Do The Album Shuffle

It appears that I was wrong about one part of the iPod app on my new iPod Touch. The order of playlists is preserved. This means that, with great help of the intertubes, I was able to create an applescript that shuffles my albums in random order, but leaving the song order in tact. This applescript creates a playlist called Random, or if that exists, removes everything from it. It then takes the playlist "All Albums" and adds the albums for every song to a list. It skips the album if the album of the previous song had the same name. For this to work, the playlist has to be sorted on album of course. It then takes a random album and counts the number of songs on it and if there's more than one song in the album, it's added to the playlist.

If you're interested, you can find the script here.

Have fun,

Zaaf

Touch SDK outside the US?

Just a small blurb to complain to Apple about the availability of the iPhone developer program. Last week Apple released a mature set of tools to develop applications for their touch computers. It comes complete with a simulator and a remote debugger. The integration with Apples IDE XCode is seemless and within an hour after downloading the 2.1 GB package I had my own version of the obligatory Hello World program. Trying to run it on my iPod Touch however resulted in a compiler error stating that I do not have the required certificate.
It turns out that such a certificate will cost $99 and is only available to US residents after their application to enter the developer program is accepted by Apple. Hmmm, I really wanted to develop some silly apps like Memory and a Scientific Calculator, but now it seems that I have to wait seemingly indefinitely before running it outside the simulator.

Zaaf

Experience windows

I'm sitting in the train and sitting next to me is a man with a 17" widescreen HP laptop.He is currently reviewing a word document and as with almost all windows users word is opened full screen. However, the document is taking only half of the screen real estate leaving a lot unused. This makes me wonder why he bought such a widescreen laptop if he's using only half of it.

The default for macintosh and unix X11 apps is to opened in a windowed view. It always amazes me that Windows users feel obliged to use their apps fullscreen instead of having several windows open and semi overlapping. It is afterall called "Windows". Since it is somehow the default way of working, it must be something the way Windows is set-up that makes people work full screen.

So much for the Windows eXPerience,

Zaaf

Universal Touch

The iPhone sdk is out. This will make it possible for a whole host of developers to make Touch apps. These are all compiled for the arm6 architecture. Of course in the future everything will be better. Let's hope that the transition to a newer better processor like the intel atom will be only a push of a button in XCode. Hopefully, the way I would like Apple to implement it is by generating Universal (fat) binaries like we have on the Mac. Because of the space constraints on the touch devices however, it is unwanted to have the same program for multiple processor architectures on the devise. Here iTunes will have to step in and strip it to the native app before sending it the device.

We can always dream,

Zaaf

Hit me on my iPod!

Last Friday I bought myself an 32GB iPod Touch. My main plan is to use it as a calendar application which also can play video and audio. It's a great little gadget for almost everything and the more I use it, the more Iike it. Even the keyboard is not as bad as I was made to believe by keyboard junkies. case in point is this blog post which is typed entirely on the onscreen keyboard of the iPod. The only thing that I don't like is the iPod app. First off all it feels like a klunky app. And it doesn't shuffle albums. And it can only play songs in album order when the are started from an album. Even the order of playlists is changed to alphabetical. And lyrics are shown centred regardless of the formatting in iTunes. And podcast shownotes are not shown at all. And it is stupid that I have to unlock, select the audio app, select the "now playing" button and press "pause" before a song is paused. But apart from that, I really like it.

So for me the iPod Touch is a success except for the iPod part,

Zaaf

Bored

Who wouldn't be bored with such a car.

Yesterday, I took the family to the Muiderslot in Muiden and on the parking lot I noticed this car.

Looks like a very boring car indeed,

Zaaf