Category: Review

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Review Websites

Podcaster.fm: the best iphone podcatcher

Podcaster.fm is a iphone optimized website that aggregates a tonne of popular podcasts, so you don’t have to. Basically, it gives you a very iPhone friendly interface for finding and listening to podcasts.

A common complaint of cranky geeks everywhere, is the iPhone’s inability to sync with iTunes over the air. With podcaster.fm – as long as I’m planning on staying in 3G range – I don’t think I’ll ever worry about syncing my podcasts again. We’ll see.

The first time I used the site I accidentally discovered that when you load an mp3 file directly from a website iPhone’s version of quicktime actually continues to run in the background! I’m not sure if it’s a bug or a feature, but I like it!

The only thing I don’t like about the website is the interface. Switching between pages is really quirky. I don’t know exactly how to describe it… it’s kind of like the destination page loads twice. The navigation itself could be improved somewhat, it’s 4 or 5 taps to find and play a podcast, that’s 2 taps too many.

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Culture Review

Revision 3: Live Streaming Has A Long Way To Go

I tried to watch a live stream of Revision 3’s Tekzilla yesterday, at revision3.com/watch.

It was absolutely painful!

I was under the impression that Tekzilla was going to a Live format. To my dismay, they were simply broadcast the recording of Tekzilla. This meant getting to see Patrick Norton, redo portions of the show, over and over and over and over again; and other tedious “behind the scenes” stuff.

Maybe this is just a baby step, testing the waters of their streaming infrastructure. But they’ve certainly got a long way to go before they’re on par with the old TSS.

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Links Review

RBC Muffin Man Ad

This ad is seriously more complex than some full length movies I’ve seen. It’s totally amazing.

More info about the ad

Production Company’s Site

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Review

iPhone After 3 Weeks

Data & Rogers
I’ve been using significantly less data than I anticipated. After three weeks I’m just under 100MB total usage. I attribute this partially to: being in The States last weekend; staying within wifi range a lot; and mainly Rogers’ terrible 3G network. The network in Winnipeg is not very good (It’s currently been down for 2 days). I ran a couple of speed test – with full reception, in a stationary position – I was only able to get  200 – 400kbps. More often then not loading extremely light-weight pages, like google or wikipedia results is nearly impossible. Using any sort of streaming is out of the question.

As I mentioned earlier, I think the poor quality of their 3G network might have been one of the main reasons Rogers was so hesitant to offer unlimited data plans. Until now, I don’t think Rogers has been treating their wireless data service as a serious consumer product.

Apps
If it wasn’t for the iTunes App Store I would have jailbroken my iPhone by now. We’re finally starting to see some interesting apps bubble to the top.
Twinkle is great! Twitter + location = pretty genius.
Dynolicious, looks like a pretty intense car performance meter. With the ability to generate, graph and store stats like 0-60, lateral Gs, Horsepower, it’s probably worth the $12.99. I drive a Yaris, so it’s kind of pointless for me. It would be pretty hillarious to take on a plane (GPS and accelerometer still work in flight mode).
Starting to see some good free games as well. I’ve been playing BreakClassic, Moonlight Mahjong Lite and Jawbreaker…Wonder if there’s a minesweeper clone.
The facebook app is still great – I think they came out with a 1.1 release since my first post. You can now view all user data.

[if someone knows how to link to the iTunes Store, please leave a  comment]

Syncing
Ok seriously, why does syncing take over an hour?!
When iTunes does it’s once a day iPhone Backup it takes me at least an hour and a half to sync. And I can’t seem to stop the backup process.

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Review Websites

Cuil Sucks

Ok. Cool…er Cuil. You’re not going to be a legitimate search engine until you strip raw HTML from your search results.