Posted by Luke | Posted on 30-05-2010
Category : apple
Tags: Apple TV, internet, streaming, video
The current Apple TV has been around for some time now, with Apple putting in a seemingly small amount of effort to progress the product. However there have been rumours surfacing of late that Apple may in fact be paying more attention to it’s self proclaimed ‘hobby product’ than we all realise. The word on the tech streets suggest that the revised Apple TV may be giving the internal hard drive the boot and choosing to opt for a purely streaming style of device to be based on the iPhone OS.
Up until now the Apple TV has been operating on a revised version of the Front Row software included within the Mac OS, with the Engadget (story here)suggesting that we might be expecting to see a smaller, slimmer device which operates on the same Apple A4 chip utilised in the wildly popular iPad. The current Apple TV works by drawing content from the computers iTunes libraries that are on your home network, it copies these files to its internal hard drive for you to watch on your big screen television. Having said this it is possibly one of the easiest and most pain free ways of being able to watch DRM video content that you have purchased on the iTunes store. Because goodness knows I can’t find a more elegant or more integrated solution to get that darn DRM’ed video onto anything but a computer or iPhone.
I certainly hope that a solution like this at a supposedly cheaper price does become available from Apple, as it is something that I would be very interested in purchasing just to make watching downloaded shows a little more pleasant by being able to sit in front of the TV rather than a tiny computer screen. I can’t wait to see where this goes!
Posted by Luke | Posted on 05-03-2010
Category : Internet/Tech
Tags: convenience, internet, utilities, WordPress
For all those bloggers out there using wordpress.com this isn’t news to you, this feature has been around for a while now. However for all of the Bloggers and website owners running a self hosted version of WordPress this is pretty cool.
This is a nice and handy little tool so we don’t have to rely on navigating to other URL shortening services like bit.ly or tinyurl. It is only a minor thing I know but if it means cutting out the need to have to navigate to other websites that I don’t need to go to then bring it on!
You will notice when you are creating or editing a post that under where you put the title of the post there is the permalink underneath. Next to the permalink you have the option to edit it, or now ‘Get Shortlink’ as you can see in the screen shot below.
When you click on this it pops up a little window with your shortened URL to copy and paste as you like. For example the shortlink for this post here would look like this: http://wp.me/pDhmW-7p now that certainly beats the alternative that is this: http://lukeandmelissah.com/wordpress-2-9-gets-url-shortening. Especially when it comes to tweets where you are character limited.
Posted by Luke | Posted on 03-03-2010
Category : Internet/Tech
Tags: buzz, connecting, Facebook, Google, internet, social network
It has been a few weeks now since Google launched their latest addition to their online repertoire of tools, their latest addition is Buzz. Essentially Buzz is aimed squarely at getting your social networking attention, designed as a competitor to everyones long term favourite Facebook.
Buzz sounds awfully promising in what it intends to deliver, in that it is intended to be a central online place that brings together all aspects of things that you want to share with others whether its just your family or the whole world. If you want to share pictures – Buzz links up with your Flickr or Picasa web albums to ingeniously show off your photos. Same idea for videos from your YouTube account, or tweets you publish from your Twitter account.
Buzz allows you to link up all of these aspects of your social networking life and share them. I guess what it intends to do is to give a central location so that there is no need for you to post to twitter, do the usual copy and paste and re-post it for your other friends on facebook who don’t use twitter. While doing this is does away with the need for users to navigate away from Buzz as it shows videos and pictures as part of the timeline that you’re viewing.
There are a few detractors here, as with any social network it relies heavily on you’re friends also being a part of the same online community. If you have a lot of friends using Gmail already or that you communicate with through Google Talk etc you will probably find that Buzz works really well for you. However if you – like me – have become so centralised around Facebook I’m seeing may not work as well for me. Where is the fun of posting and putting content into a social network that never gets any attention from the people I want to see it.
Apart from this as one drawback I see, I have had nothing but trouble trying to get this to connect to my different sites. It just seems to lock up and freeze all the time. To add to this it just doesn’t seem to come across as being polished or elegant to use. This may just be a part of me needing to get connected with more people on the service, or it could also be that I’m so used to using Facebook now that I need to re-train my brain.
So it may just be me but it seems to be a little under-ripe, and perhaps in time it will mature and become more of a useful service for me. However, while I’m willing to sign up and give it a go I just don’t know whether it is going to be a game changer for me. If you have any suggestions for getting more out of Buzz or have opinions one way or the other about the service feel free to leave a comment and let us all know what you think.
It was back in January of 2008 when Google first released their very own web browser by the name of Chrome, since that time it had only ever been available to people running windows as their operating system. Unfortunately for those of us who run either Mac or Linux as our main operating systems we weren’t able to get in on the action of this new browser. Ever since the launch however Google had said that there were plans for a Mac and Linux based version of the browser which has now arrived.
I downloaded it late last night and thought I would have a quick browse around with it. I almost always use Safari on the Mac which I consider to be a very fast web browser and on par with Firefox, but upon opening up Chrome and using it for a little while you do notice the speed in which web pages load. Speed is always something that we are looking for in a web browser because we all want the fastest load times possible and Chrome certainly doesn’t disappoint here.
As far as appearance goes, if you have used the Windows version of Chrome at all you will notice that it is all very similar but with a more…Mac’ish feel to it, the colour scheme has been adapted to better fit within the OS X environment. Although Google have equipped Chrome with a host of different themes that can be added to it as well to change up the look. It does offer the now expected feature of tabbed browsing, however it does so in a different manner to what we are all used to. As mac users if you remember back to when the beta version of Safari 4 was released the behaviour of the tabs was to sit above the address bar? Well this is the same way that tabs are implemented in Chrome – I really like this way of setting out the tabs as it maximises your viewing area which can be especially valuable if you are on a laptop and it is something that I wish had been kept in Safari.
The other neat thing that you will notice is that you lose the search bar that we have come to expect, it is no longer a separate box to type your search into. Google Chrome integrates the address bar and search box all into one and they call it the Omnibox. Therefore if you know the URL go ahead and type it in, but if your not sure use the same box and do a Google (or other specified search engine) search.
One of the other things that has become standard in all modern browsers is the ability to browse the web in ‘private’ mode, Chrome also has this functionality which they call Incognito. Essentially meaning that there will be no cookies or web history saved from sites you visit while ‘incognito’ this is a very good feature if you are using a public computer and would like to further increase your safety while doing internet banking or shopping. I do however like the rather humorous explanation that Google gives about the Incognito function.
All in all this is a very capable browser and I like it a lot! I’m glad it is finally available on the Mac and Linux platforms for all to utilise. Google Chrome is available for download here: http://www.google.com/chrome
And further information about the browser is available here: http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features_mac.html
