After much consideration, and time spent not blogging, I’ve decided I need a change. As a web designer/developer I plan to start blogging on more work related issues shortly - on a new site, which means that this is now completely dead…
You can view my website and portfolio at thepixelexperience.co.uk
Time for a change of theme, cause my old theme couldn’t handle blockquotes!
Old theme: Into The Light
New theme: Tranquility
I don’t like the flash thingy at the top, but I’ll soon change that…
Yes, I know another post on the AudioTraffic project… and it is still little more than a figment of my imagination at the moment - and no-one reads my blog anyway!
Since I’ve switched over to a Mac, I’ve been looking around for a suitable mp3 player that will sync with my Creative muvo m3 player, download podcasts and generally manage my music collection. Although I’m a mac user, I’m an open source fan and have been looking for other programs that will achieve the same aims I have for AudioTraffic. This would be great as it would mean that I don’t have to write the damn thing! Through this post I found through Planet Ubuntu I re-discovered the Songbird project.
I remember hearing about Songbird quite some time ago, and was initially quite impressed by it, but the development was way to slow and I lost interest. Now is a good time to go back and re-visit it. After only 10 minutes of messing around with it I have come to the following conclusion:
What I like about Songbird: A nice simple GUI (basically a black iTunes) - I might even consider some of the ideas here with AudioTraffic. Internet Radio - very cool and will please many, but I don’t really need this. RSS (MP3 Blogs) - thank goodness they didn’t call them podcasts! Network Device - again I don’t need this really (although it sounds very cool)
What I don’t like - (although many features are available the important one isn’t): Device syncing not yet supported. There are way too many features in this project, and that does put me off. After several years of things like song ratings, I just cannot see the point. I don’t like the way that the mp3 blogs works, Apples iTunes is much better in this point.
Basically, I find that there are way to many things included that I just won’t use and the things I need, (although planned) aren’t yet included. It will continue to piss me off that the stuff I don’t need will just take up pixel space and piss me off. Another thing, the this is a rubbish way to manage rss and mp3 blogs. However, I must start to consider that this is a browser based music managing program.
So would I completely switch to using Songbird if the features I wanted were included? Probably not, this is a browser based program, and I don’t think thats the right platform for this kind of thing. However, I am totally impressed by this software, and by the time I’ve got AudioTraffic up and running and I’ve been using it for a year, I expect that it’ll be time to switch over to Songbird. It all depends in which direction their project goes.
One last thing… Nik Butler also mentions Banshee as well as Songbird. Where is the Mac OS X version !!!
Oooooh….
Right, I know that my spelling is pretty atrochous atroshus bad, and one thing that really bothers me is that Wordpress (my blogging software) does not come with a built in spell checker. I had actually been putting together a little review section on all the spelling plugins I could find and rate how badly they worked with Wordpress 2. However, the Wordpress camp have announced a built in spell checker for version 2.1. And about time too! Thanks guys.
Update… The new (and most excellent) version of Firefox seems to have this included. Whilst this is good news, I can’t now see myself using the Wordpress version, especially since Firefox is so good.
After a considerable and necessary break from writing here, I have decided it’s high time I started again. I have been considering what this site means to me - as a blogger, how I feel about it, what I want to get out of it, and what I need to change about my writing to reach these goals. This thinking has lead to the removal of some previous posts, because they are either complete drivel or they cover topics that I don’t really want to have on my website. I have also been considering a site re-design (rather than the current wordpress theme designed by someone else) that is in the early development stages, and the plan is to have it released in the next few weeks - but you know how these things are…
So, what’s changed since mid-July. My Open University degree is now coming along nicely. I’ve just finished a rather enjoyable module on the basics of Java programming - ahem… I should say that I’ve nearly finished this module because the exam is in just over a weeks time. This module has been really beneficial to me as a programmer, and I hope to put many of the tools that I have learnt into practice in some of the projects I’ve been working on.
This previous post mentions my frustrations with using some of the modern desktop operating systems available today. Rather inevitably, I have decided to switch over to the Mac. Despite recently having the opportunity to get to the Apple shop in Birmingham I have decided to buy my MacBook from a very local re-seller in Eynsham. They seem like a great bunch of guys and apart from the great deal that they offered me, I hope to be able to rely on them for support in the future. Although I am not yet in possession of my MacBook yet (they are having a few problems getting hold of stock at the moment) they have been kind enough to lend me an iBook G4. So fingers crossed for it’s arrival this week, and I’ll do a full update when it comes.
Plenty of other cool things have also being happening (mostly non-geeky things) but I’ll save them for another occasion, because if I don’t get some sleep soon this will just be another post consisting of mostly drivel which may require some heavy handed editing in the morning.
