Twit.tv / MediaFly app – iPhone versus Droid

I enjoy listening to Leo LaPorte’s tech podcasts (http://twit.tv). With his growth the last year he is looking to expand beyond iTunes distribution, and also make the leap from audio to video (not to mention making the leap from the internet to your TV via the Roku player).

So he has teamed up with MediaFly (http://mediafly.com) to distribute for him. The hows and whys are more complicated than I want to get into here.

I used to listen to the podcasts in the Zune software on my laptop when home, and on my Zune player when out (via the generic RSS feed functionality built into Zune).

Now there are MediaFly “apps” for both the iPhone and the Droid for “accessing” (streaming/downloading) the podcasts. I am using them both, and I can’t help comparing and contrasting.

Let me cut to the chase.. they both are very young, but right now the Droid app is more useful to me. Let me soften that by saying I realize how fortunate we are to be living in an age when we see advances like this – streaming and downloading mobile audio and video without having to sync. MediaFly is getting this attention because they are breaking ground, and we are the winners either way.

Both apps have drawbacks around the GUI, with the iPhone one being very busy-looking, with mystery pauses in navigation, and controls that don’t act like standard iPhone controls.

The Droid app is very touchy – over and over I lose where I am or exit the app altogether just in handling the cell phone normally.

There are a couple of issues they have in common – for instance the inability to move around in the media. I often want to back up 30 seconds or one minute in an hour-long audio or video, and that is impossible with these clients, where the Zune made it dead-simple. They need to add buttons to the slider already present. Also, if you exit the clients, most likely they will not remember the media you were playing, where you were in it, etc.

Now for my reasons for preferring the Android client at the moment - (1) Twit video – android app has it, iPhone app does not, and (2)the GUI is a little cleaner.

Actually to really make this fair I should download the full beta Android client, because the one I have is just for the Twit network of shows.

MediaFly - http://mediafly.com/

iPhone app - http://www.mediafly.com/DigitalLifestyle#SelectedDevice

Android app - http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-mediafly-android-video-twit-zzBt.aspx

Headset Buddy

I have been looking for this for years!

http://www.theheadsetbuddy.com/

So this seems like a simple thing to me, however I have never been able to find it before. Use your 2.5mm mono cell phone headset with your pc (dual 3.5mm stereo) for Skype, or vice versa (use your computer mic and speakers, or gaming headset, with your cell phone - dual 3.5mm stereo to 2.5mm mono). As an added bonus they have an adapter to use your cell phone headset (2.5mm mono) with your iPhone/Droid (3.5mm stereo with mic)! What a find.. Booyah!

Google Bookmarks in iPhone

I recently decided to move my bookmarks from Simpy (http://simpy.com) where they have languished waiting for me to tag them, to Google Bookmarks (http://google.com/bookmarks).

There’s a bookmarklet on that page for desktop browsers that works well. However I also wanted to use this on my iPhone. You can use bookmarklets from the iPhone bookmarks once you get them in there, but there’s no simple way yet that I could find.

Here’s the current code for that bookmarklet, hopefully the blog engine won’t mangle it. Just create a throw-away bookmark and then edit it, setting the url to the following by copy-pasting it:

javascript:(function(){var a=window,b=document,c=encodeURIComponent,d=a.open("http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&output=popup&bkmk="+c(b.location)+"&title="+c(b.title),"bkmk_popup","left="+((a.screenX||a.screenLeft)+10)+",top="+((a.screenY||a.screenTop)+10)+",height=420px,width=550px,resizable=1,alwaysRaised=1");a.setTimeout(function(){d.focus()},300)})();

UPDATE: I confirmed that this works with the iPhone, but so far no dice with the Android Droid..

UPDATE; It looks like Android (well the built-in browser) doesn’t support bookmarklets at this time -

( http://friendfeed.com/android/03b4e99a/bookmarklets-in-android-browser ). The workaround would be to copy-paste the bookmark URL ahead of the URL you wanted to bookmark, which sounds painful. I’ll try this out some before recommending it.

Popular podcasts

Want to know the most popular podcasts right now?

http://podcastawards.com/

Amazon Kindle app for PC

http://www.amazon.com/KindleforPC

This is great news – Amazon has released an app for the PC for reading Kindle books. I’m not sure how this will affect sales of Kindle hardware but it is great for folks who already have Kindle hardware and books!

Thanks Paul -http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/11/10/kindle-for-pc-now-available.aspx

Google Wave Book

Gina Trapani, of LifeHacker fame, writing with the current LifeHacker editor Adam Pash, is offering a preview of her new book for free viewing. If you are wondering, “What is this Wave thing?’, this is where you need to go to find out.

http://completewaveguide.com

Lifetime map updates for Garmin GPS for one price

If you own a Garmin Gps - this is big - one price for free map updates for the life of the device. This is usually $100/year!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001PKTFM8

You can just google "nuMaps" for more information...

Google search options

http://www.google.com/search?q=iphone&hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS340US341&tbo=1&output=search&tbs=ww:1

Have you guys checked out Google’s new search options? Just click “Show options” from the Google results page. My favorite at the moment is “wonder wheel” – It shows phrases related to the phrase you entered in a “brain-map” style, so you can narrow down your search using more accurate terms.

Remote control robot via video with iPhone

• http://mrblog.org/2009/03/15/ispykee-open-source-spykee-for-iphone
• http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=9755

A more interesting way to say this is mobile webcam!

Microsoft opening up the Outlook email database (PST files) file format

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/26/microsoft-opens-up-the-pst-format.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/archive/2009/10/26/roadmap-for-outlook-personal-folders-pst-documentation.aspx

If I remember correctly, up until now you couldn’t do much with a PST no matter what API you used, unless Outlook was actually installed. Now you will be able to, which is great. I have many Gigs of email going back to 1995, all in PST format. I’d love to have or create some better (more targeted) tools to work with those archives, which usually comes down to looking for some old email for record purposes, like a needle in a hay stack.

This is not to say that there weren’t some very useful APIs already open for MAPI and accessing MAPI data using database APIs.

I remember reading somewhere that the PST format was based on MS Access. I assume the change on 2002-2003 to the format was to move it to something like the personal SQL Server db to beat the 2Gig filesize limit.