Ramblings of a Programmer

Apple has released their official specifications on what you need to do in order to publish your podcast in the iTunes Music Store. Dave Winer has more on his Really Simple Syndication site.

It appears that Apple's release of podcasts via the iTunes store has been more of a hit than people would have expected. I have not seen any numbers on the situation, but I have started to see some of my favorite podcasts like Apple News Log having to look for more bandwidth in otther places due to the unexpected increase in bandwidth usage.

The question now is whether or not Apple's release of podcasts via the iTunes store is going to have such a negative affect on some of the smaller podcasters that we will see some of the good podcasts disappear? I hope that is not the case.

To prevent such a matter, however, maybe people should start donating to some of their favorite podcasts to help with the bandwidth costs. If not, then we might start seeing the very thing on podcasts that we were trying to get away from on the radio… commercials!

Updated: Changed the article link that is pointed to on the Apple News Log.

I picked up iTunes 4.9 yesterday and started playing with it. The podcast support is pretty good at this point. The directory is coming online in the iTunes Store podcast area pretty nicely. Unfortunately, there are some issues that have disappointed me.

First, if you were subscribed to podcasts that are using BitTorrent feeds to save on bandwidth, you will have to keep a client like iPodderX or Azureus around to continue to pick up those feeds. From the Apple iTunes/Podcast FAQ:

What kind of podcasts can I play in iTunes?
You can listen to most common podcast file formats in iTunes, including MP3, AAC, WAV, and .M4B. BitTorrent and WMA are some podcast formats that are not supported.

This is very unfortunate. I was trying to use BitTorrent whenever I could to help podcasters on bandwidth. I guess it was a good thing that I recently registered iPodderX anyway.

The second issue that has me puzzled is why Apple did not include an “All” option in the new Podcasts section on the iPod. The way that it is setup now is that you go into Music->Podcasts and then select the podcast playlist that you want to listen to. When all of the podcasts in that playlist are finished, it returns back to the main menu. I would like to have the option to just play all of the podcasts so I can start it when I head out on a long road trip instead of having to fumble with the iPod to change playlists while driving.

Hopefully enough people will give feedback to Apple about these issues and they will put out an update with some tweaks.

Apple announced today that it is merging its iPod and iPod photo lines today. All future iPods will be white in color and have full color displays. The new iPods will even be able to display album art in color. There will be a 20 gig model going for $299 and a 60 gig model going for $399.

Out of nowhere, Apple also announced the availability of its new iTunes 4.9 software which includes support for podcasting. Podcasters should beware, because bandwidth useage is about to pick up.

Update: The iTunes 4.9 update and a new version of the iPod Updater software is available via Software Update.

Wow! This one caught me off guard. I can certainly expect something like this from a software company that is fighting against the big fish in the pond, but I did not expect something like this in the computer chip market. I wonder if this has anything to do with Apple’s decision to use Intel for their product line going forward?

Read the CNET News.com article for more information.

Eclipse.org released the latest version of the Eclipse development environment at JavaOne yesterday. Much of the excitement regarding Eclipse 3.1 centered on the Rich Client Platform upon which you can build very professional looking applications.

The Rich Client Platform has been greatly enhanced in this version of Eclipse. The system has improved performance, expanded tool support, bettery support for Java Web Start (JNLP), and Visual Editor support.

For more information and a podcast on the launch, check out this story on Between the Lines.

Many Mac owners have been wondering where the next version of Tiger is hiding. According to Think Secret, the previous build that was seeded to developers, 8C33, had bugs that had to be fixed before release. The 10.4.2 release is apparently going to have a new widget manager that integrates directly into the Dashboard and looks like a widget itself.

There is another article at AppleInsider regarding this same issue. According to the AppleInsider article, earlier builds of 10.4.2 had a Widget Installer that let you “test drive” widgets before you installed them. This sounds like a very useful feature if it remains in the final build.

I am not sure what exactly happened today at Blogger, but my mother emailed me asking about my blog and why the Blogroll was gone. I took a look and the template had reverted to the default and lost my changes at some point in the past 36 hours. It is fixed now.

Eclipse.org has also released the first release candidate for the CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) Project. This is an excellent plugin development environment for Eclipse that gives full C/C++ development and debugging capabilities. CDT 3.0 RC0 runs under Eclipse 3.1 M7 and later.

Eclipse.org has released the Eclipse 3.1 RC3 development environment for all platforms. The environment seems to be getting quicker and more stable with each RC release at this point.