Chicken2nite's Profile

As a Winnipegger, I balk at your New England weather. Minus 6 C indeed. And I just looked at the specs on the iPhone, apparently the operating temperature is 0 to 35 C, non operating temperature -20 to 45 C. I find that hilarious, considering it was -30 or colder for a two week period back in February or so. I suppose if you keep it in your pocket, it won't get too cold, but it's something to keep in mind.

I would say that they need to revamp podcasting in terms of how you organize them, or rather the lack of organizational features for podcasts. I'd like to be able to organize them by content rather than simply in alphabetical order. As it stands, once you have more than a handful of podcasts it gets to be quite the mess. If they would just let you have folders in the podcasting section to better organize them, I would be happy. Larry King and Meet the Press could go with my CBC podcasts and TWIT and TWIM could go with Cranky Geeks. As it stands it's a jungle out there.

Linux not user-friendly? One word: Openmoko. I'm not sure if it's been mentioned by this site, but it certainly deserves to be considering the number of iPhone articles you've put out. Openmoko has the same sort of touch screen interface like the iPhone (no buttons) but it has the benefit of being open source, which allows third parties to develop software for it, like say, a Skype app. The only way for Apple to include such a function is to clear it with AT&T, which will probably happen sometime in the next 12 months I suppose, what with the T-Mobile announcement of WiFi enabled phones with free talking in hotspots.

Well I'm just going to say that the console I've been playing the most lately has been the DS, which happens to be a very underpowered system with about the same level of graphical abilities as the Nintendo 64 (with games being no more than twice the size of the largest N64 cartridges). In other words, ten year old tech. The success of the DS is in part because developers want to program for it, whereas the PSP is in the same sort of boat as the Gamecube where most third party support come in the form of ports from the PS2. Apple has never been one to cultivate third party support when it comes to gaming. EA outsources the job of porting over the most popular PC games from their library to other companies, much like most other game publishers. With the iPod games, third party developers were shut out of the process while Apple invited a select group of developers to port over a handful of games to their new platform. My point is that Apple would easily be able to make the Apple TV into a viable gaming platform if they were A: successful at building a decent marketshare B: opened up iTunes to allow for third party developers to make a game on the cheap and sell it to recoup those costs. It's kind of funny to think that the best game on the Xbox 360 last year was Geometry Wars and the best game on the PSP was Lumines.

to be able to export videos from Democracy to the 5th Gen iPods or other video player, they would need to include a video encoder within the program (perhaps an open source app like VLC which could then be integrated, although it might be difficult to do that cross-platform) which could change DivX or Mpeg-1 to Mpeg4 video, or whichever format was supported by your hand-held of choice. As for the set top box issue, I would say that by fixing up the interface it could function better in a number of ways, since the column on the left can tend to get overcrowded and unmanagable when you subscribe to too many feeds (much like how itunes gets with podcasts). If there was a way in which you could further organize your subscribed feeds into relevance (by say putting Democracy Now with EyesOnFox and NBC's Meet The Press while having TWiT, TWiM and Cranky Geeks grouped together) then both iTunes and Democracy would become quite a bit more useable. I'm actually surprised at how little in the Podcast section of iTunes has changed since it was introduced. Hopefully with some competition from Democracy Apple will take the hint and refine the interface themselves. With Smart Folders being offered for music, it just boggles my head that you can't do the same with podcasts.

The fact that they left out any announcement of iLife or iWork '07 seems kind of odd, but I suppose they're holding out to make it run native in Leopard when that gets released. Makes sense I guess.

I'm guessing they'll be saving the wide screen ipod video with a hdd so that they could bundle in other features with it, perhaps turning that into the Newton with PDA and WiFi features. I could see them coming out with a "low end" iphone in a few years with essentially the same specs as the iphone they announced today (in typical apple fashion, as last year's powerbook was this year's ibook). One design feature that could be nice is if they were to make it a clamshell with a click wheel on the outside, but of course I'm only guessing at this point. It'd be nice if they were to allow for video capture with that 2 mega-pixel camera though.

What pisses me off is that Microsoft only allows you to sync with the xbox 360 if you have a Windows Media Center Edition PC, which is total bs. They have the number one operating system and (so far) the number one next gen console, and if they would just open it up a little bit then could have great integration, but instead they are compartmentalizing the market, similar to what they did with the Zune by ignoring PlaysForSure. Honestly I'd love to see Google come out with a set top box, keeping the price down either through selling it at a loss or leaving out high definition video (since both YouTube and Google Video don't support more than blown up 320x240). That way they could strike a deal with the content creators to distribute their content and give them a cut of the ad revenue. It could be a no hassle on demand service, where all you would need is the box and a net connection. My hope would be that some developer make something akin to the Xbox Media Center which could be installed on a hacked Xbox, where you can view DivX videos and the like, except do it for the PS3 and include as many codecs and file formats as possible. That's the sort of thing which would make that system worth buying IMO, but now I'm just repeating myself some more.