Subscribe to chromatic.netSphere: Related ContentFollowing on the heels of the Universal Music/iTunes rift, NBC/Universal has declined to renew its iTunes contract according to the NY Times. The current deal is due to expire this December. 1500+ hours of NBC Universal content, including The Office and Heroes, will remain on iTunes until that time. So what happens after December? (Read More)
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Archive for the 'ipod' Category
When I broke up with my last boyfriend there was a huge hole left in my life, that will take a very long time to fill.
I had Comcast and a series 1 TiVo. He had a dual tuner DirecTiVo. When he moved in we could record 72 hours of TV in a 24 hour period. That was the best relationship ever. When we broke up, it was devastating. I was suddenly forced to reprioritize—my TV shows. One of the shows that had to go was The Office.
But now… there’s iTunes. And it brought The Office back to me. I just finished watching the Season 2 finale with The Kiss. Yay.
Yeah I know, old news. Shut up.
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Not just modal as in “you can’t interact with iTunes until you dismiss the dialog box” but modal as in ALL THE DOWNLOAD ACTIVITY STOPS.
So, if one of your podcasts (or an iTunes store purchase) throws a download error it can’t recover and continue without human intervention.
I bought all three seasons of The Office yesterday morning, began the download, and went on my merry way. I came back this morning expecting to pack my iPod with Steve Carrelley goodness, only to discover a dialog box warning about a network connection problem prevented downloading the first item. None of the other items had been attempted—the first error stopped the other 41 items from being downloaded. Not just my iTunes purchases, but podcasts that had been updated in the interim and been queued up for download.
So let me see. My network connection was active enough to detect that podcasts had been updated, but not active enough to recover and continue downloading. Purchasing a large and expensive pile of downloads should not require babysitting. Internets can briefly come and go, and your application should know better.
This is the sort of maddening, one-track application usability behavior displayed by apple in the mid 90s that made folks say “Well yes it’s pretty, but I need to do real work on my PC.”
</fume>
Sphere: Related ContentFor you convenience, I am making the red all contextuals and formats for which understanding is dimmer.
As Apple TV Video Converter for Mac
The Apple TV Video Converter for Mac software provides several default Apple TV video profiles, which you can use converting most popular video formats to Apple TV Video MP4 formats. The profiles will help you get the specify video you like such as minimal size video, high quality video, etc.As iPod Video Converter for Mac
It can convert video to iPod MP4 for Video iPod and new iPod 30GB and 80GB together with the resolution for 640 x 480.The Apple TV Video Converter for Mac software is easy to handle. You just need to push several buttons to complete once conversion.
Furthermore with the function of parameter setting, you can set up the parameters of output files including resolution, bit rate, frame rate, etc. to improve the quality of output audio and video files.
For your convenience batch conversion function is offered. First you should check the files want to convert, then set up the formats and pacific parameters for the target files, push Encode button and begin the conversion.
Now with the help of Apple TV Video Converter you can enjoy the brand-new digital entertainment life with your Apple TV and iPod Free Download Apple TV Video Converter to have a wonderful experience!!! (Read more…)
I love the idea of a simple and fast way to convert video. I have a SH*T TON of dvds that I would love to convert, but frankly, the options out there currently are too annoying. It’s hard to get too excited about it when the marketing is written this badly though 
All day I have been tingling over Apple’s bombshells, the iTV, and the long-anticipated iPhone. They are both utter game changers, and the iPhone is just a class killer.
All day long I have been watching blogs along with personal and professional mailing lists say more or less the same things: “OooooOoo. I will cut a bitch for one of these. Except for WAAA and WAAA and WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” where “Waaa” is usually something trivial, overly specific, and favors the anemic tree over the robust forest.
Sure. Every thing made by every one ever can be improved. But take a breath and think about what Apple did today: 1) a home entertainment device that will transfer content seamlessly from your computer and from the iTunes music store (itself another class killer) and 2) a smart phone with a feature set and price point that is utterly peerless—BOTH OF THEM DONE BY APPLE which does user experience like Kobe does beef.
These devices were not made for the whinging geeks who think they need 10 jillion megatits of bukakke porn browsing on their pocket sized telephones, or those who believe that all information and entertainment must be free and the constitution of the united states somehow grants them the right to wholesale theft and redistribution of someone else’s art.
The iTV and iPhone were made for the masses, and the masses will suck these down like mint juleps on a hot summer day. A
Game over.
Shut your piehole and buy one, or die like the dinosaurs.
Here is a fairly typical example of previously mentioned whinging (and yes, I left off the part where they said they would cut a bitch to get their hands on an iPhone):
Sphere: Related Content[Top five things about the iPhone that make my secret places hurty!!1!one!11!!]
1) Cingular. They’re North America’s largest cellular network, so it makes sense for Apple to deal with them. But it would have been far better if Apple had taken on the carriers’ chokehold on handset provisioning wholesale, and simply sold unlocked phones.2) 8GB Flash drive. For many, it will be more than enough, but the iPhone won’t kill the iPod until drive sizes start matching the needs of MP3-era music libraries. My fear is that Apple will stick to its guns and stick with Flash media as it grows to 16GB and beyond, but a second-gen iPhone with magnetic storage is an obvious upgrade path.
3) Built-in battery. Apple’s bothersome tradition of non-user-servicable batteries continues. There’s no reason to do this, frankly, aside from the kind of implied “we’re aesthetic obsessives” claim that Apple still gets away with.
4) No 3G. Fast internet is the horse, 3G is one hind leg.
5) With all those features, a QWERTY keyboard stashed within (somehow) would be the perfect way to turn this little beast into Apple’s answer to the UMPC: a cheap, fully-featured computing device in addition to a phone and music player. Even a clamshell… (Read more…)
what. the. f*ck.
i want to buy a nano. but its yet another toy i really don’t need n order to survive so i managed to hold off.
but i really wanted to play with this whatever-it-is.
oh. my. f*cking god.
You get it, or you don’t. I am totally hyperventilating and touching myself inappropriately.
What follows is a seething analysis of the vacases.com and associated websites.
I love the look of vaja cases. They are gorgeous, stylish, unique, seem to be meticulously manufactured, and highly personalizable.
What I don’t love is the website. vajacases.com starts out with a noisy spinning splash screen that is purely eyecandy. Nothing functional or even particularly informational about it. You can’t interact with the product. You just sit there… watching it spin… and make noise… totally pissing you off.
As a designer, I get that bad designs happen to good products. I am patient enough to sit and wait for the nonsense to stop. I roll my mouse around the obvious parts of the site looking for a “skip this lame ass 1998 fly-ass splash page lulz” link of some sort.
But nothing jumps out. I can adjust the volume (Although why I would want to adjust the volume is beyond me. It’s just me sitting at work with music blaring through my tinny speaker. And by “music” i mean a murderous devil energizer bunny stabbing my brain over and over with an ice pick.)
Nothing in the main image is clickable. The logo isn’t clickable. The completely useless transparent gif running along the entire bottom rail isn’t clickable.
Nope, folks. It’s the language selector that’s clickable. That’s right. Apparently english is the new “stop this thing right now or I will throw up”, and espanol is the new basura.
K. So I finally get in. To the English site obviously. I choose my product… and I am presented with a grid of tastefully designed graphic blocks:
This repeats down the page for 5 different case styles, although hilariously the last two are marked as “unavailable due to shortages in materials” (HOW NICE TAKE THEM OFF THE PAGE PLZ)
If you click on the full size images you get a popup window with “specs”:
(semi useful. but why a popup?)
If you click on the closeup images you get a pop window with a slightly larger closeup:
Not useful. seriously slightly larger. and why a popup again?
If you click on the text block that says “Customize it”, guess what you get? Thats right. Another popup window that detects your screen size and for no reason whatsoever fills it with a window that you cannot resize:
Now imagine that on your 20″ monitor. ALL OF IT. Notice that the content well in the middle is a fixed size, but thankfully all that unused space on the rest of your monitor will now be taken up with a gorgeous backdrop that says vajacasesvajacasesvajacases 10 jillion times. Thank god someone has finally figured out what to do with all that pesky spare real estate we all seem to have on our desktops!
Also notice that though there is a separate “Customize it” link for each of the products on the grid screen above, the customizer application/site/popupwindowfromhell kindly opens in an uninitialized state, just in case you stupidly clicked 7 or 8 times to choose the iPod Video 60G, but might want to say customize a Treo 650 case. BECAUSE WHY NOT.
So you click several more times to indicate which product you want to customize again and end up with a relatively fun interface that allows you to pick the two colors and preview it in a highly realistic manner. Naturally they screwed up the labeling, so you choose “Color 1″ and “Color 2″ which tells you nothing about primary v. trim color. Funnier (?) is that Color 1 is not, in fact the primary color, but is the trim color. Silliness, but you realize how it works after two clicks and can move on.
Thats as far as I can bitch, because I haven’t actually bought the case yet. There are so many yummy combinations I can’t choose, but I am sure that the checkout process will have many fun things to make fun of as well.
I just don’t know what to say about this.
OK, yes I do. It’s funny. and also That will teach you to buy anything from Walmart.
Update: iLox? iSashimi?
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