Often on this blog or on my news pages I plug interesting and different podcasts whose feeds are created by Feeder, but since Feeder can create any RSS feed it’s nice to see it being used for the purpose that made me come up with the idea in the first place: to create a product news RSS feed on a web site (i.e. mine!).

Gaucho Software is now using Feeder to create news feeds and Seasonality, created by Mike Piatek-Jimenez, definitely counts as something interesting and different.

Seasonality is a very impressive weather monitoring app that shows comprehensive summaries, forecasts, maps with satellite imagery and radar, graphs for temperature, wind speed and direction, atmospheric pressure, daylight hours and local time. The best part is that it wraps all this information in a slick interface that is easy on the eye and has lots of neat tricks to keep everything manageable. Kudos!

If you keep an eye on Adam Curry’s Weblog, this won’t be news.

PodShow are launching a number of new web services, and have set up a developer-oriented blog and podcast at developer.podshow.com where developers can find out more about PodShow’s upcoming technology initiatives including developer APIs, a mailing list and more.

In the inaugural podcast, Andrew Grumet and Scott Johnson discuss PodShow’s plans to create podcasting-related software and services and how PodShow will open these up to other developers.

It’s great to see PodShow getting off to a good start in being open about their services and getting developers involved from the beginning.

Think Mac‘s Rory Prior mentions that he’s switching from eSellerate to PayPal as his business’s payment provider. In a further post, Lowering Costs, he does a very useful comparison of different payment providers.

As you can see from Rory’s table, Kagi and eSellerate come out the same on modest annual sales. However, not mentioned is that Kagi actually offers incentives if you sell more in contrast to eSellerate’s attitude of taking 15% rather than 10% when your annual sales hit $15K. PayPal also offers incentives for higher sales.

I did a similar comparison before setting up this business and chose PayPal. However, during the first month or so some people said they couldn’t or wouldn’t use PayPal. At the time it may have been a requirement to become a PayPal member in some countries before PayPal would accept payment, and not all countries were covered (I don’t think that is an issue today). I had long been a member of Kagi, so added them as a choice. Kagi also has advantages if you’re selling to schools and such, as they will accept almost any form of payment apart from bartered cattle.

I was able to offer both Kagi and PayPal without too much hassle as both of these can contact your server when a payment is made, allowing you to generate and send registration codes. I rolled my own registration system, Rory will be switching to Aquatic Prime. I think it is highly recommended to have a registration system that is not tied to one particular payment provider, since you do not know what the future will bring. All this takes time, however, which is when payment providers’ own systems start to look attractive. But with them comes some measure of lock-in.

There are other fees involved in taking payments too. As I don’t live in the US, I have Kagi wire the payment to me. This used to be $30 but is now $15, making it cheaper than cashing a foreign cheque at my bank, which is £10, or about $17.50 and has the advantage that I get it in 2 or 3 days, rather than 7 to 10. Another consideration with PayPal, if your are selling in US Dollars but that is not your native currency, is that its exchange rate is a little lousy. Even so, the net amount still beats Kagi.

The best thing about PayPal is that you can get your hands on your money whenever you want. Kagi waits until the 21st of the following month to issue payment. So, if I sell a copy of Feeder on March 1st, that payment won’t be sent out by Kagi until April 21st and won’t reach my business account until around April 23rd.

Other things to consider with payment providers are situations such as refunds. With PayPal, you can issue a refund up to 60 days after the payment was made for no fee, right from your account page. With Kagi, if a customer wants a refund, they have to contact Kagi, who contacts you and informs them of your decision – it feels very cold. Kagi keeps its transaction fee regardless and refunds the customer the whole amount, the only person who loses is you. I’ve had this happen when someone chose to buy KIT when they meant to buy Feeder. I was the only party who suffered.

Another advantage that Rory’s first post reminded me of is that European customers don’t need to pay VAT if they use PayPal. This is because PayPal leaves the decision to charge VAT to me, and I am sole trader whose turnover is less than £55K a year (the UK VAT threshold), so I don’t need to charge it. Kagi and eSellerate automatically charge VAT for European customers. That makes me angry.

With all that in mind, I can definitely recommend PayPal to anyone selling software or taking payments over the web.

Anyway, I’m glowing with RDF exposure, so about the rest of that Stevenote…

iPhoto
iPhoto is probably my most-used iApp after iTunes, and while I have Photoshop I prefer to do without it for the sort of basic editing that I do. I really like the look of the new iPhoto editing features. Speed is always good. The full screen editing and side-by-side comparison features look excellent and the effects make tricky things one-click easy. As for the cards and calendars, I don’t think I’ll be using them, but they look great. The calendars have some really thoughtful features such as including birthdays from Address Book and national holidays for specific countries.

Photocasting looks really cool. You can publish your photos on .Mac and people can subscribe to an RSS feed for the album. Whenever you add photos to the album, they go online too and subscribers can see your updates in any RSS reader. At first I thought this was nothing new, because you can subscribe to photo feeds from Flickr and the like, but the twist is that you can subscribe to a photocast within iPhoto and when updates are made, you will receive the actual photos. This has excellent potential not only for sharing, but collaboration too. It’s a superb use of RSS.

iMovie, iDVD
I really don’t use iMovie or iDVD, but they are the sort of apps you want to use just because they’re so cool. Now it seems they’ve taken the idea of themes from iDVD and let you use them in iMovie itself. It’s pretty amazing what you can do with this stuff for next to no money. You just need a video camera and some decent footage. It almost seems to me that making a video of your vacation could be more fun than the vacation itself! (See, I can do gushing!)

Garageband
I wrote a little about its ability to create enhanced podcasts and publish to .Mac straight from within Garageband but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The recording and production features look fantastic, such as the automatic ducking, background noise elimination and iChat interview recording (each participant gets their own audio track). GarageBand also provides royalty-free jingles, which can played live or added later. CastBlaster who?

iWeb
iWeb really makes your .Mac Sites folder worthwhile again, although as I’ve mentioned before RapidWeaver already does this stuff and Sandvox, currently in public beta, seems much the same. What really sets iWeb apart is its integration from within the other iApps, which is something other developers just can’t do.

And I have to say it looks damn impressive in the demo, with its fancy templates, photo cropping, rotating and everything. Actually, it appears to work a lot like Pages. Often, I actually find these sorts of apps frustrating, just because I want to do so much more than they will let me. That said, I’m sure most people will be delighted with the stuff that that iWeb can produce.

The only downside seems to be that you can only publish to .Mac, although I understand you can export to a folder and upload manually via FTP if you want.

iWork
It seems they’re not making much of a fuss about this. No spreadsheet app but there are new 3D charts and tables with calculations, so it looks like they’re filling in the gaps slowly.

Microsoft Commitment
Poor old Microsoft Mac Business Unit boss, Roz Ho, never quite seems to hit the right note at these events, but she got a very good reaction to Microsoft’s new 5-year minimum commitment to Office on the Mac. I think Microsoft do a great job with the Mac version of Office and that’s just as well, as the Mac needs it. It’s a necessary evil.

Intel Macs
I want them. Both. Now.

That said, I think “MacBook Pro” is a clumsy, awkward name. I think this is a mistake, throwing away years of brand-building.

PowerBook rules, I hear PowerBook used these days on TV as though everyone knows what one is. PowerBook is cool. PowerBook came before the PowerPC chips, so never had any connection with them. Steve said they wanted “Mac” in the name. So, what will the new iBooks be called? And the new Power Mac? Mac Pro? Puh-lease!

So what of Macworld and its impact on yours truly?

The Intel Macs look good. Their release comes much sooner than originally expected and it’s going to take me a little while to build my apps as universal binaries so they’ll run natively on Intel. I never got the Developer Transition Kit because by the time I was ready to order the web was thick with rumours of these real Macs coming and I don’t have money to throw around on computers I have to give back. (Update: Apple is running the DTK Exchange program now – damn!)

So it’s going to take me as long as it takes to get an Intel Mac, build my apps and test them all out. Feeder also uses third-party frameworks for functionality such as FTP, so they could cause some problems, but I don’t really expect any. The point is that I’m committed to doing this ASAP.

Then there is iLife ’06, which has lots of new stuff to do with podcasting. Garageband has tons of neat features to make putting a show together easy and to help with audio production. It can also create enhanced podcasts (i.e. in AAC format with chapters) and post them to .Mac with iWeb. iMovie does much the same with video podcasts. All this will be great for beginners, but as I see it, there are plenty of limitations.

I’m just going on what’s on the web but it seems that while Garageband can record and encode AACs, for MP3s you’ll still need to encode your recording with iTunes (or something like LAME) and add the tags, artwork, etc. Most podcasts are in MP3 format, because AACs only really play in iTunes and on iPods. Fine if you’re sure your listeners have these, but MP3 is truly ubiquitous.

Secondly, iWeb’s blog is lacking in interactivity. This is a major part of podcasting (and indeed, blogging), where listeners feed back through comments, etc. Not everyone uses Garageband either, preferring more professional apps such as SoundTrack Pro, Peak, etc, although maybe these features will change that.

So, I think iLife ’06 provides an excellent way to get started in podcasting, but for those who want a proper blog, already have their own web site and / or existing podcast then they will still need tools to help them with their podcasts and that’s where apps like Feeder and Podcast Maker come in. Same goes for RapidWeaver and Sandvox with respect to iWeb – RealMac Software and Karelia can go places Apple won’t go, because Apple relies on integrating its own products with .Mac to make things as simple as possible.

Now, which Intel Mac should I buy?