Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

Good news from Rogue Amoeba. When they sadly made it clear that an Airfoil for iPhone, sending your iPod other app’s audio to your hifi, is not possible due to Apple’s restrictions, I inferred they couldn’t get sound from the Mac onto the iPhone either. Not so, and Airfoil Speaker for the iPhone is under development.

Ideally, this will include a remote control for Airfoil too, so by combining with Apple’s remote (or perhaps even through a simple integrated iTunes controller) you would be able to start playing music on your Mac, decide where to send it (including, of course, right back to the iPhone) all from the iPhone itself.

So even if you don’t have an Airport Express in every room, if you’ve got your iPhone with you you’ll have access to your whole library of sound anywhere you can connect to your network.

An even nicer refinement, though one Apple may not like to implement, would allow the audio to be streamed to the iPhone wherever it is on the internet…

One of the things the iPhone has got a lot of stick for is the camera. It stayed at 2MP when the 3G version came out. I didn’t think that would be a problem; actually because it’s always with me I’ve used it a few times and the picture quality (not the resolution) bugs me. Review said it had good quality for a phone camera, that’s as maybe, but phone cameras are awful. Plus it does weird stuff like this (it is, I have discovered, a known issue) which makes me wonder how this camera actually works.

And this.

If Apple were to make it work with video, however, all will be forgiven.

As part of one of my courses I will be assessed on a personal journal. “I recommend you set up a blog” said the lecturer “for your reflections (and rants)”. So I have. Please wander over (if you feel so inclined) and have a look.

Note that all registered users at Little Storping are registered at www.hci-blog.info automatically.

I’ve been plagued lately by registration spam (mostly from @gmail). It doesn’t seem to be doing any harm, but it’s irritating; especially as Akismet seems to do such a good job on eliminating the comment spam.

So I’m going to make two changes here in the village of Little Storping. Firstly, for a trial period, I’m removing the requirement to register in order to comment (I originally used this to avoid comment spam). Secondly, any user who hasn’t yet commented on a post will have their registration deleted. Don’t worry if you haven’t commented yet - that’s what this post is for! Make sure you’re logged in and just stick a comment below saying, well, whatever you like, in the next 48 hours, and I’ll believe you’re human.

My apologies to those of you who miss this post and haven’t commented before midday (BST) Sunday 19th October. Of course, you don’t now need to re-register, but I like it if you do, and it allows you to edit your comments if you need to (and, of course, add and edit recipes in the Happy Ploughman!)

Update: I’ve carried out a slightly less radical cull that originally planned, removing everyone who hadn’t posted and who had an @gmail.com or @gmx.com address. I’m not picking on you guys, it’s just that’s where most of the spam seems to come from (I’m surprised gmail doesn’t filter them out…). Anyway, it’s still cut the number of registered users by 75%, and I know most of the rest of you are human…

When I did my first degree, a few of my lecturers pushed their own textbooks; it makes sense, no doubt, since it would be a work whose authority (one hopes) they would have full confidence in - but it also makes them money.

Now I’m starting my masters (MAVE at Sussex) I find that it’s iPhone apps that are being pushed! Shamelessly, I might add. I like this.

I finally got an iPhone. The trauma of its aquisition is still too raw (and I’m still too poor a typist) to relate, so this is a test for the Wordpress App, to see if I can post a picture from the phone…

Edit: practising editing and getting used to photo orientation (taking photos with the app isn’t as intuitive as it could be). I notice the iPhone keyboard doesn’t seem to have the thingies for doing HTML…

Despite the fact that there was only one feature I claimed I needed in iTunes 8 (which didn’t materialise - it appears the focus is on making playlists less personal rather than more so), I’ve realised there was another feature I wanted even more, and it is there - the ability to mark any file as an audiobook without having to use the make bookmarkable script for AAC files and for the first time being able to get an MP3 into the audiobook library.

I don’t get it?

If there were a single new feature you’d want in iTunes 8, what would it be?

iTunes is mature, stable, and does almost everything I want. One feature request: annotatable playlists. For any playlist, I’d like to be able to add a description of the playlist, and for any track a note as to why I’d included it. It would be easy to implement, I’m sure Apple could make it easy to edit, view and hide. I want it for my own use, but I think a lot of people would value being able to publish this via blogs and/or social networking sites, and Apple could benefit from links back to the iTunes store…

I’m late to discover this, but those lucky iPhone users have not only got that gorgeous hardware to play with, they can also sync their address book contacts with gmail while the rest of us can’t.

Well, actually we can, though it needs a bit of fiddling in terminal as described in this useful hint. But I mean, really, Apple, what the hell?