Ramblings of a Programmer

Wharp-Whistle.com has a great article on the inefficiencies with the podcast interface in iTunes 4.9.

I mentioned Friday that I had just about had enough of iTunes 4.9 and its miserable podcast support. That is in fact the case now. As of tonight, I am back to using iPodderX for all my feeds. To quote Todd Cochrane from Geek News Central, the podcast support of iTunes 4.9 is “a little hokie”. Check out his first impressions of the podcast support in iTunes.

In my personal opinion, I believe Apple rushed this out the door. It was originally thought this was going to be out around the end of July and then all of a sudden, they came out with it this past week. I wish they had waited, gotten a bit of feedback from members of the podcasting and podcast consumer community before they just threw something out the door.

It is nice to have full control over the management of my podcasts again. Yea, they are not in the Podcasts area of the iPod, but no biggie. The Podcasts section of the iPod would not let me listen to them the way that I wanted to anyway. I want to be able to just start listening to podcasts now matter who they are from and not worry about having to switch a playlist.

Anyway… now if we could just get some feedback from the guys at iPodderX.com regarding their forums. Unfortunately, they have been down since the day that iTunes 4.9 was released last week.

I know that a lot of Mac enthusiasts might wonder what my deal is, but I have one Windows application that I just cannot live without… Microsoft Money. All of my finances for the past 10 years are tied up in Money, so it would be a real pain to try and mmove to a new program on the Mac.

After getting the Mac, I tend to not fire up my Windows laptop at home anymore. Because of this, I have been neglecting my accounts as of late. One thing that I had thought about was getting a utility that would allow me to run Money on the Mac. I just cannot bring myself to paying the money that Microsoft wants for Virtual PC just to run Money, however.

I need to look around and see if I can find any other utilities out there which might give me a virtual Windows machine on my Mac. Does anyone know of any good ones that would allow me to successfully run Money?

Unfortunately for me, and my iTunes library, I know just enough about AppleScript to be very dangerous. I recently updated to iTunes 4.9 on my Mac so that i could try out the podcasting support. I found that there were a few issues with the new podcast support on the iPod that I did not like.

So, I set out tonight to create an AppleScript that would duplicate the podcasts to a new playlist that I could then update genres on and play as a single playllist. To my horror, I have totally messed up my iTunes database as far as podcasts go.

I have one big mess of podcasts in a single playlist now and they are no longer in chronological order. Why did I ever do this? Because I am a programmer, a computer addict, and I cannot leave well enough alone. hahaha

It looks like I am probably going to go back to using iPodderX until Apple does some tweaking on iTunes to give us a little more control over how podcasts are managed in the iTunes database.

Have you ever been in a state where there was so much that you wanted to do in programming, yet you didn’t really want to do anything? I am at that point right now in my programming life. I have been jerked, pulled, and tossed around so much lately that I do not know which way is up.

In the past 3 months, I have been on and off projects that used Java, C++, C#, Delphi, and VB. It is like someone threw it all in a blender, turned it up on high, and out comes a lot of mush.

I have a personal project that I was really getting into when I was working with Java, but lately, I have been on a C++ kick. I got the Power Mac back in May and I want to do some programming in Objective-C and Cocoa for it, but that is just another ingredient to add to the mix.

I am not really sure what I want to do at this point. I just sit here at night now playing around in iTunes listening to various technical podcasts and I do not do any programming. I need a plan for something that I can stick to and finish. I guess I should just pick up the personal project again.

I just hope that I have not gotten into such a rut that I cannot get myself out of it.