Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

Nerdy post for users of Apple’s Front Row coming up.

If you use a Snow Leopard (or possible Leopard) machine as your media centre and you rip your own TV stuff into iTunes, you may have puzzled over why TV shows seasons that sequence correctly show up in Front Row in a random order, particularly if you’ve not added stuff to your library in the order it was originally released.

Leopard’s Front Row annoyed a few users by changing the organisation scheme from…

TV Shows ->
The Avengers ->
Season 1
Season 2
Season 3 etc.

…to…

TV Shows ->
The Avengers
The Avengers
The Avengers

Which was fine with me while I knew that each entry corresponded to a season, and seasons were in ascending order. But in some cases the seasons seemed to come out in a random order, and I puzzled over it for ages (well, I like puzzles). Had I tagged badly, and it was sorting by release dates? Were the most recently added to iTunes showing up first? Actually it turns out it was none of this. You might have entered the season number in iTunes and have it all showing up correctly there, and when you check the tags you see the correct seasons too, but to get Front Row to read it you’ve got to force iTunes to write it to some other place (I’ve no idea where) by, for example, renaming the show temporarily and then naming it back to it’s correct name. It’s inconvenient (and a disappointingly mundane resolution to the puzzle) but at least it works until Apple release a proper fix. If they ever fix Front Row.

Incidentally if you’re finding some of your TV Shows are showing up as movies (as well as TV shows) in Front Row, despite being correctly categorised in iTunes, this similar workaround suggests changing the media kind to podcast and then back to TV show.

Once in a while something comes along that is so cool that you can’t believe it.  When Martin Varsavsky blogged about an SD card that included wi-fi I was impressed, but when I read that it can also add geotags to your pictures using wi-fi skyhooks (as the iPhone does, when not using GPS) I had to check the date.  It’s not April yet. How do they get all this functionality onto such a small card?  (It can also upload to photosharing sites via hotspots.  Oh yes, and it has up to 4gb of memory.  Currently pre-ordering at $99.)  

There’s a rumour of an Apple iPhone service that will pass iPhoto your movements and sync those with your pictures to add geotags taken on cameras that don’t support them; iPhoto ‘09 and its Places features makes whichever solution actually materialises first something of an essential upgrade for your kit.

Good news from мебелиRogue 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…

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.

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?

The (now delayed) Take 2 version of Apple TV has an AirTunes option according to this article at iLounge, allowing it to behave as an Airport Express.

When the Apple TV first came out, this was a feature it obviously lacked (in common with the new Airport Extreme and now Time Capsule). After comparing it with a Mac Mini I went with the Mini, mostly for the DVD playback and EyeTV support; at the time this suffered a similar disadvantage, subsequently mitigated by the arrival of Airfoil 3 which offers comparable functionality on any Mac (even if you can’t select the Mini’s speakers directly from iTunes).

This official new feature makes the Apple TV look more attractive, although with no price cut in the UK to match that in the US and no movie rentals, it’s still not a killer proposition. Perhaps the more significant angle to this discovery is the fact that Apple haven’t forgotten about AirTunes.

So come on Apple, how about an AirTunes Time Capsule?

I’ve been checking it out and it looks quite cool, though basically it is only an Airport Extreme with the hard drive inside it, so no AirTunes etc. But full Airport Disk support, so it can be used for storage or time machine backups for a number of machines, and you can add another disk (and/or a printer) via the USB port.

What I’d really like to know is how quiet is that hard drive? If it’s near enough silent, I might go for it just for that.