Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Hulu Site Updates Shows Promise

Hulu has made some adjustments to the website. A buffer meter was added so people stop wasting their time trying to load an entire episode. And a fullscreen button for the pop out window.
Frankly the pop out window can be used to navigate through everything as long as you have a search term to find it. The real benefits of switching to full screen, even when you can maximize a window is that often times fullscreen means full attention by the processor. That means a clearer picture and proper frame rate.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Internet Radio Search Engine

When will Google grab this plum. The media on the internet is far to scattered. We need to make a website that runs like surfthechannel but for internet radio. A database containing user entered data that logs the title, the most direct link to the station, the format of the streaming file and what player is required. Plus, a whole bunch of other things like ratings and comments and many other extras could be slapped on.

Dealing with adult content I think should be avoided for this site, maybe a seperate site for the dirty stuff if at all. Personal radio stations and things like pandora or last.fm should definately be allowed. The same principal of linking directly to the content provider should be maintained just like surfthechannel.

Personalization of the site should also be avoided as that is to provide a service to the user which is best left to big companies that can afford to blow money on managing the user data. The only data I want to see is the data of the radio stations. Tags might be useful but I dislike the unorganized scatter brain stuff. A better tag needs to be created only for radio.

Maybe we should encourage users to to include rss feeds too to help keep the search engine more up to date. Searching through rss feeds might mean buffering the rss feeds data into a quickly retrievable database. Probably best to leave that till a later version of the site. It's not of primary concern.

Podcasts could go either way. I don't think there are any legal issues with podcasts. I mean podcasts are just mp3s, right? I mean there's like an .xml file involved or something. I think. I dunno about these podcasts yet. I think it'll be fine to include them somehow.

I gotta think about this some more.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Adobe Flash Media for My Phone

The .flv extention is not very hip with the Palm OS. Kinoma is the only guy out there that is doing anything to make a dent. Kinoma Player 4 EX is the one option I've seen that will actually let me play flash video files. It really means little when you're surfing the mobile web. The video format used by YouTube's mobile database is a slimmed up version of a Quicktime default format. The impact of the iPhone no doubt.

Kinoma's software for PalmOS costs $24.99.
It will let you play the .flv files on a memory card.

The software's guide to online media is fine but it doesn't offer any support to Pandora of Last.FM which makes it pretty useless to me. Those are the only two ways to listen to discover new music. If I want other music the phone is already an mp3 player.

What I need is to find a way to make the flash media plug-in.
I have never programed for PalmOS before.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

A few days ago I found out about a new version of Windows that Microsoft has been working on. Right now it is called Windows 7, codenamed Vienna, but neither will be it's final name. I am not sure what the advantages will be. I'm wondering if Windows Vista is just going to be another Windows ME disaster.

A Windows 7 concept video on youtube.com