Mike Walsh's random thoughts and musings …
Archive for September 2, 2010
Why doesn’t the new iPod Touch have GPS?
0624 days
Yesterday was the big Apple iPod announcement event for 2010. There has been oodles of coverage of the event. I was surprised that the iPad didn’t get an OS update and was pleased to see buttons back on the Shuffle. The Nano is ok although I am not sure losing the slim rectangular shape and click wheel is a good idea, only time will tell.
The real interesting device was the iPod Touch. I have a second generation 8GB iPod Touch which I bought off of Craig’s List before I committed to the iPhone. I was unsure about only having a touch screen key board so a used iPod Touch let me test it out without committing to a two year contract for the iPhone which I eventually did.
I like the Touch and actually use mine quite a bit even though I have an iPhone. I was looking forward to the new Touch, in particular for the rumored camera feature. Having an HD video camera would be nice, the camera in my 3GS is so-so at best.
Today I was speaking with my co-worker Nick and we were talking about the Touch and my desire to have one, even though I don’t need it. Nick mentioned that if it had GPS, the Touch would be perfect. It got me thinking – why did Apple leave out the GPS?
If the Touch had GPS then it could:
- Geo tag photos and video
- Enable navigation with Google and/or Bing Maps (there is nothing worse than using my iPhone for GPS only yo have a call come in)
- Possibly replace dedicated GPS hardware
- All the location based services that Apps offer
I am sure there are other uses too but these came to mind. Lack of GPS is really the only short coming that I could see.
I was hopeful that the rumors about the new Apple TV would be true and it would be a screen-less iPod Touch for the TV. While the new Apple TV has some pretty cool features, I don’t see much differentiation over comting products from Roku, Western Digital, Boxee and others. Each of these streaming devices seems to have one limitation or another. I haven’t seen anything that says the new Apple TV supports UPnP which both my Xbox and WDTV Live do support.
I am disappointed in the Flickr support from the WDTV Live so was hopeful that the Apple TV would be more compelling than it is. As it is, if I had to buy something right now, I think I’d get the Roku HD for $69.
Working with WordPress 3.0 multisite
0624 days
I started playing with WordPress 3.0′s multsite functionality this week. I have a number of WordPress blogs for various things and they are a nuisance to keep updated. I had looked at WordPress-MU about 18 months ago when I did the CASL Ambassadors site and determined that it had more limitations than I was ready to deal with so I just went with a separate WordPress installs.
WordPress 3.0′s multisite functionality is pretty straight forward and it only took a little while to set it up. I followed the instructions found in the this post on WpEngineer.com. I wanted to use the subdomain setting but it appears the hosting plan I have with GoDaddy.com won’t allow it so for now, I am using subfolders.
Now that I have things up and running I need to start moving my sites. The first one I moved is for Photos. I want to share photos with my family and host them on Flickr but I have never liked the lack of presentation that Flickr has.
I found an interesting theme called AutoFocus which tiles posts across the front page of the blog. I am slowly going back in time to create a post for each of the sets I have stored in Flickr. I had to create a work-around for the post image to appear on the front page.
AutoFocus uses the first image attached to a post as the image display on the blog front page. My posts don’t have one, at least I don’t want them them. I want the post to contain the oEmbed Flickr gallery and the thumbnails using the Flickr Gallery plugin.
What I ended up doing to get it to work was to add an image via URL from Flickr and then add the tag attribute style=”display: none” to the IMG tag. Works like a champ!
Recent Comments