April 1st, 2009 Jeff
For those of us who are still using DirecTV, you can now rejoice. A DirecTV application to record your shows via your DVR has finally arrived. The application is called (aptly) DirecTV and sports a very straightforward interface.
You can find television shows via search by channel or by date and time. The nice thing is that in the Settings panel you can set it to only display channels that you subscribe to. (Very helpful) The interface feels like a solid iPhone app, which based on my previous experience with DirecTV is more of a credit to the Apple SDK than to the DirecTV developers.
Once you find a show, you can set it to record the episode or record the entire series. You can also select which DVR should record it (if you own multiple), give the recording a priority of “Record if Possible” or “Definitely Record”. This works in tandem with the Prioritizer feature in the DVR, which helps dictate what shows get recorded in the event of a recording conflict. You can also set the “Keep Until” option to “Disk is Full” or “I Delete It”.
Will you handle all your recordings with this application? My guess is you probably not, but if you’re on the go and forgot about that episode of Grey’s Anatomy than you’ll be happy that you have it.
The application is free and works over EDGE/3G and Wifi. The application was fairly snappy for me on EDGE as well, so even though I don’t own a 3G phone I’m sure the performance will be solid.
Screenshots
Posted in Apple, Software, Television | View Comments
November 29th, 2008 Jeff
I will not dispute that Adium is the champ when it comes to instant messaging on the Mac. But every heavyweight champion has his weaknesses and Adium is no different. My main gripe with Adium is it’s lack of consistency in the realm of file transfers. I often need to send or receive a file through an IM client and Adium tends to fall flat on it’s face. In all fairness to the Adium developers, they rely on a library called libpurple. This library (and by extension Adium) has trouble handling file transfers in firewall situations. But because libpurple is maintained by someone else, there is no time table from Adium on when this will be fixed.
So with that in mind I present to you a Chax plugin for iChat. Why you say? Well my biggest gripe with iChat is the fact that it doesn’t handle tabbed windows.
Every chat session in iChat opens in a seperate window by default. I hate that. With Chax a few menu options will allow you to have multiple chat conversations in a single window. Another pain in the ass feature about iChat is that if you login with multiple AIM accounts, each buddy list will show up as a separate window in iChat. Chax can fix that for you as well with the “Use All Contacts as Primary Contact List” option. (In the iChat preferences window under CHAX -> General)
Now if we could just get iChat to support a few other protocols it would be perfect. I also forgot that Adium isn’t so hot on the audio and video chatting either, yet another reason to use iChat. Chax makes it just a little less painful to do. Check it out.
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