MacCraic

I was listening to the podcast last night & realised I made a bit of a boo-boo when reviewing the 2.2 update. I made 2 minor omissions & 1 major one in my review which I’m correcting in this post. I apologise to our listeners for this frakk up (I’m a major Battlestar Galactica fan, what can I say) & will now offer up my thoughts on these omissions which should have been in the review.

Minor Omissions:

Use of Home Button: Under the 2.2 update you can now click on the home button which will bring you back to the first page of the “Springboard” (the screen you see with the icons like App Store,Safari etc. when you first boot up your iPhone/Touch). This is a very handy feature where you have a large number of apps over a number of pages (9 pages are the max you can have) on your iPhone/Touch & you need to get back to the 1st page.

Updating Applications: Under 2.1, when you normally  elect to update an application from the app store you are returned to the “Springboard”. From here the updated app package being downloaded appeared in an available space on it which then downloaded,installed which would then replace the old version of the app involved. Under 2.2, now when an update occurs it now less confusingly goes to where the app is located on the “Springboard” & overwrites it’s icon with the download & install progress bar & then the updated app & icon. Just a minor UI graphical update but a nice one all the same.

Major Omission:

Podcast Downloading: This was a huge omission on my part & it is also one of the major new features of iPhone/Touch 2.2 which I’m impressed with. You can now just like purchasing & downloading songs (with same graphical effects) from the iTunes Store, also browse & download podcasts which appears as a separate button under the iTunes app. You can also access this section if you have podcasts already downloaded, via your Music player app under the podcast section with the “get more episodes” link as per following screenshot:

As you may also notice if you’ve missed a number of podcasts then they appear in the order of least recent episode at the top & then current episode further down. An excellent move by Apple as I can’t count the no. of times I’ve gone to listen to a podcast, had 2+ episodes of it & played them out of order without realising it.

Also, unlike the previous OS updates in my experience, when you now play video podcasts under the music player app alongside audio podcasts it does’nt just play the audio but plays the video too by activating the Quicktime player which makes a lot of sense.

However, it should be noted that if you try to download podcasts via EDGE or 3G to your iPhone you will be limited to file sizes of 11MB max, which puts a no. of video podcasts out of reach for timebeing. If you use your Wi-fi function & are close to a hotspot this restriction will not apply.

Little Quirks that should be fixed in next release (2.3):

1-Even though the podcasts are in order of oldest on top & more recent underneath, this has not been carried over to the video player app which denotes Podcasts in the old manner as below with comparison to it’s corrected display under the music player in the 2nd screenshot:

2-When I played AAC formatted podcasts which contain chapter breaks under 2.1, I locked the screen & double tapped “home” button to activate basic controls & hit “>>|” (next button) so I could jump to the next chapter on a podcast. But under the 2.2 update, when I now do this after locking the screen it jumps to the end of the podcast as opposed to the next chapter (this happened while listening to the “MacCast” podcast) .

3- Why is the podcasts section limited to only the “what’s hot” category as per screenshots below:

Should’nt the functionality here be on a par with browsing under “genres” on the music section. I’m not sure whether this should just be a fix on the iTunes store servers when you first enter or an OS update, but either way the podcast functionality is being crippled compared to browsing via the iTunes desktop client.

Overall though, I like this update as stated in the podcast & it’s still light years ahead of any of the competition out there.

Keeping thinking different Apple & apologies to our listeners for my omission.

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Sorry folks, I made a bit of a boo-boo with the file for the podcast.   I broke the cardinal law of not checking something after you make a change.

I had uploaded the file and checked to see it was working.   Then I went back in and enabled stats on the podPress plugin and happily headed out for the day.  I was at a friends birthday party in The Church Bar on Mary Street last night and didn’t get in until 3:30am this morning.  I brought MacCraic.com up on my iPod Touch (why I don’t know call it cosmic intervention) and discovered that the feed was broken.   I was too tired to even think about why so I left it until this morning.

Everything seemed ok but I checked the super notes on the podPress wiki.   Fantastic help in there, especially for a noob (or should I say knob lol) like me.   It turns out that the enabling the stats feature can cause some feeds to break on some servers.   I guess mine is one of them.   Not really important as I can use Libsyn’s stats anyway.   So I turned it off and hey presto feed is back working.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this.   And a big thanks to shaznyc for contacting me and letting me know it was down.   I really appreciate that.   Beers are on me the next time I’m in the Big Apple.

On a side note we are hoping to do a quick show on Tuesday after the Keynote.   Here’s hoping there will be loads of new shiny things to talk about.

Take care all.

Justin

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