Ipod Touch

Today I tried to unblock the ipod touch and it froze the first time and started to heat up and the second time the screen went to black. I thought on two occasions that my ipod was bricked. I’ve been able to re-install everything and am now syncing the content back onto the device. For the first attempt the device was plugged into the computer and whilst I did see the install app on the screen the display would stop responding. Whether this is due to weak wifi or an incompatibility I’m not sure. On the second attempt the hack didn’t work and went so far as for the display to cease working. I tried re-starting it with the button and nothing changed. As I plugged it back into the laptop it detected that something was happening and so I was able to restore the ipod. In summary I’m not going to try that again with my own ipod. I’ll wait until February when they’ll allow third party apps to be included.

Today whilst surfing through the webapps I found one that’s great for what I do, share video content via the web. I found Vtap, a video sharing website that allows you to search through, select and stream videos straight through to your iphone or Ipod touch without either converting it to an ipod compatible format or using the youtube website.

For certain videos it gave me a feedreader rather than playing the videos but for those that are already indexed it works well. It’s definitely worth a try and it’s a taste of the future.

There was a time when you would wake up and it’s only half an hour later that the world around you would be clearly visible. In today’s web 2.0 world you wake up and twenty other people are wishing each other good morning. Many are celebrating that it’ Friday and others have pathetic status messages about 40 days of celibacy, about being overworked and all those other messages. Of course everyone has the right to their feelings and to their own experiences but as certain individuals spend more and more time online they notice these status messages and trends and get really tired. Look at the level of media saturation about the McCann story. I muted a podcast for mentioning the story. Careless parents lost their daughter, end of story. It’s not worth as much airtime as it’s been given. Then there’s the “back from the dead media coverage” that gets just as tiring. If a royal driving a car doesn’t wear her seat belt and dies as a result of a crash then she should not be idolised in the way people have done. It should have been an opportunity to promote the use of seatbelts to avoid repeat deaths in such a manner. Then there’s the enthusiast’s oversaturation of the media. In particular I’m thinking of the Iphone. Of course it’s a beautiful new interface, of course it’s ushered in the fully screen tactile device but for anyone outside the US the media saturation has become too much. If you’re an active consumer of new media news then there’s a good chance you would have read several thousand articles boasting about how great it was. As a result a lot of people got media burn out from the story. It’s only as a result of getting an ipod touch that I can tolerate those stories once more. The 30 minute news round up in the evening preceeded by the daily newspaper has been followed by an era of instant access to news stories once they have been written. What this means is that for ardent consumers of new media it is easy to reach a burn out/saturation point. we, as new media consumers must be careful not to read about single topics so much that we are unable to hear about specific topics anymore.

Whilst listening to Macbreak weekly I heard about Editgrid, a web based spreadsheet that resembles many others with a difference. It’s optimised for the Iphone if you go to iphone.editgrid.com. It’s an interesting implementation which can as easily be edited online as offline. This is great for those that may need quick access to a spreadsheet without the weight of a laptop at the same time. It’s a simple to use application which doesn’t take a long time to sign up to and gives you flexibility. There is one major disadvantage. It’s hard to select a cell to add data and inputing date by hunt and peck is very slow. I’d therefore recommend using it as a tool for referencing rather than data entry. See if your views differ from mine.