Cast for two

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

First Itunes movie not in Itunes Belgium Store

Today Itunes exclusively launches its first feature film called Purple Violet. This could be significant because new business models that cut out elements in the chain often shake up the industry. Unfortunatly, the movie Purple Violet is only available in the US store:

The Itunes store does speak Dutch but a Belgium store is not there yet. To make matters worse, I still have to select Itunes Belgique :

I hope Itunes Belgiƫ will become available soon. If they wait to long it might be that we need an Itunes Vlaanderen ;-) .

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Web pages especially for Iphone/Ipod Touch

I was wondering how the embed a media file into HTML for the mobile Safari browser on Apple's Iphone or Ipod Touch. Therefore, I looked up how others are doing it and what's in the documentation Apple:

  1. BBC has made a portal to its podcasts : http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/directory/ip/ or you can just go to bbc.co.uk/podcasts.

    The code used to embed the mp3 podcasts is:

    <embed width="100%" height="22" enablejavascript="true" controller="false" autostart="false" pluginspage="www.apple.com/quicktime/download" src="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/northernireland/nimusic/nimusic__20071112-2215.mp3"/>

    More info on BBC podcast portal.

  2. Also Apple makes their trailers available in an Ipod Touch / Iphone friendly way. The URL is http://www.apple.com/trailers/iphone/
    Here's the HTML code that Apple uses to embed the Beowulf movie:

    <embed src="http://movies.apple.com/trailers/iphone/images/greenband_320x133.png" href="http://movies.apple.com/movies/paramount/beowulf/beowulf-fte_i320.m4v"
    target="myself" width="320" height="133"
    controller="false"
    autoplay="false"
    scale="1" cache="true" type="video/quicktime" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">

    Ars Technica has some screenshots of Apple trailers on the Iphone.
  3. The code proposed by Apple looks like this:

    <script src="AC_QuickTime.js" language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"></script>
    QT_WriteOBJECT_XHTML('http://d2.mikseri.net/m/30a/30007249206/Frozen%20Silence%20-%20Cherish.mp3', '32', '16', '',
    'autoplay', 'false',
    'emb#bgcolor', 'black',
    'cache','false',
    'align', 'top');

    The URL is to a piece of music of the album "Frozen Silence" by Matti Paalanen.

  4. Also the indie site http://ourstage.com has Iphone specific pages according to Techcrunch. But when surfing to that page on my Ipod Touch i get no specific content.


To get those HTML codes, go to about:config in Firefox and set the value of general.useragent.extra.firefox from something like 'Firefox/2.0.0.9' to 'Useragent "Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML,like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3A100a Safari/419.3' and then surf to the URL for ipod touch or iphone and inspect the page source.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Impression of Google's Android UI on Ipod Touch

I downloaded Engadget visual tour of Android's UI in Iphoto, cutted out the screens and synced them on my Ipod Touch. Voila, a visual impression of Google Android UI on Apple Ipod Touch:









Ipod Touch Firmware 1.1.2 also in ITunes Belgium

Already a few days announced, the new firmware for Apple's Iphone and Ipod Touch is available trough Itunes. Also in Itunes Belgiƫ :

The main new feature is that you can edit the calendar and the contacts with the Ipod Touch. The new update is a whopping 157 megabyte big, so it took 10 minutes to download via my DSL line. Installation went smooth. I'm reconsidering installing Spanning Sync
to synchronize my Google Calendar and Gmail contacts with Apple's Ical and contactbook. Spanning sync is free for the first 15 days.

Friday, November 09, 2007

Double rainbow

Just saw a nice full rainbow that was partly doubled trough the window at the office. Picture taken with a Sony Ericsson K810i mobile phone.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Barcamp Brussels #4 decided

Peter Forret has decided on the organisation of Barcamp Brussels. Barcamp #4 will be on the 1st of december 2007 near Brussels North railway station (at mVillage).
I have subscribed already.