Monthly Archive for June, 2007Page 3 of 5

Google Logo in Poor Taste

Published
by
Ryan Jarrett
 on June 17, 2007
 in BBC and Google
. 0 Comments

I noticed today that Google have changed their logo to coincide with Father’s Day.  Nothing particularly suprising there, they do it all the time.  This time they changed the second ‘O’ to a man in a rubber ring or dinghy, and they tail of the lower case ‘g’ changed to a small boy in a snorkel and mask.

Google's Father's Day Logo 2007

Normally this would have been fine, but I found this in rather poor taste seeing as earlier this week a 2-year-old boy was found floating in the sea, who later died later in hospital.  The body of his dad was found a couple of days later.  Before the infant was found a dinghy was found containing nappies and armbands.  I think Google should have withdrawn their logo this time and put up an alternative design.

My thoughts go out the the friends and relatives of the victims of this terrible tragedy.

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Zattoo - Watch Live TV on Your Machine

Published
by
Ryan Jarrett
 on June 14, 2007
 in BBC, Beta and TV
. 5 Comments

Today I received my invitation to start testing the beta of Zattoo, an IPTV application. After filling in the necessary details, I was taken to the viewer download page, which gave me four choices: Apple, Windows, Windows Vista and Linux. I downloaded the Windows version (for my trusty XP laptop) and at 16.5MB it didn’t take too long. Installation was straight forward - no options except for installation directory. Once Zattoo was installed and run for the first time, it asks for your email address and password that I provided before I downloaded the app. You can ask Zattoo to remember these details so you don’t need to re-enter them each time its runs.

Zattoo interface

Now Zattoo was running, I was surprised at how uncomplicated the interface is. There are two windows; the main “viewing” window, and the “channel” window. As it suggests the viewing window is where the live pictures are shown. This window can be resized or maximised in the standard way, plus there is also a fullscreen button. The only other controls are a volume slider/mute button, and a toggle to display/hide the channel window. There is also a menu bar, which turns on/off aspect ratio fixing, allows you to select stereo or mono sound, change user, allows you to check for updates, etc. but this did not intrude on my viewing pleasure.

The channel window to the right of the viewing window contains a number of graphical buttons, each one representing a different television channel. At this time, the list consists of:

  • BBC 1
  • BBC 2
  • BBC 3
  • BBC 4
  • BBC News 24
  • Canal 24 Horas
  • CBBC
  • CBeebies
  • Deutsche Welle
  • France 24 English
  • SF Info
  • TVC Internacional
  • TV Polonia

As you can see, not all are UK channels; when you register you have to select which country you are in. I tried switching to a non-UK channel and it says you are not allowed to watch this channel, so I guess non-UK Zattoo users will not be able to access BBC content.

Picture/sound quality is quite good for streaming TV, and it is responsive when you change channels. One thing I did notice - when I was watching the news on BBC 1 the regional news was for the North East region, so I’m guessing that’s where Zattoo (or at least their UK base) is located.

Overall I’m quite impressed with Zattoo. Its easy to use, fast and has a low system overhead (especially when compared to Joost). Its different from other IPTV apps that are in beta because they are streaming an existing channel, not providing an on-demand service. I am a big BBC fan, so the choice of the 7 BBC channels is a great start, and will do until the BBC’s iPlayer/iMP comes out.

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Browser Wars on my Laptop

Published
by
Ryan Jarrett
 on June 13, 2007
 in Apple and Beta
. 1 Comment

Safari 3 betaApple announced on Monday that they have brought out a beta of Safari 3 for Windows. “Hmmm, that sounds interesting”, I thought, especially with its claims of speed increases in displaying web pages up to 2 times faster than other browsers. I downloaded and installed Safari with no problems. And when I launched it for the first time it ran smoothly, and indeed it was much quicker than Firefox and Internet Explorer. It even had less of a demand on my precious system resources. So I changed my default browser to Safari 3 and used it for the rest of the night, mightily impressed.

Tuesday dawned, and I slowly realised that Safari was gonna cause me problems:

  • The back button on the side of my mouse would not work in Safari
  • Also, to go back I had to press CTRL + [ (not Backspace as it is in Firefox and IE)
  • When I tried to compose a post in Wordpress the toolbar which allows me to add formatting and embed links would not display. I could edit the text, but there was indication if this was the text of the post or the raw HTML.
  • I missed some of my Firefox extensions

So I admitted defeat and switched back to Firefox. And I was dissappointed. I was beginning to warm to Safari. And the speed improvements were obvious and certainly appreciated. I didn’t mind having three browsers on my system. I’d already decided how I was going to use them:

  • Safari - this was going to be my general browser, the browser I used when I had lots of other things open (I usually have Outlook, a few spreadsheets, Word docs, Live Messenger, iTunes and more running). The speed and reduced draw on resources would have made this ideal.
  • Firefox - this was going to be my power browser, when I was going to do a heavy browser session. With its advanced features, excellent support for most things on the web and powerful extensions, it could be tailored to what I need, although it is rather RAM hungry.
  • Internet Explorer - I use IE when I have to, when Firefox can’t/won’t display pages correctly, or when developing web pages. Its resource usage sits between Safari and Firefox, but I just prefer Firefox nowadays.

I still have all three browsers installed, but until Apple addresses the issues I have with Safari, it won’t be used too often. Firefox is, once again, my default browser, and will be for the foreseeable future. I accept that Safari 3 is only in Beta, so it may change so watch this space.

Link

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