There are a ton of great apps out there designed to snag, convert and shovel big heaps of video onto your iPod and iPhone, and I talked about a few of them at this year’s Macworld Expo 2008 in San Francisco. Among my absolute favorites:
QuickTime Pro. Apple’s own multimedia powerhouse lets you convert a ton of different formats into iPod-ready video with just a simple menu command. It’s only $30 and well worth the price.
TubeSock. This nifty little app converts your favorite YouTube videos from the Web and save ‘em right into iTunes, where they’re only a sync away from going with you on your iPod or iPhone. There’s a free demo version that converts the first 30 seconds of video, and the full version is only $15 — much less than a single movie ticket and a small stale popcorn in most cities.
Handbrake. If you’ve got a DVD movie from your collection that you’d like to take along on your iPod or iPhone, this little open-source wonder will convert it into a Pod-friendly file quite nicely.
And even though I talked about these in the O’Reilly booth at *MAC*world, all of these programs have Windows versions as well.
As I wait impatiently for FedEx to get here with my copy of Leopard, I took a few minutes to take Safari over to the iPhone Dev Center page on Apple’s site. With the company’s recent announcement that a software developer’s kit for the iPhone is on the way early next year, there’s been a lot of buzz about the potential for new applications from third-party developers.
The iPhone Dev Center site has a lot of cool geeky stuff already — sample code, videos, reference libraries, and Web development guidelines about app-crafting for the iPhone and iPod Touch. To see the goods, though, you need to have an Apple Developer Connection membership. Don’t worry, you can sign up for a free online membership here. But as I was poking around the page, I saw a note saying you could also just sign in with your .Mac username and password. Rawk!
Once you get signed in, the links on the iPhone Dev Center site go live so you can start checking out the content. You can even download the seven iPhone Tech Talk videos on the page and watch them with iTunes. “iPhone User Interface Design” and “Managing Content and Synced Data for iPhone” are two of the titles — nuke up the Orville Redenbacher!
Sorry for the long stretch o’ nothin’ between posts here. As you may have heard, Apple released a whole bunch of new iPods last month and for us in Missing Manual Land, that’s a cue to get cracking on a new edition. And we have.
iPod: The Missing Manual, Sixth Edition is off to the printer and will be out in stores soon. In the meantime, here are a few tidbits gleaned from doing this new version of the book.
Quicker naps for your iPod. There’s a quick way to put your iPod Classic or Nano to sleep with one quick tap now—without having to hold down Play/Pause. You can add a "Sleep" option right on your iPod’s main menu. To do so, go to iPod -> Settings -> Main Menu and scroll down toward the bottom of the list. Select "Sleep" and press the center button to add it to your iPod’s main menu, where you can select it anytime you want the iPod to take a nap and save its battery power for later.
Fetching missing album art. Cover Flow on the new iPods makes your music look great, but you get a bunch of gray, generic covers if you don’t have the actual album artwork embedded in your song files. You can make iTunes get it for you by choosing Advanced -> Get Album Artwork. Odds are iTunes can find a lot of your missing art, but if it can’t, it pops up a message telling you it didn’t find everything. But here’s the handy part — it tells you which ones it couldn’t find when you expand the bottom of the alert message. With this shopping list in hand, you can head over to Amazon and snag the missing image files yourself by searching for the album name. Once you see an image on screen, drag it off the Amazon Web page to your desktop — and then into the empty artwork window for that song in iTunes.
Dudes, don’t get me wrong: I love my iPhone. But this thing’s definitely got a few signs of version-one-point-oh-itis. Exhibit A: Every time I (and apparently lots of others) try to use the phone’s iPod program while browsing the Web, the iPod crashes. On the iPhone crashing simply means that the music stops. You’ve got to then finger click your way back to iPod to re-start the music…until it happens again about a minute later. Kinda takes the fun out of showing off your new gadget to all the (ok, both) Zune owners you know.
One poster to the Apple discussion forums advised powering the phone on and off (hold down the Sleep/Wake switch on the top of the phone for three seconds). I tried this to no avail. The prevailing opinion out there in Fix It Land seems to be that this bug will only (hopefully?) be fixed upon the release of Apple’s first iPhone software update. Let’s hope that comes soon.
I’ll be the first to admit: my experience with first generation Apple products is they tend to be buggy.
How easy is it to read long passages of text on the iPhone? That’s a question I’ve been wanting to answer since the Holy Phone was announced this past January. I’ve long had a reading-related fantasy (trust me, this won’t get dirty) that I could use the iPhone as a kind of auxiliary monitor. Stuff a few software-related how-to doc’s onto the phone, and then perform the actual tasks on my main monitor. I don’t know about you, but when it comes to reading documentation online I always end up printing it out since I can’t stand switching back and forth between, say, Photoshop Elements and the info onscreen that’s telling me how to use the histogram. Once I got my hands on an actual iPhone and saw firsthand the jaw-dropping clarity of its 3.5 inch 160 dpi screen, I couldn’t wait to run a few tests.
I took a look at three different kinds of content: a book from O’Reilly’s Safari online reading library, a Web site whose layout appeared especially readable on the iPhone, and a PDF.
The verdict? iPhone-friendly Web sites are the clear winner. Safari books take second place and are readable for about 10 pages or so at time. PDFs are as lame as ever on the small screen. Pictures, comments, and some suggestions after the jump.
Talk about The Gadget Panic…driving through a strange city with NO idea how to get to a specific place and the GPS starts bugging out. Luckily, it was just a brief loss of satellite connectivity and we sort of knew it was giving us the wrong directions anyway since you can’t really turn left in the middle of a tunnel. But it was enough to make me realize how reliant I’d become on that little talking box stuck to the windshield to tell me how to get from Point A to the rest of the alphabet.
Now that those handy global-positioning systems are pretty affordable for a lot of people (”affordable,” meaning that decent ones cost a couple hundred bucks now instead of the equivalent of three car payments), travel can be a lot less worrisome. Just punch in the address, let the receiver find its satellites and calculate the route, and off you go with maps and guided audio directions. You may get a route that sticks to the main roads or isn’t very creative, but there’s no more flipping through the atlas or coffee-stained map in a panic while trying to drive, either — and that has to make for a safer highway experience. (Of course, it’s still a good idea to keep the hardcopy maps in the car-door pocket just in case.)
On many GPS units, you can even pick the type of voice you want to hear telling you where to go. We use a female British voice on ours, which vaguely sounds like a digitized Dame Judi Dench. (We even named our Garmin Street Pilot “Cecily,” since it had a nice English ring to it.) But even GPS units have joined the pop-culture multimedia revolution. TomTom, for example, offers celebrity voices like Burt Reynolds and Mr. T to guide you, and there are GPS boxes can play MP3 music or double as an FM transmitter so you can blast your iPod’s playlists through the car radio between turns.
If you’re new to the whole GPS thing, sites like GPS Magazine and GPS Review are a good place to read news and reviews of the different receivers and services available. Because if you’re thinking of investing in a GPS receiver, a little research can really, er, point you in the right direction.
Gadget geeks, rev up your credit cards! The new iPhone ads on Apple’s Web site announce that the phone will be available June 29th, just a few short weeks away. Expect a data explosion at the end of the month on blogs and tech sites as the early adopters snap up the device and dissect the good, the bad, and the why-did-this-&^%$#@-thing-do-that?
Ah, Star Wars. Today marks the 30th anniversary of the film’s release, with all its sarcastic Han Solo lines and nifty technology — even a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. After all, Star Wars showed us droids, comlinks and movie/data discs a few decades before we got Roombas, wireless Bluetooth headsets, and DVDs stocked in Earth stores. (And that flying practice drone that shot Luke in the tuchis when he was learning how to use his lightsaber — now that’s a gadget that really fights back.)
If you’re still into Star Wars, Lucasfilm is giving you a chance to really get into the movie. InformationWeek, among other sources, has details about this new feature added to the revamped StarWars.com site:
The redesigned site will include a variety of Web 2.0 features, including an online media remix platform from video editing startup Eyespot. Using Eyespot’s tools, Star Wars fans will be able to mix their own video source material with over 250 scenes and sounds from the six Star Wars films.
Okay, that’s pretty cool, even if you’re not a huge fan of the movies: a huge pop-culture franchise is not going to sue your pants off if you want to tinker around with copyrighted material and make your own creation to share with the world. No word yet if you can download your mashup to your video iPod, but I’ll be checking it out.
Memorial Day weekend is upon us, and with it, the traditional start of summer. After a chilly, rainy spring here in the Northeast and a (hopefully) sunny beach break on the horizon, I can’t think of a more potentially useful tool right now than this combination bottle opener/keychain/iPod Shuffle case from Mophie. It’s kind of everything you need right there to enjoy a refreshing bottled beverage and a playlist full of happy tunes on a nice summer day.
Wanna make your mobile phone go nuts? Sign up for Twitter and get a lot of friends.
Twitter, which got a big boost in popularity and an award at the SXSW conference earlier this year, is a service that lets you describe what you’re doing at that very moment in 140 characters or less — which can make for a lot of SMS haiku. After you sign up with Twitter, you can post your abbreviated thoughts through your page on the Twitter site, by texting the Twitter number on your mobile phone, or even by instant message; AIM, Jabber and Google Talk are currently supported.
And, because Twitter is a social service, you can collect “friends” and have all of their posts (called “tweets”) show up on your page, phone, or message window so you always know what all your pals are up to. You can choose to make your Twitter messages public to the world, or private to just your friends. When I first heard about Twitter a few months ago, I was sort of dubious about wanting to read a lot of pointless posts on my phone. Yes, Twitter can be completely frivolous (“I’m waiting in line at the store to buy carrots”), but after using it for a while, I can see it has a lot of potential.
Okay, I can understand a leopard-print case for the iPod, but a French maid’s uniform for the Roomba? I guess our gadgets can entertain us on many levels…
The Roomba, for those who vaguely recall its debut about five years ago, is a disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaner that scuttles across your floor snarfing up cat hair and Oreo crumbs all on its own. You just charge it up and turn it loose, and it sweeps the carpet for you while using dozens of built-in sensors to keep itself out of trouble (like falling down the stairs). A company named iRobot makes the Roomba, as well as the Scooba, a similar model that specializes in washing hardwood, tile and linoleum floors. You can even hack the Roomba.
The company’s Web site says than more than two million Roombas have been sold worldwide, so it seems only natural that someone got the idea to dress up the little rolling robot. In fact, myRoomBud, one of the original Roomba wardrobe designers, was started by inventive and enterprising kids, who came up with all sorts of ideas. If you don’t want to put it in a maid’s uniform, there are plenty of other costumes: cow, tiger, ladybug or “Foo Foo the WereRabbit.” The Roomba costumes sell for around $25 USD at RobotShop and Amazon as well as myRoomBud, and that’s a lot cheaper than some of those fancy designer iPod cases that practically cost more than the iPod itself.
The whimsical nature of the Roomba-wear reminds me of why a lot of people love gadgets to begin with. They’re usually small, you infuse them with your own personality and they keep you from getting bored. But unlike an iPod or mobile phone, the Roomba actually does housework. All it needs now is a pair of wireless speakers linked to the stereo system or computer music library so it can serenade you around the house when it gets done with its chores…
The Queen has arrived! The video library of movies and TV shows is growing nicely over in the iTunes Store — all in good time for summer and the start of vacation and maximum slacking season. I’ve purchased quite a few things from the Store, including most of this season’s Veronica Mars. Even though the prices are reasonable, I’ve also been spending a lot of time on a site where the movies and music are even cheaper.
They’re free, in fact.
The Internet Archive has been around for more than a decade, but since I got my video iPod, I find I’ve been visiting it way more often than I used to. The site — a non-profit organization based in San Francisco — collects all sorts of digitized audio, video and text for scholars, historians or anybody who wants to look. And being digital, you can even download some of the works.
For iPod enthusiasts, the fact that you can get lots of music in MP3 format or video in the MPEG-4 means you can take it with you (if the file has been bestowed with a “Download” link, that is). Granted, much of the content is older and in the public domain, but if you have any interest in film, music, or cultural history, it’s easy to blow most of the afternoon roaming the virtual halls of the Internet archive. The usage rights vary and not everything is downloadable, but the site explains what you can do with each work you find.
It started with a little bit of flat-screen TV envy. Every time I visited someone’s home and gawked at their shiney new plasma or LCD TV, my living room setup felt a little 20th century: I had a 28-inch, old school TV with a backside as big as a fridge, and a stereo whose most modern feature was its two (count ‘em!) casette tape players. I did have a TiVo, but that only increased my feeling that I should be doing a better job of being a modern electronic citizen. Here’s what my setup looked like:
You don’t even want to know what was happening behind the console. So began my year-long quest to join the flat screen masses. I coughed up $26 for a one-year online subscription to Consumer Reports, whose overview of HDTV and all the various TV options was pretty useful. I also started visiting tons of TV showrooms in New York City: the Sony home entertainment complex, Samsung’s similar version in the Time Warner Center, J&R, and on and on and on.
So, the next version of Mac OS X, (10.5, or Leopard, for those following Apple’s Big Cat Scorecard) won’t be arriving in June after all, according to a statement Apple released on its Web site yesterday. Because the company had to pull programmers off the OS X team to help muscle the iPhone to its June release date, Leopard won’t prowl until October.
Oh, well.
While part of me is bummed about not having a shiny new operating system to play around with this summer, that also means I won’t have to spend those inevitable hours trying to get all my gadgets, hardware and software to work with it. Operating system upgrades can cause all sorts of upheaval, with hardware drivers and certain programs not working the same way in the new system as they did on the old. Windows Vista early adopters with iPods got to experience this first-hand when a problem between iTunes and Vista reared its ugly head right after Vista’s January release. Luckily, most of the major problems were resolved with the release of iTunes 7.1.1, but there are still a few lingering issues; Apple describes them here, Vista adventurers.
So Leopard is put off until fall. While I’m half disappointed and half relieved, I think there’s one thing Mac users probably won’t have to worry about when they upgrade: since Apple is calling the software shots, iTunes and Leopard (at least) will get along just fine.
Despite the number of chargers I haul around, it hadn’t really occurred to me just how reliant I am on portable power until three of my most-used gadgets recently started to show that inevitable sign of lithium-based battery age: the inability to hold a charge for very long. The mobile phone and laptop are both due for upgrades this year (hel-LO, iPhone!), but I must admit I’m getting sentimental about the charge-challenged iPod.
It’s not like this is my only iPod, either, or even the newest. Since we tend to update iPod: The Missing Manual at least once a year in an attempt to keep it fresh, tasty and timely, I have more than a few Pods around the house, all purchased for book-research purposes. No, the iPod in question here is an old 40-gigabyte iPod Photo model that I bought in the fall of 2004. It was the first iPod with a color screen and one of the last models to come with a huge amount of accessories (like a dock, AV cable, AC adapter, USB and FireWire cables) right in the box. Man, those where the days….
In addition to the office-job commute, This Old Pod has come along with me to London, Paris, Pensacola, Philadelphia, and Gettysburg (and holds photos from all of the above, plus iLingo’s French lessons and a couple years worth of Samuel Pepys’ diaries I got from Project Gutenberg). I use my video iPod and the sporty Nano when the need arises, but I fell into a habit of using iPod Photo as my daily walkabout companion. It hasn’t died yet, but its battery life is noticeably shorter between trips to the wall charger.
I’m sure there are more than a few folks out there reading this who may be in a similar situation, and probably with their one-and-only iPod. So, what to do? I figure if I want to keep using my faithful gadget, I have two options: replace the battery or plant the Pod permanently in a set of speakers that keep it powered while it plays.
