Life is grand

Viddler has this neat way of showing you tags and comments in a timeline along the bottom of the video. So if 3 minutes and 21 seconds into the video the video mentions flying spaghetti monster then you can tag that point in time. That tag is text and therefore searchable as well as being linkable. Comments work pretty much the same way. Neat idea.

That is where I work, at the TSSG. Lovely, isn’t it?

Ja boet, don’t rock the weber, alright.

(Apparently we are allowed to blog about Joost, just no screenshots as of yet. If I got that wrong then tell me and I’ll yank this down.)

I got a beta invite to try Joost out today and was pretty stoked. Finaly, I’d get to see what the hype was about.

I downloaded the 9mb file to a Windows XP VM in Parallels on Mac OS X. The installation was pretty good, even doing a system requirements check which the VM passed. The app installed but when I tried to run it it said it could not access the 3D hardware. Fair enough, nothing can do that in Parallels yet.

So I booted into Windows Vista Ultimate, downloaded it again and installed it. Running it though gave me a nice big error message. Fair enough I guess, it does say Windows XP with SP2 only (though there are apparently ways of getting Joost to work on Vista. I am just not going to bollocks about with that.)

So I grabbed my girlfriend’s laptop which had Windows XP SP2, installed the app and… you guessed it, it didn’t work. No dedicated 3D hardware in her work laptop. OK.

So I grabbed her other laptop, an Acer with a 256mb 3D graphics card. It installed and to my delight it ran. The screen went dark and then the strange but oddly cool Joost crystals whirled about the screen. Pretty.

I like the interface, clean and simple though I do worry about the average computer user being able to figure it out. Some of the icons are not intuitive.

So, what about the video?

It didn’t work.

I could list the channels, view the item entries, see the thumbnails, do searches, install plugins, check out the chat forums and everything else, except watch video. Sometimes Joost would tell me it couldn’t load the video but most of the time the crystals just whirred and nothing played.

Is my home broadband not fast enough? Joost says it will average about 320mb per hour download and 120mb upload per hour. I’ve downloaded 1gig files in about 45minutes and uploaded a few hundred mb in an hour.

I suspect something is up with the bandwidth but I wish Joost was a bit more informative about what was happening.

I’ll find a Windows XP machine at work (which has mega-bandwidth) tomorrow and see if it works better.

I am really happy as Earth Shots has included one of my photos in their 100 Days of Earth Shots video slide-show.

To be honest my photo pales in comparison to many of the photos in the list. Here is mine:

Scoble got a bit upset today about people not linking to him. My humble opinion, and one that perhaps only pertains to me, is that video is rarely the best way to initially present information. Scoble had a video about Intel’s plant and their new chips but after waiting 5 minutes for it to load and then getting through all the introductory bits I closed the window and went in search of the New York Times article instead. A minute later I had found it and read most of it, skimming the paragraphs that were not interesting to me and focusing in on the ones that mattered.

Scoble’s video, at 40 minutes long for part 1, is a good piece of content but frankly I am just not interested in sitting through 40 minutes of CPU talk. It isn’t for me and I doubt it is for most of Engadgets readers either. Those who do want more detail and some looks inside the Intel plant can watch the video, no problem.

Sadly Scoble’s love of video has been why I have switched off to him. It takes far too long to get any information out of him these days.

Scoble can air his opinions on his blog and Engadget are free to link to whom they please. No demands, no rights, no expected behavouir.

Before the internet there were just two inevitabilities; death and taxes.

Now we have a third; spam.

Le Grand Content

Yes, more iPhone coverage. This time a FAQ from David Pogue who got to play with it; The Ultimate iPhone FAQ.

Here are the ones that caught my eye:

• Can it run Mac OS X programs? –No.
• Can I add new programs to it? –No.
• Does it connect to iChat? –No.
• Does it get onto the HSDPA (3G) high-speed Internet network that Cingular has rolled out in a few cities? –No. But Steve Jobs said a later version of the iPhone will — once there’s enough HSDPA coverage in this country to justify it.
• Does the Web browser support Flash or Java? –No. (No Flash! That bites.)
• Can it open Word and Excel documents? –No.
• Does it connect to standard iPod accessories like car docks and speaker systems? –Yes!
• Will it sync with Outlook? –No.
• Won’t the screen get smudgy? –It does, but you don’t see it except when the screen is off. The one I played with was pretty streaky, but wiping it on my sleeve cleaned it completely.

And a good video of the iPhone:

Just been reading two reviews of Microsoft’s Zune player and while it isn’t terrible it isn’t going to convert any iPod users or be an iPod killer in the stores.

The NYT review[^] is a bit biased IMO (I own an iPod too but jeez author, get a life) but it brings up some frankly weird points about the Zune:

1. The Zune has WiFi, fantastic. Except you can only use it to send songs to other Zunes. You can’t connect to a PC, network or any other WiFi device. WTF?
2. You can’t use it as an external HD. Sorry folks, no USB drive in Explorer for the Zune. WTF?
3. The screen is bigger. Except it has the same resolution as an iPod.
4. Real world testing shows poorer battery life than an equivalent iPod (two hours less.) And yet the Zune is bigger and heavier.
5. No podcast support from what I can tell. Crikey.
6. Songs are $0.99 but you have to buy credit bundles of $5 or more.
7. Songs are listed as costing 79 “points” which sounds cool except 79 points will cost you $0.99. Now that is marketing.
8. The software media player is seemingly a stripped down Windows Media Player. You can’t use WMP with your Zune.
9. Getting all your existing music onto a Zune is a long conversion process if it works at all.

The other review[^].

It seems OK but nothing to rush out for.

Birds