Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• What exactly is an iPhone application?

  Scoble mentions 3 new iPhone apps today from Newsgator, Bloglines, and Google. It's interesting that companies keep saying they are doing "iPhone development", when really these are nothing more than sites skinned to look more natural on the iPhone. The iPhone is the only mobile phone that gets special versions made for it, which is especially curious to me considering one of its big selling points is the full-featured Safari and a better browsing experience in general. My initial take is that these companies are just trying to ride the coattails of the amazing iPhone marketing. Mashable says "NewsGator hasn’t been so hyped in recent months, and all I ever hear about is Google Reader." Is it just an easy press release when you have nothing else interesting to announce? Or do these special versions really make a difference? (I don't have an iPhone... so isn't an entirely rhetorical question). Posted Jul 24 2007, 10:28 PM by Tim with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Rants, Gadgets, Things that amuse me, Marketing, Apple, Programming

• Podcast support in Windows Media Player 11

  There is one other issue I need to deal with before I can totally switch to Windows Media Player 11 - podcast support. Microsoft made the head-scratching decision not to include native podcast support - one area where iTunes really excelled. Someone wrote a plugin over the summer , but it doesn't work in WMP 11 and Vista and he's not maintaining it right now . There are countless other third party aggregators (Doppler is an old favorite), but I need to spend some time figuring it all out. My key requirements are: Automatic downloads (no manual intervention) Synchronization to the device (at most 1 click, preferably none) Removal of old podcasts (preferably removed from the device after they've been listened to, but I'll accept support for the last, say, 3 episodes - as long as Steve Gillmor doesn't break CalacanisCast into 17 parts). For those of you not using iTunes, how are you managing your subscriptions? Note: I'll update this post over time as I refine the strategy. Posted Dec 28 2006, 02:56 PM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Rants, Gadgets, Music, Blogging, Apple, Audio, Podcast