In the above posting by Kevin Hoffman, he talks about his newfound love and admiration for Core Data. I am continually amazed at how smart and technical people discover the elegance of the technology that came out of NeXT. Of course Core Data isn’t EOF, but then again it is, just the next generation (and without client server support supported).
Core Data, like EOF, is powerful object persistence framework. But you have to accept it and not fight it. In his two examples, he found the elegant solution. But for everyone that finds the solution, there are probably 2-5 that do it the hard way and curse the world. It goes to my five levels of understanding. I need to dig that up and publish it here.
So far the Apple TV is good. It is excellent at music and photos are well done also. I would say there is a problem with TV, but that isn’t exactly right. The problem is music videos.
I see music videos more like “music with video” than “tv with music,” yet the later is how Apple TV treats it.
If I put a bunch of music videos in a playlist, they show up under the “Music” section of the menu. So it should behave like a music playlist. When a song/video ends, goto the next one in the playlist. I should also be allowed to use the “shuffle” feature.
The TV section is more like TiVo, when a show ends, go back to the menu to select the next one to watch. This make particular sense for longer shows (30+ minutes).
I see the Apple TV as my way to program my own channel. I am willing to goto my computer and select what should be in a playlist/channel, go upstairs, “tune into” that playlist/channel and watch it ALL without hitting the remote. Between podcasts of real shows (from BBC & CNBC) and podcast only productions, there is a ton of create content for me to assemble for my hour in front of the TV at night. I know this will work well since it is exactly the process I’ve automated for my ride to the office and back.
I have it now. Did enough wiring prep to pop it in quickly. Sealed box to running Apple TV in about 5 minutes. My one hiccup was that I forgot to patch the network jack by the TV into the hub in the basement so it wanted to go wireless. A quick run to the basement and it was happily on the wired network.
I like it. The music usecase is wonderful. It solves this problem very well. The one thing that is now obvious is that Apple needs to deliver higher quality video through the iTunes store. I need HD content flowing, now 640×480 max. This will be HUGE!
A year ago I saw something flow through my news reader (NetNewsWire) and saved it in a tab. It is time to close the tab, but remember the page (picture really)…
Last week I was in upstate New York and discovered this beautiful Art Deco sign on the Syracuse University campus. Photo taken April 7, 2006, in Syracuse, New York.
While at Syracuse, many people thought Varsity was the best pizza. I thought it was a classic hang-out, but not the best pizza. The sign and location are wonderful, but nothing could beat Archie’s pizza after it has congealed for some time under the heat lamps.
My Apple TV is in the mail. Should have it Friday.
The world has not been waiting on pins and needles for Apple TV. Many people are disappointed on what it will deliver. I’m not in that camp. I ordered one the day they were announced. I don’t buy everything new from Apple, but this delivers what I need.
I have a 42″ plasma in my family room, but no big stereo on the main floor (or anywhere in the house for that matter. When we have parties or people over, the best we can do for music is to use a small Sony CD player/speaker system we’ve had for years. It does fine, but I always burn a CD and it plays the same 70 minutes of music all night. Believe it or not, people actually say “haven’t we heard this before.”
So what does Apple TV give me?
Method of playing music on my TV (which sounds pretty good). All my music is on a Mac Mini in the basement.
Way to play video podcasts on the big TV
Have music video versions of some of our music to be mixed with regular music. I’ve been paying $2 for a music video that comes with the song, or getting “bonus videos” with some songs.
Alternative way to watch TiVO programs from the basement TiVo on the big screen (using either Tivo2Go after a crippled low res conversion, or TiVoDecode
Watch movie trailers on the big screen so Eileen knows what to add to the Netflix queue
Some people complain about it not being 1080i (or p). This doesn’t bother me since my TV is only in the 720p range.
Other things I wish I could do with my Apple TV (even thought I don’t have it yet)…
On Scripting News, Dave writes what is perhaps the most profound thing I’ve ever read from him…
Empire of the Air: “There was a pivotal, electrifying moment in the story”
I’ve read his stuff for 8+ years, and this is good stuff. Nothing personal in it, just brilliant insight into the human condition and the power of the on-line medium we have before us.
There are a number of AOL blogs. What I find interesting is the various platforms each one picks. For individual employees, I simply note what they use to see if it is something I might look at (these are smart and clue-full people after). Obviously AOL has a couple of blogging platforms internally (AOL Journal and Blogsmith come to mind).
But this blog caught my eye: http://www.discoverfullviewblog.com/ To promote a major area of AOL (search), they are using Blogger, a property of Google. Since Google “enhances” AOL Search, that might seem fine, but I would have assumed the blog would be hosted on another platform. Something closer to AOL. Perhaps this is just proof of openness?
Maybe this is really someone’s personal blog and I misunderstood it as more “official AOL.”
Over on the ADO.NET team blog, they talk about Entity Data Models…
The intent with ADO.NET is more ambitious: We view the ORM problem as just one of a number of services we want to build on the database. Other services include reporting, synchronization, backup, and so on. In order to cover all of these services, we have designed a data model that is similar to the object-oriented idiom that programmers use, while remaining independent of any particular programming language or programming platform. This data model is the Entity Data Model (EDM).
This is all good stuff. I like annotations, but I also like this model approach. So much so I fell in love with it 10 years ago with NeXT’s Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF). I was amazed at how this article read just like a description of how EOModels work.
Perhaps this is me discovering something MS has been doing for many years, but not over a decade. One day I hope CoreData brings back multiuser support. Perhaps even with fully supported Ruby and Python binding (which will be near free in Leopard?).
A few weeks ago, Google’s personalized home page enhanced the display of RSS feeds. Normally just the title of the post is shown, and you have to click thru to the site to read the whole thing. They added a way to “open” a quick snippet of the entry, including the main link of the story.
For sites like Techmeme, I end up at Techmeme and 90+% of the time, I just click to the original story. Techmeme guides me to interesting stories, but requires a quick pitstop at their site.
The addition of the “+” enabled me to go direct to the page of interest, and bypass Techmeme. Today I noticed that the Techmeme feed doesn’t have the plusses. Other feeds still do.
Is it fair to assume that Techmeme complained? Probably. This plus probably dropped their traffic a bit. I now miss the feature, not because I hated going to Techmeme, but because I will miss the extra productivity (the pitstop usually adds 10-20 seconds each time).
[UPDATE: In the comments, Gabe says Techmeme didn't complain, and is fine with the sidestep. Good for Techmeme.] [UPDATE 2: The "+" is back. This return to normal. A technical glitch somewhere, or a quick change/change back? Who cares, I have my short-cut back]
[tags]google, techmeme[/tags]
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