Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Thinking Out Of The Box
My 1989 Bronco II had no CD player. No problem. I bought a cassette adapter and a portable CD player. The headphone output of the CD player connected to a thingy that looked like a cassette but wasn't. You pushed it into the cassette hole and the CD music signal played through the car stereo. Very cool.
Several companies have come out with cassette adapters for iPods. The problem is you have to keep the iPod nearby to fast forward, pause, etc. The devices also make a lot of noise (from the sprocket turning).
Not anymore. The geniuses at Griffin Technology have a(reportedly ultra quiet) cassette adapter that evaluates the speed of the cassette sprocket and translates this into an iPod command. Press pause on your car stereo. The sprocket stops turning on the cassette. The Griffin adapter breaks new ground here. They innovated a sensor that "listens" for this event and sends a "pause" command back to the iPod through the headphone wire remote control circuit built into most iPods. Fast forward (fast sprocket speed), play (normal sprocket), stop (no sprocket speed), etc. Control your iPod through your 1989 Ford car stereo with no BMW style custom electronic$! Only $30.
That is thinking different -- out of the box if you will..
Several companies have come out with cassette adapters for iPods. The problem is you have to keep the iPod nearby to fast forward, pause, etc. The devices also make a lot of noise (from the sprocket turning).
Not anymore. The geniuses at Griffin Technology have a(reportedly ultra quiet) cassette adapter that evaluates the speed of the cassette sprocket and translates this into an iPod command. Press pause on your car stereo. The sprocket stops turning on the cassette. The Griffin adapter breaks new ground here. They innovated a sensor that "listens" for this event and sends a "pause" command back to the iPod through the headphone wire remote control circuit built into most iPods. Fast forward (fast sprocket speed), play (normal sprocket), stop (no sprocket speed), etc. Control your iPod through your 1989 Ford car stereo with no BMW style custom electronic$! Only $30.
That is thinking different -- out of the box if you will..
"One more thing..."
No Steve Jobs keynote or "Apple Special Event" is complete without an encore. He makes you think he is going to walk off the stage, then turns and smiles as a 20 foot tall slide towering above him shows "One more thing.." (leading to the frenzied Mac crowd wetting their pants). The first time I saw this (on Tech TV since I don't actually go to these events) a flat-panel iMac came out of the floor on a pedestal. I ordered mine a week later.
Three years later on September 7, I watched Steve Jobs pull the iPod nano out of his watch pocket ("I always wondered what this little pocket was for" he quipped). He then proceeded to demonstrate that you can fit about 6 nanos in the bounding box of an iPod (about 86% smaller), I thought about how the larger sibling was a "lame duck". No one would want one anymore (unless you have 20-100Gb of music).
Well.. on October 12 that may change. An "Apple Special Event" is scheduled (invitation emails showed a curtain open with a slide showing "One more thing.."). Major news outlets are predicting a video iPod.
This could be very exciting. Not because a device will exist which can show a low resolution video stream. It will be exciting because Apple will not release a video player without lining up a source for customers to get preformatted video content to play on it. And it won't be a few dozen poorly edited amateur-video podcasts either. We're talking downloads of real entertainment. And if they charge for it -- commercial free.
Example.. I miss an episode of HBO's Sopranos. No problem, download a low res version of the show to my video iPod. HBO doesn't kill their DVD potential since the resolution will be so poor it will not transfer to TV.
Steve Jobs did say once that iPods are "background entertainment". People don't want portable video players because they don't want "foreground entertainment" while doing other things. Bill Gates (who had just released the portable media player with video) quipped that "Steve's kids may like to listen to classical music in the back seat, but mine like to watch video"). The market showed who was right.
In March, Microsoft announced the launch of MSN Video Downloads -- a service to provide content for all those Microsoft® Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Center devices out there. (Has anyone actually seen someone using one? I haven't.). Apple will come out with the same idea. Even though they will be months or years late to the party, the product will actually deliver, leading to the press making it seem like Apple came up with the idea. A perfect example is the portable MP3 player. People were using Nomad Jukeboxes for a long long time before the iPod came out. The same goes for the iTunes Music Store concept.
Want to cringe? Take a look at some of the Microsoft authored FAQ entries on how to setup your MSN Video Download service. Yikes!
This could be a flood gate opening. Stay tuned. My 40Gb Gen3 iPod may be on eBay very very soon..
Three years later on September 7, I watched Steve Jobs pull the iPod nano out of his watch pocket ("I always wondered what this little pocket was for" he quipped). He then proceeded to demonstrate that you can fit about 6 nanos in the bounding box of an iPod (about 86% smaller), I thought about how the larger sibling was a "lame duck". No one would want one anymore (unless you have 20-100Gb of music).
Well.. on October 12 that may change. An "Apple Special Event" is scheduled (invitation emails showed a curtain open with a slide showing "One more thing.."). Major news outlets are predicting a video iPod.
This could be very exciting. Not because a device will exist which can show a low resolution video stream. It will be exciting because Apple will not release a video player without lining up a source for customers to get preformatted video content to play on it. And it won't be a few dozen poorly edited amateur-video podcasts either. We're talking downloads of real entertainment. And if they charge for it -- commercial free.
Example.. I miss an episode of HBO's Sopranos. No problem, download a low res version of the show to my video iPod. HBO doesn't kill their DVD potential since the resolution will be so poor it will not transfer to TV.
Steve Jobs did say once that iPods are "background entertainment". People don't want portable video players because they don't want "foreground entertainment" while doing other things. Bill Gates (who had just released the portable media player with video) quipped that "Steve's kids may like to listen to classical music in the back seat, but mine like to watch video"). The market showed who was right.
In March, Microsoft announced the launch of MSN Video Downloads -- a service to provide content for all those Microsoft® Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Center devices out there. (Has anyone actually seen someone using one? I haven't.). Apple will come out with the same idea. Even though they will be months or years late to the party, the product will actually deliver, leading to the press making it seem like Apple came up with the idea. A perfect example is the portable MP3 player. People were using Nomad Jukeboxes for a long long time before the iPod came out. The same goes for the iTunes Music Store concept.
Want to cringe? Take a look at some of the Microsoft authored FAQ entries on how to setup your MSN Video Download service. Yikes!
On the menu, go to Tools -> pull down to Internet Options -> click the Security tab -> click the Custom Level button. Where you have the radio button set to "disable", you will need to choose either "enabled" or "prompt", as appropriate, for the following items:
ActiveX controls and plug-ins -> Download signed ActiveX controls: choose "enabled" or "prompt"
ActiveX controls and plug-ins -> Script ActiveX controls marked safe for scripting: choose "enabled"
Scripting -> Active Scripting: choose "enabled"
Miscellaneous -> Navigate sub Frames across different domains: choose "enabled"
This could be a flood gate opening. Stay tuned. My 40Gb Gen3 iPod may be on eBay very very soon..
