Podcatching in iTunes 4.9

You have surely read this elsewhere by now. But Steve Jobs announced earlier this week that iTunes 4.9 which is due in a couple of months will include the ability to subscribe to rss feeds for podcasts (and extensibly all others.) Rexblog discusses some possible easily foreseeable extensions to this capability. I am off for a weekend in the sun. There will be no cast this week, but there will be on June 1st. See You in a Few!

The Educational Mac Podcast #15

The Educational Mac, Podcast 15, Saturday, May 21st Welcome to the Educational Mac Podcast. I apologize for the late show this week, but life has been crazy for a couple of weeks. Just as things are settling down at work as the school year begins to wind down, illness finds its way into the house. My son has not been at school in five weeks now. Three weeks of this was planned as our elementary operates on a year-round schedule and he was on a 3 week break. However, the coughing that began 3 days before he was to go back and the pneumonia that followed has kept him out the last 2 weeks. He was even to sick to play baseball, too sick to even want to play ball. That’s how we really knew how sick he was. His team is undefeated 11 games into the season and it has killed him not to be able to play these last 2 weeks. Anyway, he is finally getting well, but I took a lot of time off caring for him. The funny thing was, things at work started to pick up again as well. Thanks to email and iChat I was able to accomplish a lot of what I needed to while staying at home and caring for the boy. If there was a week I didn’t want to be late with the podcast, this was it. There actually hasn’t been a lot of Mac related educational news this past week, but some things kind of poked their heads up the last couple of days.
Cobb County Developments Macsimum News Coverage Cobb County BOE Press Release University of Georgia bow out of evaluation
Also, I apparently have a retraction to make from the blog, as the podcasting event that appeared on the social calendar for NECC disappeared today. NECC Social Calendar sans podcasting event
Steve Brooks over at the Edugadget blog posts about some new iPod software that looks promising in some ways. Edugadget Post on iStory Creator iStory Creator Homepage
Finally, from the sometimes wishes do come true department, information directly from a Henrico County Schools employee.
See You in a Few!

Late Night Podcasting Lounge at NECC

Just read this from the NECC RSS Feed. The Late-nite Podcasting Lounge will be hosted by Apple, showcasing the emerging trend of podcasting and its impact on education. Outstanding examples of educational podcasts along with classroom integration strategies will be showcased. Come see for yourself how easy it is to use podcasting to impact learning! Since the event is late, you'll be bribed with food, drinks, and even some iPod give-aways ... bring your own iPod to throw into the party mix after the session! Almost sounds like Apple's first public acknowledgement of podcasting. Could it be? See You in a Few!

Late 'Cast This Week

Life is getting in the way of the podcast so far this week. It may be Friday before it gets out. When it does look for some inside information as to what happened to Apple in Henrico. See You in a Few!

Now for a Useful Widget

Over the course of the past several days, I have downloaded about a dozen Widgets for OSX Tiger. Some of the widgets have proved more useful than others. One of the most usefule is AirTraffic Control by Spintriplet.com. It allows you to see what Airport and other wireless access points are in range. For example, right now it is showing a new wireless point that just popped up in my neighborhood. Now another Widget that was published just the other day is not so useful, but works for a great quick diversion. It is a Minesweeper widget. Small, but cool.
Finally, is the widget I am using right now, called Dashblog. If it works, I think I will find myself publishing to the blog much more often, because it is right out there for me to see whenever I invoke Dashboard.
I hope it works well.
See You in a Few!

The Educational Mac Podcast #14

TEM Podcast #14 May 11, 2005
New iMacs and eMacs
Cobb County Dialogue
We're #1 Technology Counts 2005
Future of Podcasting My personal vision of the future of podcasting

The Educational Mac Podcast #13

Tonight's show includes my own little Tiger Review Including my take on Spotlight Dashboard Safari RSS iChat AV 3 including my disappointment QuickTime 7 (This podcast was recorded entirely in QT 7) Dictionaries see sidebar
The latest from Henrico and Cobb Counties
Tiger Tactics
Mac win in a small way
Interview Next Week
See You in a Few!

Tigerize Me

Okay, I got Tiger sooner than expected. Work came through rather quickly with a copy. I had backed up last weekend in case I was able to obtain a copy. So I took a chance and just updated with Tiger. The update ran fine, the machine restarted and wouldn't finish loading the OS. Great! I restarted once, everything came up and this machine has purred ever since.
I love this OS. Even with just updating the OS everything runs faster. I am especially impressed with how fast Safari is loading everything, but especially images. I imported my RSS feeds from Firefox, updated them and they are working great. I like the look of the reponse page for feeds much better than Sage in Firefox.
I am really liking Spotlight as well. My drive indexed in about 20 minutes. I was expecting it to take much longer. I never got Quicksilver to work right for me, but Spotlight works really well for what it is supposed to do. I don't know about "expert" Mac users, but I think teachers will really love Spotlight.
Dashboard is really fun, really cool, and really looks good. I don't think it will improve my workflow in any way, but it is really fun, really cool and really looks good.
I like the changes to Mail as well. I like being rid of the drawer. That always bugged me. Overall it just is cleaner to deal with for me.
Now let me get my rant out. The thing I was most looking forward to with Tiger was the new iChat AV. 10 in an audio chat, 4 in a video chat, cool, cool, cool! Oh, but wait, hold the phone. Come to find out there are some limitations to these functions. With my Powerbook G4 1.5 I can initiate and participate in an audio chat of more than two. However, I cannot initiate only participate in a video chat involving more than two machines. I don't get mad at Apple very often, but I am pissed about this one. Maybe I wasn't listening very well at some point, but I never heard anyone or saw anything saying I would have to have a DP G4 or a G5 to utilize all of the features of the new iChat. Boo on not letting the word out louder.
Aside from that however, I am very pleased with Tiger. About 10 of us in the office loaded it today, and for the most part installation went well. One guy's email didn't quite make the transition, but he'll live.
Other than my gripe, I have to say that Apple did a pretty good job with this update and I look forward to them making it even better.
See You in a Few!