Hulu Introduces HuluPLUS For $10 A Month

Today, Hulu introduced its subscription service, HuluPLUS. HuluPLUS will offer content on multiple devices such as the iPad, iPhone, and televisions via Sony's Playstation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360.  HuluPLUS will allow subscribers access to the service's back catalog of shows and season passes of current programming. The subscription fee will cost $9.99 a month.  Current episodes of shows will remain on the free site.

$10 a month seems expensive compared to NetFlix which starts out at $9 a month and has a larger catalog.  Is this the end of Hulu or the start of something great?

My Love / Hate Relationship With iTunes

iTunes, Apple's hub to its digital media player empire, is seriously broken.  The only way to sync an iPod, iPhone, or iPad to a computer is through iTunes.  As the software has "improved" over the years, it seems to have actually got worse.

I was first introduced to iTunes almost 5 years ago.  Prior to using iTunes, I used Windows Media Player and Winamp.  I had a small mp3 collection and I still listened to the majority of my music on cds.  One day I heard of an audio recording making its way around the internet called "The Revenge Of The Screen Savers".  As a big fan of The Screen Savers, I had to check this out.  I found the podcast and installed iTunes 6 to listen to it.  I was hooked.  I started finding podcasts through the iTunes store and enjoyed every minute of it.  My wife even bought me a 5th generation iPod with video for Christmas that year.  That is when I started to really notice iTunes' shortfalls.

Now that I had an iPod, I needed to convert my large CD collection into mp3s.  This was a very time consuming task, but it was worth it.  After all, I was going to be able to carry my entire music collection with me at all times.  I plugged in my iPod to sync it with iTunes and it took forever.  My collection was about 10GB, so there were a lot of songs to copy over.  I was surprised that iTunes kept hanging the computer, but I wrote that off since the computer was several years old.

Six months later I bought my first Mac, a 17" Intel iMac.  I was very impressed with the interface and it's overall speed.  It didn't seem to hang on anything and iTunes ran and looked much better than it did on my Windows XP PC.  I had purchased a bunch of used CDs from various sources and imported all of them into iTunes. After a while, my hard drive (only 160GB) started filling up with documents, media, and applications.  I decided to purchase an external hard drive for my iTunes library. Moving my library seemed easy enough. I chose not to back up the library database. Since I didn't use playlists or rate songs at the time, I didn't think I needed to.  Well I was wrong.  There was a bug in iTunes that was preventing the ID3 tag of mp3 files to write to the mp3. All of the music I converted to mp3 on my iMac had it's title, artist, and album information missing. All of the songs were ruined and need to be reimported.  To this day, I convert the ID3 tag of any album I import even though there haven't been any reports of this bug in years!

Apple keeps adding more features into iTunes with every release.  We now have music, podcasts, video, apps, photos, calendar, contacts, bookmarks, books (audio/e-book), and iTunes U syncing with our Apple devices. In addition, there are Genius Playlists, Coverflow, gapless playback, and iTunes DJ running processes and updates in the background. iTunes seems to hang all of the time now.  Unlike other OS X programs, iTunes has the special power to hang my entire system when it freezes.  If I get impatient and force quit the application, I have to wait 15 - 30 minutes the next time I launch iTunes while it verifies my library.

Speaking of iTunes freezing, iTunes routinely seems to hang while syncing my 3rd generation iPod Touch.  I’m not sure if the software is really hanging or actually syncing my data because iTunes only displays the status of “syncing iPod”.  The status bar needs to be more descriptive so users actually know what is occurring with their devices. 

Below are a couple of key issues Apple needs to address to improve iTunes. 

• Better support for large libraries.


• Improved performance & lower memory usage


• Smart Playlists syncing doesn’t work on iOS devices


• Better descriptions in the status bar


• Improved interface for creating playlists

For being the portal for all of Apple’s profitable “i” devices, it doesn’t seem the company spends too much time improving the performance of iTunes.  In it's current kluged together state, iTunes seems more like a product from Redmond instead of Cupertino. Hopefully, the application will be completely rewritten in the next major release.

iPad Camera Connection Kit

 

The iPad camera connection kit is a great accessory, if you can find one.  The current wait time on Apple.com is 4-6 weeks.  If you don't have one yet, you better get your order in!  I ordered mine when the wait time was 3-4 weeks and it took 5 weeks to get delivered.

The kit comes with 2 adapters, USB & SD card, that plug into the 30 pin connector at the bottom of the iPad. To import your photos, insert the SD card into the adapter or connect the camera directly to the iPad via USB. The photo application will automatically launch and give you the option to import all of the photos and videos or select individual files.  

The ability to transfer your photos to your iPad can come in handy.  If you are on a long vacation and fill up all of your storage on your camera, just transfer the photos and keep shooting.  Plus, the iPad's 10" screen is great for showing off your shots right after you take them (holiday parties?).

Besides the intended use of transferring your photos, the camera kit has more abilities.

You can:

• Connect a USB keyboard 


• Attach audio devices such as USB headphones and microphones


• Connect external storage devices (jailbroken only)

 

Price: $29 

Rating: 5/5

 

Fix OS X Trash Issues

Recently, I lost the ability to move files to the trash on my iMac running OS 10.6. At first I thought this might be a win, but the idea of accidentally deleting important files quickly filled my mind.  To rebuild the trash folder, run the below terminal command. The first command is for your main admin account and the second one is for another user with the user's short name replacing "user_name" in the command.

Main Admin account: sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash

User account: sudo rm -rf /Users/user_name/.Trash

If you are running this for the same account you are logged into, you will need to log off after running the command.

 

E-Book Price War Begins

Barnes & Noble has reduced the cost of the 3G Nook to $199 from $259 and began offering a wifi only model for $149.  In response, Amazon has cut the price of the Kindle to $189. Recently, Apple announced they have sold over 3 million iPads within the first 80 days of availability.

This is great news for the e-book market.  Expect the e-book market to really begin to gain market share.  Do you use an e-book reader or are you thinking about getting one?

Connecting External Storage To An iPad

 

If you have a jailbroken iPad, you're in luck.  Through the use of the iPad Camera connection kit, it is possible to access external storage through the kit's USB or SD card slot.  There are multiple ways to access the data stored on the external device, but the easiest way (so far) is using the Cydia app iFile.

To access your external data, attach the camera connection kit to the iPad and plug in your device.  If you receive the error "The attached USB device is not supported" your device has mounted properly.  Click the dismiss button and open iFile.  At the root folder, browse to var -> mnt.  This directory contains all of the external storage devices you have mounted.  The default folder is typically mount1.  Open the folder and you will have access to the documents, photos, movies, and music you have stored on the drive.

Productivity Spotlight: Dropbox

 

Dropbox is an online storage product that allows users to sync their data to any Mac, Windows, or Linux computer and Android and iPhone OS mobile devices.  Dropbox provides 2GB of free storage and up to 100GB available for purchase.

After installing Dropbox, a folder is created on your computer. This folder is automatically synced with the service allowing access to your files from any computer, via the desktop or web client. The files are also accessible on your supported mobile device. 

Besides syncing files, Dropbox allows you to share files with other people.  Inside the web client, you can create a URL to any file located in your public folder.  Once you have the link, you can send it out to anyone so they can read the file.  The service also supports collaboration.  Users can create new or share existing folders and grant members access to the files.  If one of the participants is not a Dropbox user, an email invitation will be sent to the individual.

If you are an iPad user, the Dropbox app is a must have.  The interface is clean and easy to use and it makes getting files on your iPad a snap.