James Andrews

Since it’s inception Wordpress has been customized and built into probably the most easiest CMS to use for maintaining website. The page administration is real simple to use. They have created a wonderful API that is simple to understand, so that even the most novice developers can jump in and get their hands dirty. I have fallen very much in love with that simplicity.

For the past few days I have thought that I wanted a new look for my website. I am not a designer. I can cobble together something that looks “ok-ish”, but that’s about it. I turned to a website that I have come to rely on when I need designs for personal projects. That site is called Themeforest.net. It allows you to buy designs, prebuilt HTML templates, and even Wordpress themes that you can use on your site un-exclusively. Now I could have gone and found a design, and coded all the HTML/CSS/PHP for myself, but I didn’t want to spend the time. I have other projects on my plate, so I thought I would simply find a Wordpress theme that was appealing purchase it and make a go of it. SIx hours of watching video.

While the theme is artistically pleasing, and full of all sorts of features it fails like so many other themes whose designers still see Wordpress as a blogging tool, and not a content management system. The home page is driven by blog category instead of it being a “page”. The javascript carousel is also driven by a category. While I can’t say that I feel it’s 100% wrong, I have had customers who have bought themes and became frustrated because the theme they bought didn’t support pages in the carousel, and then I had to figure out a way to fix it.

These designer/developers have to figure out that Wordpress is not just a blog, and that their customers do not want to rely on the blog aspect and categories to manage “pages” of a site when “pages” is already part of the Wordpress functionality.

I have spend too much time this evening hoping for a response on their forums, or my comment on Themeforest.net. Then trying to debug the code because I really wanted the new look up tonight. Alas, that is not the case. I have it at 99%, but am missing something stupid I am sure. Tomorrow is a new day, maybe I’ll 1) get a response with a fix, or 2) figure out what I am missing.

It’s been one day since Steve Jobs announced the iPad to the world. Since then it seems like a world of haters has vomit their hatred of the iPad upon us. Complaining that it’s nothing more than an oversized iPod touch. What I am trying to figure out is this 1) why is that bad? and 2) Did you really expect something more? 3) Why did it have to be more?

In Steve’s keynote he talked about the computer and the smart phone and something in the middle. The iPad is not meant to replace the computer, and it’s not meant to replace the smart phone. It’s meant to compliment them. There are plenty of instances where you may want something portable like a phone, but not as clunky as a laptop, and that is where the iPad comes in. Something that doesn’t need a full computer operating system. Something that can become the device you need at the time.

Let’s say you are in the medical profession, do you really want to have to boot into a complex operating system like windows, linux or OS X that uses up battery life quickly? Or would you rather just turn on a device that allows you to open your application, view and enter patient data quickly and submit it to the servers in the hospital IT department? What if you are a photographer, or a real estate agent, or a business person in general who wants to track their appointments, calculate costs quickly. Applications designed specifically for you, so you don’t need to multi-task into other applications? That is what iPad is about.

Sure there are instances where multitasking may be nice, such as listening to Pandora Streams while doing something else in another application. It’s not a perfect device, but for people to condemn it for it’s faults and not look past them to the devices potential just seems real sad to me.

The iPad will be a great device once you get it in your hands, and see what it can do.

While its fresh in my mind I think I am going to write about the DragonCon iPhone application. Thursday evening I was browsing either Twitter, or Facebook or Livejournal. I don’t remember which when I saw a link advertised for a Dragon*Con iPhone. It was basically advertised as a replacement for the little panel list booklet that I can’t read because the text is so fraking small. I was pretty psyched.

The application is pretty simple in design. There is a main page that has update information. There is an “Events” button, a “My Schedule” button, and a “Speakers” button. For DragonCon the “Events” button gave you a list of all the panels on all the different tracks and concerts from various acts at the convention. This was really handy. Not having to dig out a little booklet that was hard to read was a real PITA. You clicked on an event and the there was a way to add the event to your “schedule” page that had a day calendar look. You could plan your entire weekend and then all you would have to do is go to your “Schedule” page and see what you had chosen and life was nice and easy, not marking the little book and trying to find an event you read about but were unsure about, simply add it, and then go through the schedule and cull out the things that overlapped or were too far away for you to make it from the previous track. The idea at it’s simplest form is great. No wasted paper, and much easier to find panels.

It’s got problems thought, and to be fair the Application is called “Follow Me” and is created by “Core-apps LLC”. It is an event organization app that allows you to have information on panels exhibitors and updated information on. DragonCon is simply their client.

The biggest problem is the load speed. DragonCon has a LOT of events, and since the application talks to the internet to update those events you’re talking a connection EVERY time the application is loaded. It seems to load the XML (assuming it’s XML) EVERY time instead of doing something simple like checking the last modified date against a db to see if the schedule has changed. With 30000 people at the convention and most of them connected to cell towers trying to make connections for tweeting, surfing or using FollowMe. That lead to a VERY slow user experience. The app should only ever update when the data has changed, and then, only modify new data since that change. There are also a lot of things that they could have added to make the experience of using the application a lot better. “Speakers” for example gives list of all the speakers, there’s no cross talk to the events telling allowing me to see what events that speaker was in. There was no way to search only different tracks. All 3 days of events were listed in one list. Separating out Friday, Saturday, and Sunday would have made it easier for those of us trying to get to the sunday list late friday night to plan things. Instead you have to scroll through hundreds of panels that happen Friday and Saturday. Little things that with a little more thought could make this application rock the convention world.

Basically the idea is great, the execution needs some work. Yay DragonCon for doing this, They may want to consider a web version as well for those non-iphone users. Any web developer with half a brain could write something similar in a couple weeks, and then you’d make everyone’s life easier.

FollowMe gets 2 of 5 stars. DragonCon for using the tech to make my con experience better gets 5 for 5!

The other day I went over to a friend’s house who I hadn’t seen for a while. During my visit he went to show me some video. He grabbed a keyboard and start media player application on the PC attached to his TV. The application was XMBC an open source media player. I am a mac user, and a while back XMBC forked and Plex was created for OS X. Yesterday I downloaded Plex and started looking at it’s potential to be my multimedia app, instead of buying an AppleTV.

If you have used XMBC you will be happy to hear that the interface is identical. You can add your movies, music, photos, pretty much whatever media you have you can play, and it does it well. One of the things about XMBC and Plex is the ability to add plugin bundles. These bundles allow you to play videos from Comedy Central, Hulu, BBC and a slew of other online video resources. There are even some questionable un-supported bundles for “mature materials”. I tried a few of the different bundles and they worked pretty good. I did have issue with Comedy Central’s pluggin. Some videos listed didn’t play at all, and I am not sure if it was my internet connection or something wrong with the content, but I was slightly disappointed with that.

Plex also allows you to change the skin of the media player, but most of them are piss poor at best. The Best of the bunch is called Mediastream and is the default one that loads with it. You can change the background images to be what ever you want. Images from your favorite TV show, pictures you took on your vacation, or video. It’s all very cool and customizable. Though there seems to be no way to fas tforward through video, It always seems rewind. If you get to the beginning it will go to the end and rewind. I’ll have to investigate more.

I have an XBox360 and some time ago I bought the Harmony Remote for it. It so happens to support Plex, so I also programmed Plex into the remote. I took a little figuring out, but you can easily navigate through the menu items. Though there is still a lot they could do better. For example the VCR controls could actually control the video properly. play, stop pause etc. They don’t act correctly with the remote. Same problem exists with fast forwarding. You click on the right arrow expecting it to fast forward, and it rewinds instead.

I also think it would be real neat if it played mp3+g media (mp3 based karaoke). I need to get a mac mini so I can create a dedicated machine, but that’ll have to wait until later this year. early next year. I would have used an old iBook G4 I have, but Plex only works on Intel based macs.

For more information you can check out http://www.plexapp.com/

I give Plex 4 out of 5 remotes.

Over the last 2 days I have managed to watch 102 episodes of a Japanese anime called “Naruto Shippuden”. I was able to do this legally online without having to pay to watch for each episode all thanks to the partnership between the Hulu and VIZ media corporation who are the license holders for Naruto in the US. There are a few things about this that really made me happy and I hope that some one somewhere in that industry reads this because I think they have a great thing going.

First off. I HATE Cartoon Network. As many of you may know CN is owned Time Warner when it was originally conceptualized the main idea was TW wanted a place where they could show all the old Hana-Barbera cartoons that they had purchased. That was all fine and good but it grew to be something more than that to the point where they were showing a lot of really great Japanese animation, as well as some great original material. Cartoon Network eventually started Adult Swim, which took control of CN’s airwaves after 10pm on weeknights and weekends. While they had some original programming based off of old Hana-Barbera media, they also had a nice collection of Japanese animation. Cartoon Network had become the leader in providing Japanese animation on TV despite ADV’s attempt at Anime Network.

Today’s Cartoon Network is a different beast. While they still do have some great original programming they have forsaken the Japanese animation even though there are still a lot of interest in Anime. With the exception of Pokemon which is played every weekday morning there is very little anime during the 7am-10pm hour. Adult Swim is a different story. For a while they had a lot of GREAT original programming. Aquateen Hunger Force which was my personal favorite and many others seemed to shine, but recently the shows have gone downhill in a menacing spiral and all anime has been pushed off to late saturday night/early sunday morning. A slew of [AS]’s mistakes include showing Family Guy to the point of it being unwatchable, shows like “Tom Goes to the Mayor” and “Tim and Eric good show great job”, and more recently the inclusion of “King of the Hill”, probably because some suit at TW felt that that horse hadn’t been beaten to death enough. They’ve basically ruined a good thing.

This is just one example of a television network screwing up and disappointing their viewers. Fox is notorious for scheduling changes that keep shows from becoming smash hits (ie Firefly/Family Guy), and I personally think that now is the time for the industry’s major overhaul.

NBC the parent company for Hulu is on the right track, but I still think they have a LONG way to go. Allowing the choice of what you want to view, when you want to view it is a great first step. Limiting the number of commercials per commercial break is AWESOME, even though I think they could do better in means of allowing the user a choice in the kinds of commercials that interest them. For example I don’t care about women’s products, don’t advertise them to me while I watch. The internet is empowering, allow the consumers the power to control what they want to see. There are so many times I turn on the TV and at 4am I can’t find a thing to watch because it’s all infomercials. Give me a world where I don’t have to watch banners at the bottom of shows advertising other shows. Give me a world where I don’t have to watch commercials about little blue pills until I need information about those little blue pills.

The state of television is dim, internet television’s future is bright, let’s do it right!