Suburbia

iMovie in the Cloud? More like head in the Clouds...

Every year when Macworld Expo in San Francisco draws near it sparks off a bunch of rumours about new products to be launched. I've already written a couple of posts (iPhone Shuffle, Mock Mini) in response to some of the rumours.

However, as obviously fake as the mockup of the rumoured Mac Mini update was nothing takes the dumb award like the rumour of an online version of iMovie! A few sites including Techcrunch have written about this rumour but there's one simple reason which make it unlikely: Bandwidth. 

Read the full post 'iMovie in the Cloud? More like head...' →

Touchgrind (A short history of skateboarding games)

Anyone who is into skateboarding and owns a games console has no doubt played at least one of the many games in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series. This game defined the genre for several years and had no equal. In recent years EA's Skate presented the first game to seriously challenge its place at the top. One of the things that set Skate apart from the Tony Hawk games was that there was a learning curve more closely resembling the real skate experience. Skate was also helped by the capabilities of next generation consoles like the Playstation 3 and the XBox 360 which offered amazing graphics.

In the area of hand-held consoles however, the Tony Hawk franchise offered the only skateboarding games for Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS. Skate was never released for either of these hand-held devices perhaps largely due to the selling point of their high-end graphics. The sequel, Skate 2, will also only be available for the PS3 and XBox 360.

Read the full post 'Touchgrind (A short history of skat...' →

Forget the iPhone Nano, here is the iPhone Shuffle

The other hot rumour leading up to Macworld San Francisco is for a smaller form iPhone, supposedly called the iPhone Nano. Macrumors published a sketchy picture of the supposed iPhone Nano which shows it as basically a shrunk-down version of the regular iPhone. 

Personally I can't see that being real, it simply does just look like a scaled down iPhone. However, people said the same thing about the previous generation iPod Nano when pictures showed the short squished format but it turned out to be real so who knows?

Read the full post 'Forget the iPhone Nano, here is the...' →

Is this the new Mock Mini, erm, I mean Mac Mini...

Macworld San Francisco will soon be taking place and as ever the rumour-mill is hot with talk of a revamped Mac Mini, along with the talk there are the usual sketchy photos of the supposed new products!

MacObserver linked to a post on Macenstein.com which shows one of these sketchy product shots, however, I took one look at it and thought "That's been Photoshopped together"! It got me thinking that I should make my own mockup of a Mac Mini just to show how easy it is, and also how obvious the Macenstein shot looks to me.

Read the full post 'Is this the new Mock Mini, erm, I m...' →

BBC launches multi-platform downloadable iPlayer using Adobe AIR runtime

Finally people can stop complaining that the BBC only support Windows XP for its downloadable iPlayer application. Using a cross-platform application developed using Adobe's AIR the BBC have launched a downloadable iPlayer that can run on Windows, Mac and Linux.

I've written quite a few times about the iPlayer and it seemed to me that the only viable solution for a cross-platform iPlayer was to use Flash and/or Adobe AIR. The only element I wasn't sure about was how DRM would be provided:

Read the full post 'BBC launches multi-platform downloa...' →

An idea for improving iPhone App management in iTunes

The iPhone App Store is a huge success with thousands of applications available. However, it doesn't take long after downloading a whole load of apps before you've got pages and pages of apps on your iPhone. With just two, three or maybe even four pages of apps it's not too difficult to remember where specific applications are but beyond that it gets harder.

One solution to helping find the apps installed is to create pages with specific types of apps on each page, perhaps Social networking apps on one page, games on another and so on. However, you can soon end up with a lot of pages using this method. Currently on my iPhone I have about seven pages of apps and it's getting increasingly difficult and time consuming to manage this as I add more applications. 

Read the full post 'An idea for improving iPhone App ma...' →

Goodbye N95, Hello iPhone

It's been 18 months since I got my Nokia N95 and I've enjoyed using it, the combination of a phone with a good quality still camera and also pretty good video camera along with wifi access has been great to use.

Since getting an iPod touch last christmas it was pretty much inevitable that once my phone contract was up that I would switch to an iPhone. Although the N95's killer app is a great camera, the array of applications for the Nokia N95 pales in comparison to what is available for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Read the full post 'Goodbye N95, Hello iPhone...' →

iPod Touch 2.2 firmware update breaks BBC iPlayer (Fixed!)

The recent 2.2 firmware update for iPhone and iPod Touch brought some great new features but also an annoying glitch, it breaks the ability to play content on the BBC's iPod / iPhone version of the iPlayer site!!!

If you try to playback something on the iPlayer site you get a message saying "Sorry, programmes can only be accessed over a wifi connection". For some reason the BBC site thinks that I'm accessing it via a 3G connection, which isn't allowed for the iPlayer site! 

Read the full post 'iPod Touch 2.2 firmware update brea...' →

Steve Balmer: The Sarah Palin of the tech world

Somebody should tell Steve Balmer to be quiet, he's like the Sarah Palin of the tech world.

Doesn't he remember what he said about the iPhone?: "There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."

Read the full post 'Steve Balmer: The Sarah Palin of th...' →

Budget AVCHD editing in Windows: VoltaicHD for PC and Windows Movie Maker!

I've previously written about How to edit AVCHD footage on Mac OSX, at the time of writing that article there weren't many options for editing AVCHD footage on either Mac OSX or Windows operating systems. VoltaicHD is a great application that helped Mac OSX users in particular because at that time there was no way of editing AVCHD on Mac at all.

Many Mac users had purchased AVCHD cameras and were frustrated by the complete lack of software available for editing AVCHD on Mac and even Windows users had to wait quite a few months before Sony released a version of their Vegas software that supported AVCHD. 

Read the full post 'Budget AVCHD editing in Windows: Vo...' →