Island in the Net by Khürt Williams
Technology and Photography Musings. Established circa 2000.
It’s the best-looking, most convenient way of doing so and for the price they charge you’d be missing out by not having this app on your device. It has changed the way I consume audio content on my iPhone. Even though I had tried these types of app before, no other does it as well. via Instant podcasts With Instacast | Macgasm.
I started using Instacast earlier this week and I love it.
ComputerWorld's Johnny Evans posted an article blog last week about supply rumours that the iPad 2.0 would have features that mimic some of those on the iPhone 4 namely video cameras and Retina Display but also a new connector.
The video phone feature likely means Apple will be fielding front and rear video cameras, most likely made by Omnivision, as recent reports claimed.
I sat an thought about this for a minute. Yes, one whole minute. What exactly would I do with a rear video camera on an iPad? It's too bulky to carry around as a photo or video camera. A front facing camera makes more sense but ... I don't see it catching on. Even now with the iPhone 4 I've made a total of two FaceTime calls.
The final slice of speculation from out of Apple's supply chain is one I've rejected until now -- that Apple will deploy mini-USB for connection and sync of the device.
I don't like the fact that I need a special connector to sync my iOS devices to a computer or to connect to my car audio. But the Apple Dock connector does have advantages. Will I be able to control a USB enable iDevice from my car stereo? Will I be able to display the currently playlist and artist/song infomation? Can USB carry video and adio out to a HDTV? Mostly likely not which means Apple would have to add an additional port (HDMI?). What would be far better is for Apple to leverage the Bluetooth feature of the iPad and work with hardware manufactures to build AD2P support into their products. Car audio manufacturers already do this. Then Apple could use mini-USB for syncing or better yet allow Wi-Fi sync.
I'm not sure we need this beefed-up just yet, but given AAPL's continued command of flash memory sales, by dint of it being the world's biggest flash customer, there's no reason not to anticipate a 128GB iPad -- though this would bite at the heels of the recently-introduced MacBook Air.
I'm sure there are people who want to carry their entire music and video collection with them but I bet it's only a few people. I've never seen the need the needs to carry around days worth of music or video just in case I get bored. With the bounty of magazine, news reader, and bookstore apps I just don't see the need.
Here are my un-informed predictions for the iPad 2.0:
I'm a fifty percent sure that I'm one hundred percent wrong.
I saw a recent Apple Byte episode in which host Brian Tong mentioned that there is no way to upload a full 720p HD copy of a video captured on an iPhone 4 without first syncing to a computer. I can imagine why he would think that.
Just a few days after getting my shiny new iGadget I shot a video of my nephew playing with the garden hose in his backyard. He was having fun squirting himself in the face and the only camera on me was my iPhone. I downloaded iMovie for iPhone and created my masterpiece (isn't everything created on an Apple product a Masterpiece). I quickly found that the export to YouTube feature produces less than pleasing results. Come on Apple, 360p! While it is true that the iPhone 4s built in tools only provide for sharing of a compressed 360p version of a video I went back to the AppStore and found an app that allows me to upload the full quality video to YouTube and Vimeo.
Pixelpipe is a media distribution gateway that allows users to publish text, photo, video and audio files once through Pixelpipe and have the content distributed across over 55 social networks, photo/video sites and blogs, and online storage.
Before downloading the PixelPipe app I created an account on the main PixelPipe.com web site and setup a few "pipes" or destinations. I realized later that I could also have done this via the PixelPipe app. A "pipe" is the connector between the PixelPipe app and one or more destination sites where you want your content to be uploaded. For example, I set up pipes for flickr, picasa, and Dropbox and many others.
I setup some of my pipes as default routes. This means that any media I select to upload will automatically go to these default pipes. I have defaults for Dropbox and Box.net so that my photos or videos will be synced over the Internet to a folder on my iMac.
For each pipe I created, PixelPipe created a routing tag. The routing tag explicitly tells PixelPipe where to upload the content overriding any default routes. If you want your content routed to different photo sets you can create a routing pipe and tag for each one.
Content uploaded equally well over both the AT&T cellular data network and Wi-Fi. I had no trouble uploading a 50 second iPhone 4 video (editing in iMovie) over the 3G network to YouTube. I showed the results in my prior post.
PixelPipe is not just a platform for routing images and video. It is also a micro-blogging platform as well as way to route content to other micro-blogging platforms such at twitter, tumblr and posterous. There is so much that PixelPipe does that I am feeling overwhelmed describing it all. Suffice it to say, that if you have a smart-phone device, PixelPipe provides a way to use that device to post your device created content out to the world.
