Chicken2nite's Profile

  • Jan 07, 2008
  • 79
  • 1

Latest comments made by: Chicken2nite

  • As a Winnipegger, I balk at your New England weather. Minus 6 C indeed. And I just looked at the specs on the iPhone, apparently the operating temperature is 0 to 35 C, non operating temperature -20 to 45 C. I find that hilarious, considering it was -30 or colder for a two week period back in February or so. I suppose if you keep it in your pocket, it won't get too cold, but it's something to keep in mind.
    Chicken2nite had this to say on Dec 06, 2007 Posts: 79
    iPhone Bytes
  • I don't mind so much about email as I do about a handful of other functions lacking in both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The main one would be TextEdit. Is there any more basic a bloody function as the ability for a computer to accept and save text? If they had TextEdit, you could compose your email in advance of getting to the wifi hotspot. That is, if the iPhone/iPod Touch had the other big feature, the ability to copy and paste text. I mean sure, I could just depend on Gmail and Google docs to compose those sorts of things, but that requires access to the internet. The fact that the iPhone/iPod touch are one big input device would lead you to assume that it would allow you to input this sort of thing when neccessary, perhaps a stickies app or something. Again, Text Edit is the killer app.
    Chicken2nite had this to say on Sep 14, 2007 Posts: 79
    Why No Fries with the iPod touch?
  • I would say that they need to revamp podcasting in terms of how you organize them, or rather the lack of organizational features for podcasts. I'd like to be able to organize them by content rather than simply in alphabetical order. As it stands, once you have more than a handful of podcasts it gets to be quite the mess. If they would just let you have folders in the podcasting section to better organize them, I would be happy. Larry King and Meet the Press could go with my CBC podcasts and TWIT and TWIM could go with Cranky Geeks. As it stands it's a jungle out there.
  • oh snap. wrong article
    Chicken2nite had this to say on Jul 12, 2007 Posts: 79
    Airport Extreme N - The New Hotness
  • Linux not user-friendly? One word: Openmoko. I'm not sure if it's been mentioned by this site, but it certainly deserves to be considering the number of iPhone articles you've put out. Openmoko has the same sort of touch screen interface like the iPhone (no buttons) but it has the benefit of being open source, which allows third parties to develop software for it, like say, a Skype app. The only way for Apple to include such a function is to clear it with AT&T, which will probably happen sometime in the next 12 months I suppose, what with the T-Mobile announcement of WiFi enabled phones with free talking in hotspots.
    Chicken2nite had this to say on Jul 12, 2007 Posts: 79
    Airport Extreme N - The New Hotness
  • Well, I don't think that for typical programming usage you would necessarily need the power of the next generation of the iMac (which most likely would include a quad core processor IMO) so perhaps it wouldn't matter, but it would most definitely be a step up and would be a nice computer for all those people sitting on a G4/G5. Still, a 24" iMac would be pretty sweet regardless.
    Chicken2nite had this to say on May 09, 2007 Posts: 79
    AAM: When Should I Buy?
  • Well I'm just going to say that the console I've been playing the most lately has been the DS, which happens to be a very underpowered system with about the same level of graphical abilities as the Nintendo 64 (with games being no more than twice the size of the largest N64 cartridges). In other words, ten year old tech. The success of the DS is in part because developers want to program for it, whereas the PSP is in the same sort of boat as the Gamecube where most third party support come in the form of ports from the PS2. Apple has never been one to cultivate third party support when it comes to gaming. EA outsources the job of porting over the most popular PC games from their library to other companies, much like most other game publishers. With the iPod games, third party developers were shut out of the process while Apple invited a select group of developers to port over a handful of games to their new platform. My point is that Apple would easily be able to make the Apple TV into a viable gaming platform if they were A: successful at building a decent marketshare B: opened up iTunes to allow for third party developers to make a game on the cheap and sell it to recoup those costs. It's kind of funny to think that the best game on the Xbox 360 last year was Geometry Wars and the best game on the PSP was Lumines.
    Chicken2nite had this to say on Apr 15, 2007 Posts: 79
    Why Apple Will Never Make A Game Console
  • Smaran, I'm assuming you're responding to the concept of the whole video encoder thing. In which case, "implementing" an open source multi platform app to run on Democracy be it on an Intel or PPC based computer would be as simple as "implementing" VLC, IF such a program existed. There are shareware and freeware apps available that will allow you to do this sort of thing, but they are either only for a particular platform (guess which OS WinAVI works on?) or they have a price attached to the full version, something that would be incompatible with Democracy which is open source freeware. So if someone were to create an open source encoder akin to how VLC is maintained, then Democracy can step in and do this, otherwise you would have to depend on another application to perform such a function. I'm pretty sure there's an OS X app that will convert a video to play on video iPods an PSP's, but it costs money to encode a video longer than 2 minutes or something like that.
    Chicken2nite had this to say on Feb 28, 2007 Posts: 79
    Democracy Player: Internet TV
  • to be able to export videos from Democracy to the 5th Gen iPods or other video player, they would need to include a video encoder within the program (perhaps an open source app like VLC which could then be integrated, although it might be difficult to do that cross-platform) which could change DivX or Mpeg-1 to Mpeg4 video, or whichever format was supported by your hand-held of choice. As for the set top box issue, I would say that by fixing up the interface it could function better in a number of ways, since the column on the left can tend to get overcrowded and unmanagable when you subscribe to too many feeds (much like how itunes gets with podcasts). If there was a way in which you could further organize your subscribed feeds into relevance (by say putting Democracy Now with EyesOnFox and NBC's Meet The Press while having TWiT, TWiM and Cranky Geeks grouped together) then both iTunes and Democracy would become quite a bit more useable. I'm actually surprised at how little in the Podcast section of iTunes has changed since it was introduced. Hopefully with some competition from Democracy Apple will take the hint and refine the interface themselves. With Smart Folders being offered for music, it just boggles my head that you can't do the same with podcasts.
    Chicken2nite had this to say on Feb 28, 2007 Posts: 79
    Democracy Player: Internet TV
  • If I were to guess I'd say that they're holding off on Leopard and iLife to coincide with the launch of quad core processors in the iMac and Mac Pro (something they'd have to do nearly simultaneously to prevent the two lines from being nearly on par with one another). One of the problems with adding more and more processor cores is that it has less and less of an effect in real world terms unless the application is designed to utilize the extra power. Leopard would need to have this built in for it to be the OS that is the back bone for the near future of the Mac line as more and more Macs have more and more cores. iMovie as well would be an app that demand this sort of optimization if they wanted to have it be a real step up from last year's product.
    Chicken2nite had this to say on Jan 13, 2007 Posts: 79
    The iPhone is Great But What About The Rest?
  • The fact that they left out any announcement of iLife or iWork '07 seems kind of odd, but I suppose they're holding out to make it run native in Leopard when that gets released. Makes sense I guess.
    Chicken2nite had this to say on Jan 11, 2007 Posts: 79
    iPhone Reaction: Slick but Unwanted?
  • Apple is developing their own standard with the iphone. They don't need everyone to buy it, they just need to develop a reputation for it as a quality product, so that over the coming years as the price goes down and it becomes affordable to more and more people, they would choose the Apple experience over competing products with their crippled features. If I were to guess, the next compelling upgrade for the desktops would be quad core processors, which aren't quite ready yet I would assume. I'm not sure how they'll be doing it, since if they were to update the iMac before the Mac Pro, they could cripple Mac Pro sales as the cheaper product would have an equal number of cores. Meanwhile there might not be a compelling change in power capabilities when switching up to 4 or 8 cores (which is what the AMD camp has been saying, that this is the new Gigahertz race) so they might be holding off on the hardware upgrade until they can properly integrate it with the coming Leopard, so that any new hardware would be optimized for the new software.
    Chicken2nite had this to say on Jan 11, 2007 Posts: 79
    iPhone Reaction: Slick but Unwanted?
  • I'm guessing they'll be saving the wide screen ipod video with a hdd so that they could bundle in other features with it, perhaps turning that into the Newton with PDA and WiFi features. I could see them coming out with a "low end" iphone in a few years with essentially the same specs as the iphone they announced today (in typical apple fashion, as last year's powerbook was this year's ibook). One design feature that could be nice is if they were to make it a clamshell with a click wheel on the outside, but of course I'm only guessing at this point. It'd be nice if they were to allow for video capture with that 2 mega-pixel camera though.
    Chicken2nite had this to say on Jan 09, 2007 Posts: 79
    iPhone Reaction: Slick but Unwanted?
  • aha. After a little digging, I found the app that I had heard about months ago. It's called Connect360 and it tricks the xbox into thinking your mac is a Media Center Windows machine. The catch is you would need to convert your files into WMV and WMA to get video to play, something you would need Flip4Mac to do.
  • What pisses me off is that Microsoft only allows you to sync with the xbox 360 if you have a Windows Media Center Edition PC, which is total bs. They have the number one operating system and (so far) the number one next gen console, and if they would just open it up a little bit then could have great integration, but instead they are compartmentalizing the market, similar to what they did with the Zune by ignoring PlaysForSure. Honestly I'd love to see Google come out with a set top box, keeping the price down either through selling it at a loss or leaving out high definition video (since both YouTube and Google Video don't support more than blown up 320x240). That way they could strike a deal with the content creators to distribute their content and give them a cut of the ad revenue. It could be a no hassle on demand service, where all you would need is the box and a net connection. My hope would be that some developer make something akin to the Xbox Media Center which could be installed on a hacked Xbox, where you can view DivX videos and the like, except do it for the PS3 and include as many codecs and file formats as possible. That's the sort of thing which would make that system worth buying IMO, but now I'm just repeating myself some more.