Dave’s Blog

Boxee, you have a lot going for you and I'm pulling for you to win the race for the living room (with new arrivals from Google and an Apple iTV on the horizon). I use you as a centerpiece of my home media setup after ditching my cable plan. My family and myself have fully embraced the whole "TV over internet" model. But we need to have a talk. 

The most positive thing that you have going for you is that are an open platform. Developers can write plugins for you, with the only restrictions being the developer's own ability and dreams. This is a good thing, as it allows infinite development of your platform - and I believe this is where boxee should be focusing its time on: enticing talented developers and content producers to write apps for your interface.

With the latest release of Boxee you've added an internet "Movie Library" to your service. Note that movies have been available via the Boxee platform since the beginning via a Netflix app or if you have local media to add to your library. For the sake of argument, let's say that a user doesn't have a local movie library.

Imagine, if you will, a new user trying out Boxee. The TV selection is great - it lists "A" list television shows from Hulu and other sources around the internet. Let's compare this to the Movies selection. Once you click over there, you quickly see "B" and "C" list movies from indie studios. There are a few exceptions thrown in, but in general the movies are ones that almost no one has an interest in watching. While I do not have anything against these movies and their talented directors, this is not what the average person is actually looking for or will watch much. 

I would definitely recommend you be more selective about the movies you show to the average user. Why? This same problem is the one that has afflicted Joost from the beginning. Lots and lots of content, hardly anything worth watching. It essentially waters down the perceived quality of the app - and this is going to hurt Boxee in the long run.

Instead of showing your content partners' movies by default, it would be much better to present users with a choice on first run. For example the choices would be something like:

• Local Movies
• Netflix for Movies (instead of in a separate app)
• Free Internet Movies 

This gives the end user a choice to receive higher quality movies in the "Movies" area of Boxee - which is where most non-Boxee speaking people would go to see a movie. As it stands now, "A" list movies are hidden under an App, and this really off-putting to the neophyte Boxee user.

Finally, where are the premium for pay content apps? Your users are thirsting for an iTunes app for protected iTunes content and an Amazon Video on Demand app. A live TV app via MythTV would also be a winner. These are the lynchpins to taking over the living room from cable boxes. Millions of people are willing to pay for premium content if it is in a reliable, easy to use platform such as the one Boxee is striving to be. 

I know you are working on your own payment system, but if you wait too long to even introduce these all important content sources, you're going to miss the boat. 

In summary, please don't pull a Joost. Focus on keeping your platform open and accessible - with top notch easy to access content, and you will have yourself a winner. 

Twitter has a problem.

I have many different social groups that I interact with. For reading messages from these groups - I have created lists. They work fairly well on the reading side to see what a certain group of people are tweeting about.

But what about sending messages?

I send out messages on many different topics. Maybe it is the eclectic in me showing. I might tweet about a local traffic problem, and in the next moment about the latest research on geolocation privacy. My shared links to do with the law (I work in the legal profession) may have no interest to many in my group, but will be spot on for other members.

So what is the solution? Right now we are presented with only 2 options:

- Create different twitter user for each 'topic' we want to post tweets on, or
- Use external services for sending out such information.

Facebook status updates are actually an excellent example of this. When Facebook lists/groups were first introduced, I diligently added each friend to a specific group: real life friends, high school classmates, social media friends, work (bar association) friends, etc.

They have proved to be essential to my Facebook experience. I am selective to whom I send out status updates to. They work in read/write manner, both restricting your posts going out (for privacy) and also to read messages from these groups. 

I believe Twitter needs some sort of outgoing list or tagging system. When someone follows you, you should be able to 'tag' them as interested in a topic. Perhaps this tag can be shared so that they can modify their interest in you - because although you may primarily be interested in one topic, if a person is interesting enough all of their messages may be of interest. 

The problem here then is that you are adding a level of complexity to sending a "Tweet" which is part of the brilliance of Twitter. Instead of having to compose a long message, tag a topic or think of a headline you simply tweet your message, 140 characters or less.

What solution do you currently use to fix this problem?

Now that the iPhone 4 takes 720p video at 30fps we have a worth competitor which crosses the finish line. There is still some room for improvement that Apple and the other phone manufacturers should take note of. 

The first phone I noticed which actually started this convergence was the Sony Ericsson Walkman phones (W series, W580i, etc). The problem with these phones was the interface, which was horrible. You could listen to a lot of music due to the expandable memory, however it just did not work in well with the UI and had low adoption rates.

The first iPhone solved that problem and was essential in "selling" the public on an "Apple phone". The experience Apple had from the iPod made it a natural entrant into the phone market. Merging the phone and the music player was the first great coup that Apple pulled off.

The beginnings of the camera convergence could be seen as well. As sensor sizes shrank, we began to see better cameras in phones. The original iPhone through the 3G only included a 2 megapixel camera, which was on par with my first digital camera from 2001. The 3GS introduced a 3 megapixel camera which was an improvement but not a true replacement for a compact digital camera. Finally with the iPhone 4, we have a 5 megapixel camera which is a likely replacement for many with a compact point and shoot camera. The current generation of many point-and-shoots already have small sensor sizes which show a lot of digital noise and I expect to see the same on the iPhone 4 camera when zoomed to 100%. That being said, since it is 5MP you will rarely need to see a photo at 100%. On the phone itself it will look spectacular and I expect it to look decent on a computer screen running at a normal resolution.

An extra bonus is the 720p @ 30fps video that this camera is capable of taking. Although this won't replace the current generation of HD video cameras it does make a suitable replacement for those off the cuff videos of family and friends that are so great to have.

Another benefit of having a phone with so many capabilities and a relatively open platform (just think - the processing power and RAM of the iPhone 4 is similar to full sized computers of 2000) is that we are seeing other devices converge into the phone. GPS units with turn by turn and text-to-speech, credit card machines, a burgeoning game platform and more.

Of course Apple isn't the first company to have many of these features (See an HD video sample on the Nokia N8), but it is the first to wrap it in a spectacular interface. For many consumers, the iOS UI is the easiest and fastest way to get something done on a phone. The "Facetime" feature may become moderately popular over time, but unless they conform to some other open standard I do not see it becoming mainstream. Skype should be able to utilize the front facing camera over 3G, which would be key for both Skype and Apple. This alone would spur on many iPhone 4 purchases.

The iPhone and iOS has its weaknesses. Other manufacturers should take note:

• Camera "Only" does 720p @ 30fps. Look for this to increase to 1080p/i and 60fps.
• iPhone screen is one of the smaller ones. Sure, it has the "Retina" pixel density but many folks, especially those with older eyes, enjoy larger screens.
• The Apple lockdown. Android's open OS is the way forward if fragmentation and quality control can be maintained. 

Make no mistake, Apple has a winner with iPhone 4. Now that we have background processes, unified inbox,  a majority of the gripes myself and others have had with the OS have been rectified.

We have the convergence of the following mobile devices now complete:

Phone + Music Player + Camera + Video Camera + GPS + Gaming Device

So what's next? We will see increases in quality on all features. The iPhone can't really get any more pixel density, so I would expect to see an "iPhone XL" at some point with a 4-4.5" screen. Aesthetically, there is a lot of non-screen space on the phone still. We might see a phone with almost no edges at some point in order to maximize the size - however there may be some engineering limitations that I am simply not aware of. 

What do you think? Will you be getting an iPhone 4?

"Th newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward".

~ Finley_Peter_Dunne

Came across this admittedly weird issue. Randomly over the past few months, I try to go to Facebook or Twitter and end up being redirected to another website, usually MySpace. See screenshot for an example of what I saw a few moments ago.

This time, it just forwarded me to a Samuel Garcia (SR388) so I punched it into Google, and low and behold others are having this same exact issue! Facebook redirects to MySpace.

They also posted a fix -- flush the DNS cache on your local system via the command:

ipconfig /flushdns

So what could be causing this issue? I thought it might be some sort of DNS hijacking but everything I could check seemed OK. It happens to multiple computers on my network. Finally a comment on that threat points over to the Linksys forum about DNS issues with many others having the same problem. It appears that it might be some sort of Linksys firmware issue. 

Other specifics of my network - I have one router running stock Linksys firmware (WRT310N) and an old model WRT54G running Tomato firmware. I have the WRT310N getting DNS from the WRT54G, and the WRT54G is using OpenDNS servers for DNS resolution.

Next time this happens I'm going to use wireshark to try to get some insight into the problem.

Is anyone else seeing this weird issue?

Canon's site for the LiDE 50 does not list any Windows 7 drivers for download, nor Vista 64-bit drivers. However, I did find that you can use the CanoScan LiDE 60 drivers in place of the LiDE 50 drivers, and they do have options listed for Windows 7/Vista in both 64-bit and 32-bit varieties. 

Do do this, you download the appropriate driver (either the Windows 7 64 or 32 drivers) which is contained in an executable file. Use a program such as 7zip to uncompress this file into another folder. Within this folder, there are no drivers but further cabinet files. Use 7zip to decompress the _winzip_ file, which actually contains the driver you need to install.

In your device manager, locate the scanner and select the option to update the driver. You will need to select the driver manually, then specify the device type and driver, then click the "Have Disk" option. Locate the folder where the driver is located and select the .inf, and it will successfully (hopefully) install the LiDE50 as a LiDE60 scanner.

After having the device installed properly, download the latest CanoScan Toolbox, of the date of this writing it is version 4.9.3.2. This will give you access to all of the options you should have to set the buttons on your scanner, for example.

No need to buy a new scanner just because Canon didn't develop a driver for the LiDE 50, apparently the chipset for the 60 is almost exactly the same.