Ian Landsman

Rather than a full on review, I thought I'd just do a pictorial for all you poor souls out there who don't have iTunes installed :-)

Overall I think the podcasting integration is great. Much better than any of the iPodders right out of the box. It uses the Music Store interface so everyone will already understand how to use it. The only downside is that there doesn't seem to be a way to see the RSS feed URL until you subscribe, though that's minor and I can see why they left it out. Browsing is ridiculously easy and since it's the Music Store there's rankings for most popular and so on.

Some of the poor featured sites on the homepage are going to get slammed. I could see sites pulling themselves from the directory, because their bandwidth costs are going to be huge. Apple should really create a way (I think they are) that podcasts can charge using the Music Store technology. Even if you just charged each subscriber 99 cents a year it would probably be enough to help a popular show out. Also alot of folks would buy, since it would be as easy as pushing a button just like you already do for music. Anyway, here we go:

Click on images for larger version if available

The Podcasts link appears directly below the library link as the second link in the navigation. This was a huge decision for them. They could have buried it below the other main navigation or even below your playlists, but instead it gets top billing. Even higher than the Music Store link.

Here's the Podcast directory within the iTunes Music Store. Some type of new Adam Curry show is at the top. It might be the Sirius show reformatted, not sure. List of most popular on the right. Highlighted shows in the center.

When you subscribe to a show this is where it goes. It immediately starts to download the show.

Here's the show open, showing the shows. My prefs tell it to only download the latest show but it still allows you to individually download the others.

iTunes shows you what you've already listened to and/or currently listening to.

Clicking on the show information seems to be the only way to find out the original RSS feed.

Very simple and functional prefs pane.

That's it! Too much work to do for any more screenshots. I suggest you download 4.9 and check it out yourself!

" This sounds interesting. So now developers of RSS readers that want to consume podcasts have to know how to consume the RSS 2.0 element, Yahoo!'s extensions to RSS and Apple's extensions to RSS to make sure they cover all the bases. Similarly publishers of podcasts also have to figure out which ones they want to publish as well." [Dare]

• Interesting insights by Dare, I guess as a aggregator developer he gets to think about these things alot. As more Big Co's embrace RSS and add their own namespaced elements you have to wonder if it will turn into a mess even larger than RSS vs ATOM. Right now nobody has really added anything critical but you can almost see it coming where Microsoft and Apple release competing specs for the same functionality and off you go into the murky land of multiple formats.
  

"So, my goal for the normally slower summer months, is to make sure I get plenty of face time with users, especially the ones who have come in new this year. I've already discovered some mis-training that some of them got from more experienced staff members, and gotten that corrected, so the effort has already paid off!" [Life of a one-man IT department]

Important stuff for any of you IT folks out there. I've worked with a bunch of great IT people as well as a bunch of terrible IT people. This may come as a shock to some, but technical knowledge has little to do with how other members of the staff perceive your job performance. If you can't or won't talk to your users nobody is going to like working with you even if you do regularly supply patches to the linux core. It's all about users (baby, yeah)!

Trend Junkie is doing some neato podcasting stuff. His latests is coverage of a party in Times Square NYC for Pontiac.

"By the time she returned, Nathan flipped his applesauce cup over, and had spread applesauce on the entire tray of his highchair, on his arms and even worked some into his hair"

The Applesauce Boy

-Funny

Ian Jones is documenting the path to his new logo. Looking forward to part 2 "the reveal". Nice job Ian. My all time biggest hit post was the one about my logo design. It still gets hundreds of views a day, not to mention the fact that it's given my designer a nice bit of business as well.

I also love Ian's idea of building a small app that builds on the success of another ISV hit, FogBugz.

More good stuff from the gapingvoid

"Does your product have the "I was there" factor?"

"The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that local governments may seize people's homes and businesses -- even against their will -- for private economic development.

It was a decision fraught with huge implications for a country with many areas, particularly the rapidly growing urban and suburban areas, facing countervailing pressures of development and property ownership rights.

The 5-4 ruling represented a defeat for some Connecticut residents whose homes are slated for destruction to make room for an office complex. They argued that cities have no right to take their land except for projects with a clear public use, such as roads or schools, or to revitalize blighted areas.

As a result, cities have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes to generate tax revenue."

• Umm. More than a little scary, it borders on unbelievable. Especially for those of us in areas where land is short and prices are high. I can imagine Toll Brothers making their case now why my house would make a great place for them to build a new swath of million dollar homes (hence a higher assessment -> increase tax revenues).

I love progress, development, Wal-Mart and so on. Go tear down those old burned out buildings or use that land with the old factory on it, but to steal peoples homes?

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/23/scotus.property.ap/index.html

I'm desperate for a good charting library for PHP. Anyone know of one? Graphs are a big part of HelpSpot and right now I'm planning on going with a very nice flash component I've used before, but only because I can't find a decent image generation library. I would prefer images because if people want to use the charts in presentations, shove them in a Word doc, etc then an image makes that easy. A flash graph makes that impossible. However, that said I'm not willing to sacrifice the quality of the graphs. They must look really good! So this is my last ditch attempt to find a nice PHP library for building graphs.

Before commenting let me throw out a few things here.

1. The images must be of this quality: http://www.dotnetcharting.com/

2. I don't want to use JpGraph: http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/. The images are not high enough quality. Also the library has two different versions for PHP4 and PHP5 and both are pretty sizable. I can't/won't ship both with HelpSpot. I realize this is the dominant charting component for PHP so I may just be screwed.

3. I can't/won't increase the server side requirements to make this work. So it must be pure PHP or if there is a compiled server side component it must work cross platform (win, osx, linux, unix).

Any ideas?

Great great post about making usable PowerPoint presentations. I agree with every single word of this. I used to do training sessions on building PowerPoints at my previous job. It's amazing how many people don't understand that they are the presentation, not the slides. Read this and learn!

I also agree with the bit about KeyNote as well. What a great program.