly. When I open the application, the first thing it does is prompt me to create a new account. Even though it already knows my account information. And not just the first time, mind you. It prompts me to create a new account every time I open the application unless I explicitly tick the box telling it to stop asking. On what planet is this useful?

The preferences screen for myPodder contains instructional text that does not fit in the alloted space. There is plenty of space remaining to display more text, but no, we can't use it. The potentially helpful text instead just disappears. Also, the preference tool gives me the completely useless ability to create a new account here, but provides no way to configure myPodder to use a different account. (If I did accept this foolishly repeated invitation to create a new account, how would I make myPodder use it? Download a new copy?)

There's a handy link to "go to podcastready.com website" at the bottom of the application's preferences screen. When I clicked it, it did indeed take me to the web site -- and it closed the myPodder application. Argh!

Once on the web site, PodcastReady allowed me to subscribe to podcasts from its directory. With a little poking around, I found how to subscribe to specific URLs not found in the directory, which worked okay. Unfortunately, it also let me "subscribe" to random URLs that were not podcasts or even RSS feeds. It created a new "channel" from a plain old web page I gave it, without noticing that it was not a valid feed. The channel showed up in myPodder, and generated a download error when it attempted to download the podcasts from the broken channel. The error did not say the feed was invalid, just that the download failed.

Oh but wait, I haven't told you about my favorite feature yet. (Can you hear the sarcasm there?) When running from my iPod, myPodder was nice enough to add the podcasts it had downloaded to the iPod's database, so I could actually play them without starting iTunes. That's a handy feature. Except that it corrupted my iPod's database, and now every time I open iTunes, it locks up behind a beach ball and refuses to do anything. And since the iPod restore utility lives inside iTunes, there is also no obvious way to fix the problem. Thank you, PodcastReady, for screwing up my iPod in such an annoyingly painful way. To fix this problem, I had to go into the terminal, locate the hidden iPod_Control folder on my iPod, and delete it. Then I could eject it, force quit iTunes, plug the iPod back in, and restore the now "blank" iPod via iTunes. (With a bit more effort I probably could have located the corrupted file and deleted just that, but I'm not sure what iTunes would think about that, and I was losing patience.)

The worst part is, even if all these problems were fixed, I still don't think I would like PodcastReady. Having it installed on my iPod means I can update podcasts from any computer. But it also means that no computer can download my podcasts unless my iPod is plugged into it. The old process was "plug in iPod, wait 30 seconds for sync, unplug and go". The new process is "plug in iPod, start myPodder, click the explicit download button, wait 30 minutes for it to download, unplug and go". This is not an improvement.

Secondly, since I subscribe to a lot of podcasts, I have an iTunes "smart playlist" that combines all my podcast episodes sorted by date. The myPodder application doesn't update my smart playlists, so it forces me to navigate through them by title instead, which is not what I want. To update the smart playlists, I would have to start iTunes anyway, so what good is myPodder?

And thirdly, whose idea was this "private channel" feature? It's a channel where my "friends" can stick things that they want me to listen to. Isn't that sort of the inverse of "private"? And doesn't that open me to a DOS attack when somebody decides to stuff the entire Internet in there? If I want to get recommendations from friends, why can't I just subscribe to their "recommended" feed? (Maybe I could if I had any "friends", but I never got that far. Too busy restoring my iPod.)

So the summary is, if you have an iPod, stay far, far away from PodcastReady. If you have some cheapo mp3 player that comes with crappy software, myPodder might be less crappy than what you have, but I wouldn't bet on it. PodcastReady is a good idea, designed badly, and executed very poorly.

TV Download Services - Reviews Coming

It's been a long time since I watched any TV. Mind you, I'm actually a big fan of serialized dramatic visual arts (the art formerly known as "TV shows"). Some stories just cannot be told in a two hour movie. But I gave up on broadcast and cable both when Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer retired. I canceled my subscriptions then because there simply wasn't anything left to watch. I nearly came back when Firefly came out, but then it was canceled in mid-season and I felt completely justified in rejecting the broadcast establishment with disdain. If anything good did happen to make it to the airwaves by accident, I knew it would be out on DVD and available from Netflix soon anyhow.

Lately, however, there have been a few twinkles of hope, and my Netflix queue has become clogged with TV DVDs. Battlestar Gallactica got me hooked first, then The Unit and Heroes. Now I have 327 discs in my queue and not much hope of ever getting through them all. I actually broke down and decided I should consider downloading some episodes. (No, not that way. I mean legally.) I picked a few oddball things from iTunes, but I realized that iTunes is not the perfect solution. As Chris Breen said (or was it really his daughter?), NBC are being poo-poo heads and pulling their shows from iTunes. And just when I want to watch Heroes and the new Bionic Woman, too. Grrr!

So I think it's time to take a look at the various online services available and see how they compare to each other and to the DVD experience. I know going into it that this is going to be an especially trying experience, because iTunes is the only commercial service that supports Macs. All the others require Windows. That means I have to jump through flaming hoops to get them to work, because all my computers are either Macs or run Linux.

Sigh. Nothing is ever easy. I'll write future posts on my experiences so you can follow along at home.

What's the largest grossing movie?...

It’s amazing to see the difference in the worth of a dollar today compared to a few years ago. For all you that think The Lord of The Rings Trilogy was the greatest thing ever, and if you think that the grosses were gargantuan, think again. Boxofficemojo.com has compiled a list of the 100 largest domestic grossing movies after being adjusted for inflation, and a lot of what I saw on that list was kind of shocking. Compare it to the All Time U.S. list from the imdb.

iTunes Plus (that is, Minus DRM)

I've been waiting for this one since they announced it, and now it's here. Today you can upgrade your iTunes client to version 7.2, and then you can upgrade (some of) your iTunes purchases to 256kbps, DRM-Free versions! (Shop at iTunes now)

It's been said before, and those who know me also know my opinion, but for the record: DRM is bad, bad, bad. It's bad for artists, bad for fans, and bad for online music retailers. It's even bad for the media distributors who use it, although you may have a hard time convincing some of them of that.

EMI seems to get it, though, as their music is now up and running. I am not a big purchaser of music in general, but I have been saving up to vote with my dollars. As I write this, I am listening to my newly purchased, non-DRM Rolling Stones tunes. Wow this stuff sounds good!