still early days

It’s fascinating to watch the emergence of the new pull based media network/platform. This week two media platforms reved up a version with new releases of iTunes and FireAnt. On the content front NerdTV’s first episode hit the pipes.

Nerd TV
The juicy bit is quite funny. It involves Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and the question of taste. Much is repeated from other talks with Andy Hertzfeld and I’m not sure the video adds that much more than the audio of the interview…but…the story concerning the first entry of software into the Computer History Museum is worth a listen. It involves Bill Atkinson, Donald Knuth and MacPaint.

iTunes
I have recently been using iTunes only to try and manage my podcasts. That’s as compared to using iPodder. On the plus side people like Make have been exploiting the full capabilities of the platform that Apple have created. So there has been videos and PDFs turning up on their channel. But the podcast audio is segregated from the ‘real’ library and ways of managing the retention of podcast audio is clunky and one size fits all. I was tempted to go back to iPodder and my homespun Python scripts but when iTunes 5.0 emerged I thought it would improve matters. I can report it has made things worse, now significant chunks of my podcasts I had lined up in my “Speech for the Gym” playlist have vanished. Haven’t had or got time to investigate any further for the next few weeks.

FireAnt- Media Clients
FireANt has another version and I’m going to dig in and use it a while to compare it with DTV. Both have similar features. DTV is open sourced and FireANT is not. FireANT can sync, including automatic transcoding of content prior being shipped across to the Sony PSP. Demo.

The biggest issue I have with both apps is the channel metaphor. Where it really falls down is when tasty single shot media is available, for instance the amazing short animation by Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel on the Trusted Computing Platform. Or take this French animation, Le Building – which reminds me equally of Delicatessen and Les Triplettes de Belleville. Both of these pieces took many many hours of work and they’re simply not going to being creating them each day/week to warrant them creating a channel.

I have some more thoughts on that but must put all such thoughts aside to concentrate on tasks at hand for a couple of weeks.