Tired of waiting for Creative to fix the Zen Touch playback problems and update the firmware to support PlaysForSure, I got a Dell DJ30 for my birthday. So far, it’s passed the first test: after a quick firmware upgrade, I was able to download my entire Yahoo Music Engine library (most of which is from the $5/month subscription service) and it worked! Overall the feel and controls are pretty nice. Dell uses a scroll thumb wheel rather than the ‘touch’ pad on the Zen. The wheel is better because it has feedback for each click. Also the overall unit is…
Today Yahoo! unveiled support for podcasts — finding, downloading, and listening. I’m just starting to play with it, but it appears to support both Yahoo Music Engine (YME) and iTunes. (If you’re already using YME, be sure to get the podcast plugin.) The site seems to focus on finding podcast series and individual episodes, with decent search and tagging capabilities. I thought it would keep track of podcast subscriptions for you, but instead it’s basically a searchable directory. You can listen online with a lightweight player, or download a “.pcast” file into YME or iTunes for subscribing and downloading the…
I continue to receive periodic email newsletters from Creative, hoping that eventually they will update the firmware for my poor little Zen Touch MP3 player. Today’s email included a teaser subject that I couldn’t resist: Creative patents industry-standard MP3 player technology If you guessed that we have another example of patenting the obvious, you’d be right! Here are some choice excerpts from the press release (emphasis mine): Creative’s invention for the user interface for portable media players enables selection of at least one track in a portable media player as a user sequentially navigates through a hierarchy using three or…
I’m back to trying out FeedBurner again, primarily to see if their stats capabilities are helpful for my RSS and Atom feeds. I notice a lot of people change their “advertised” feed to be the Feedburner URL, but I think it’s cleaner to use a URL on your domain and just redirect (assuming you have this capability with your web host). That way, you can try FeedBurner for a while and return back to your original links if you want. Here’s the sequence I used: Create two new templates in Movable Type (rss_fb.xml, atom_fb.xml), filling with the same content as…
Earlier this year, I discovered SplashBlog, a really nice mobile photo blogging client for PDAs. At the time, I thought it looked like it would be a great solution once they supported more systems beyond SplashBlog.com and TypePad. But, the 2.0 release included significant software as well as business changes. Now the application is free (was about $20) and you get a free SplashBlog.com account good for 100 picture uploads. Unfortunately, they’ve dropped TypePad and will now support only SplashBlog.com going forward.