July 2006 Archives

Elgato released a new version of EyeTV today. I’ve waited this 2.3 update very, very eagerly for the last couple of weeks — ever since Elgato revealed that it would contain a new, Front Row -like full screen interface.

A Mac mini is the primary television in our household, and we love the Front Row interface for watching DVDs and downloaded videos. Adding live television to the things accessible through this interface would be make it pure couch potato heaven — not least because of the Apple Remote’s awesome physical form factor and simple interface. So I checked the Elgato site almost daily in anticipation of the release.

Well, I wish I could say that my TV bliss fantasy has come true with EyeTV 2.3. It hasn’t. In fact, EyeTV and the new full screen menu are nearly unusable with the Apple Remote. Consider the key mapping Elgato has chosen:

• Menu: Launch the Full Screen Menu
• Up and Down: Volume Control
• Left and Right: Instant Replay, Back to Live TV
• Pause/Play: Pause/Play

That’s it. At this point, Elgato ran out of buttons. Can’t really blame them — the Apple Remote only has those six. Luckily, the situation was not as dire as it seemed: the Elgato engineers figured out a way to overload the left and right buttons by making a distinction between holding down the buttons and clicking them.

So, they now could add two more features onto the remote. Personally, I would’ve gone with the ability to switch channels, but Elgato didn’t see it that way: rewind and fast forward were more crucial. For the rare event of having to switch channels, you could always launch the full screen menu and choose the new channel from there.

I have all sorts of other little EyeTV quirks I could mention, but this one is pretty illustrative. The bottom line is that EyeTV is about 90% awesome, but they cannot ever seem to get the last 10% right. They need help.

Apple, in the last quarterly results conference call you mentioned something about having over $9 billion cash money in the bank. How about using it to complete the Front Row solution by acquiring this little Munich company that almost could?

Scoble on the iPod killer:

…it’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft has a wifi exclusive for very long. If Apple lets Microsoft have that for more than a month you’ll see people saying that Apple is dying again. … I’d take a 30GB player with Wifi over a 60GB player without any day of the week. Why? Cause I hate wires.

I hear this comment about wireless media players very often, and every time it’s just as silly. How many wires do you need with an iPod? One. How many wires will you need with the Microsoft player? One, because they haven’t invented wireless power yet.

How very, very disappointing. Someone has made, and MacUpdate chosen to publicize and distribute “Acquisition Block,” a crack to Acquisition, David Watanabe’s excellent Mac client for Gnutella and BitTorrent.

As a fellow Mac software developer and an Acquisition customer, I have to say that this is a low point for MacUpdate. When I mentioned i use this a while back, I was so impressed that I vowed to give up on MacUpdate/VersionTracker altogether at some point. I guess that day just arrived.

i use this rocks. Once it gains some momentum, I can see myself abandoning MacUpdate and VersionTracker altogether. It’s much better to have a count of users than to rely on ratings — almost nobody bothers to write a review, but a single click indicating usage is a different story. So, go on, give Pyro and Knox some love!

There was a nice bump in Knox sales during the last few days, and Google Analytics found the culprit: Jon Hannibal Stokes of Ars Technica told his audience that

Personally, I’m using Knox for making encrypted backups to my iPod and NAS box. I mount a secure vault and back up to it with my backup tool of choice, Chronosync. Knox itself then handles backing up the image to the iPod when I dock it, and Chronosync backs up the image to the NAS on a weekly basis.

That illustrates what I think is one of the coolest features of Knox: you can set Knox to backup a vault onto an iPod whenever the iPod is docked, rather than just at a specified interval with a “Please connect your iPod now for the scheduled backup” nag screen. Assuming you sync your iPod regularly, it’s a great, hassle-free way of ensuring that your backup stays up-to-date (and often on your person).

But one commentator didn’t get it:

I’m not getting what Knox actually gives you that you can’t do with disk utility. It’s just a different interface to create an encrypted sparseimage, right?

Given that Hannibal just explicitly detailed his Knox usage, this comment seems completely nonsensical. What Knox gives you? Jon says it right there! But it illustrates something we’ve learned about Knox sales: that it’s hard to change preconceptions once you’ve let them form.

When we released Knox 1.0 in April 2005, the site wasn’t very up front about Knox using the OS’s built-in encrypted disk images to do the encryption (now it is). What happened, inevitably, was that once the techies figured it out, they felt that they had uncovered Knox’s secret and wrote the app off as a “command-line tool wrapper” rip-off.

Had we been more up front about this in the beginning, those techies would have been forced to look beyond the encryption to the actual value-adds we provide: the management UI and the backup features. Now, they didn’t get that far, which is why we see the same knee-jerk reactions wherever Knox is mentioned.

When Knox 2.0 comes out, this audience will be forced to take another look, and what they’ll see is something that is not possible with any other app or OS tool. So, stay tuned…

New MacBook Pro logic board. We’ve been waiting for the right moment to send our two MBPs in for repair because of various problems — I guess this is it. Incidentally, our black MacBook is also being repaired. Its keyboard and trackpad suddenly died.

TEDTalks. Each one is a must see. Go for the iTunes subscription — the quality beats the Flash streams hands down.