Having subjected myself to the iRiver podcast review / supermarket sound-seeing tour again, and having received some feedback, I should post some notes on the iRiver and Griffin Lapel Mic recording itself:

• I managed to take a better picture today of the iRiver and mic that doesn’t look like there’s a nasty fingerprint on the screen (this was actually corrected glare from the flash) and shows the pretty blue backlight.
• Apologies for the heavy breathing. It would appear the Griffin Lapel Mic is very sensitive and when swivelled into a vertical position for stealth purposes picked up the down-draught from my nostrils, making me sound like an asthmatic toad. Lovely.
• Likewise, you definitely need some sort of furry windshield for the mic because there was little more than a breeze, yet it sounded at times like I was in a hurricane.
• Dreadful sound quality on the music – I thought I had the levels right at first, but my car stereo automatically raises the volume when you go above a certain speed. You don’t notice this yourself because that’s the point. At 22 kilohertz you have a narrower range of frequencies than real life – hence the crackling – not the iRiver or mic’s fault
• I chose the supermarket because I thought it would be noisy enough that I didn’t feel self-conscious. I was wrong.

For something different, I have recorded an audio review of the iRiver iFP 899 from a Mac-using podcaster’s perspective. Not that I am a podcaster, but I am a beginner. The review is interwoven with a sound-seeing tour of me going to the supermarket, since using these iRivers for podcasting is all about mobile recording.

Audio: iRiver Review MP3

It’s a worrying 50 minutes long, of which the review is mostly the first 15 minutes. The rest is me ranting / smoking / umming and scuttling furtively down the tinned food aisle. Although I don’t know why I bothered trying to hide the white Griffin Lapel Mic; it does tend to stand out against my dark navy jacket (see photo, right).

I got some facts wrong during the review, so read them here and don’t sue me:

• 1GB flash memory
• 40 hours of recording at 64kbps / 22.05Khz / Stereo
• Real-time Encoding
• 40 hours of playtime on a single AA battery
• Plays MP3, OGG, ASF and something called WMA
• FM tuner
• Record from Line In / External Mic, Internal Mic, FM Tuner

I forgot to mention the FM tuner in the review. Both the tuner and the recording feature work very well and the tuner has excellent reception (for me, anyway).

Also, I could hardly remember that in the box you get:

• Manuals (you’ll need ’em)
• CD
• Earphones
• Carrying Case
• Neck strap
• 1 AA Battery
• USB Cable (iRiver supports USB 2)
• Audio Cable (3.5mm jacks both ends)

Here is a screenshot of the iRiver Music Manager software (that doesn’t really manage anything):

Finally, I mention in the review that I tried to pause the recording and hit the wrong button, meaning I had to start another recording to continue. I stitched these together with Sound Studio then re-ripped the file into MP3 and tagged it using iTunes. I don’t think the quality suffered.

Enjoy!

Update: Click here see some notes on this review, and please accept my apologies for the singing.

Something of an unexpected consequence of the forthcoming Safari RSS support on Tiger and Mac OS X 10.3.9 is that Safari 1.3 has changed the way it handles the feed:// URI scheme. Clicking on a feed:// link (like the RSS one at the bottom of this blog page) now produces a warning like this:

Or in other words, Safari is saying “I can’t handle these feed:// links, and I won’t let any other application handle it either”. How very useful! Before, clicking a feed:// link would open an appropriate newsreader application to subscribe to the feed. These apps generally ask permission to handle the feed:// protocol first time you run them. Will they have a choice on Tiger? I hope they change this soon.

Update: You are able to configure which application handles RSS feeds in Tiger – apparently! 😉 So, if they just sort out this Safari 1.3 situation, it will save a lot of headaches.

Update to the Update: On Surfin’ Safari, Dave Hyatt says:

The feed URL dialog that tells you 10.4 must be installed to view RSS feeds is simply a bug and not part of a master plan for global domination.

That’s a relief!

I’ve got to say, this looks promising, not to mention fantastic.

I love what Dave Watanabe has done with NewsFire and can relate to the way he works. A month or so ago, he mentioned concerns about supporting podcasting in NewsFire on his blog. He didn’t want bloat, didn’t like the metaphor mix and perhaps didn’t see the point when there are plenty of podder clients out there, but he made himself open to feedback. Clearly a creative thought process ensued and the result looks great.

I commented on Dave’s blog about this. My post was so long I felt guilty and that served as the final nail in the coffin for my “reasons not to blog”. The trouble is that support for podcasting and enclosures is still in its infancy in most newsreaders and the dedicated podder clients seem lacking in so many areas. This has created an enormous amount of unnecessary support for Feeder, where I have been dealing with problems people think are to do with their RSS feed when in fact the podder client is to blame. Most Feeder users wanted to use their existing aggregators such as NewsFire, but the support has been lacking.

In essence, all a Mac podcasting client need do is:

• Subscribe to feed.
• Check for items with audio enclosures.
• Download the enclosure files automatically or manually and optionally add them to iTunes.

This probably sounds simpler than it is, but that’s the use case scenario.

Of what I consider to be the “big three”, NetNewsWire 2, which is soon to to go final after a very long public beta, has great podcasting support – and regardless of its beta status is a wonderfully comprehensive app that manages to do everything I can think of. PulpFiction offers a different angle (and one that is very useful for mailing list feeds and the like), supports enclosures but not automatic downloading / iTunes integration. NewsFire is a superb application that shows how less really can be more, it looks as good if not better than any iApp and is so tight and polished in its implementation. I hope the podcasting side works as well as the screenshot suggests.

The great thing about this blog is I get to write about things in my applications that would otherwise remain shrouded in mystery and pretend that they are important.

Take the “Insert Image” toolbar icon in Feeder – you’d be amazed the lengths we at Reinvented Software will go to source an image. The icon is actually a scaled-down and cropped version of the photo shown below, taken at the beach in Corona Del Mar, Orange County, California in Summer 2002.

When it came to doing this toolbar icon, I was looking for a real photo to use and originally wanted a sunset or something similar to iPhoto’s icon. Although I have similar shots, some also from the same location, none of them seemed to work as well as this.