podcasting

Floola the brilliant FREE Itunes replacement for the iPod

Jonathan utils , , , ,

image001Floola is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod or your Motorola mobile phone (any model supporting iTunes except iPhone and iPod touch). It’s a standalone application that can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation under Linux (any GTK2 distro), Mac OS X (10.3.9 or newer!) and Windows (98 or newer, including Vista).

Manage Music, Videos, Podcast and Photos all in one simple app, anywhere on any computer.

Installation of floola merely involves unzipping the distribution and copying the .exe file to your iPod root directory. You can then run the application to manage all your music, download podcasts, images, smart playlists and synchronise with Outlook all from the iPod – no additional software is required. The process is very easy and quick. I haven’t found any issues with the software.

Floola works on multi-platforms; Windows (from 98), MAC and any Linux distribution. Floola also integrates well with last.fm. Adding files to you iPod is now just a question of drag and drop onto the Floola interface – it couldn’t be easier. Other really handy features include a search for duplicate files, search for ‘lost’ files on the iPod, easy addition of videos, automatic conversion of audio and video that are not in recognized formats, synchronisation with Google calendars, export playlists to HTML – it will even try to FIX a iPod that is not working properly!

Clearly an essential addition to your software if you do not want to have to rely on iTunes and its limitations.

floola – manage your ipod without iTunes

Jonathan general ,

I recently started using Floola to manage my old video ipod. I keep the video ipod in the car and use my FM transmitter to listen to podcasts via the car radio. This is a good solution as the battery power on the ipod is not brilliant and I don’t particularly use it for any video watching. I was getting frustrated with the iTunes software to sync my now ageing ipod and found that iTunes kept asking me to upgrade and download the latest version; which seemed to screw the synchronisation process with the ipod and sometimes even did not see the ipod at all.

Floola is a single .EXE program that you copy to your ipod and run directly from the ipod. You plug in the ipod, use file explorer to find the drive of the ipod, copy the floola.exe to that drive and then run the program from there. this gave me the advantage of being able to keep the ipod self contained so that I could manage the ipod on any pc plus the floola software can even maintain your list of podcast rss feeds and download via the floola program. The only downside I found is that the software can sometimes be slightly unpredictable and like all software of this nature; takes some getting used to. Having said that in these days of massive downloads and bloated software it’s refreshing to find a piece of software that is small (only 1 exe file – no installation) and simple once you get used to it.

I strongly recommend it and it’s donationware, which means donate an amount of money if you want – but you don’t have to.

Floola is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod or your Motorola mobile phone (any model supporting iTunes). It’s a standalone application that can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation under Linux, Mac OS X and Windows (Windows Vista is supported).

Software Engineering for Internet Applications (Philip Greenspun)

Jonathan general , , , ,

A really good online book that talks about building internet applications. Philip Greenspun discusses his books and life on a podcast on IT Conversations (transcript available:
Software Engineering for Internet Applications

This book covers all the issues to do with building a web site, topics cover; planning, user registration and management, content management, scaling, search plus some really interesting areas such as XML, SOAP and MSDL and user activity analysis – well worth reading and it’s online free!

There are several data models for each area showing the notional breakdown of structure for the topic. For example under the chapter heading of content management, Philip shows a model for articles and then goes into a great deal of depth on the key elements of the online community specifically discussing the ‘means of collaboration’ and how articles may be posted (as a form of content management).

Part of the collaboration may involve comments from other people, as for example, a blog or similar concept. Again the struture for implementation is shown and discussed looking at the merits and downsides of implementing such a schema.

There’s plenty more besides. Just in the this one article Philip covers; news and discussions, file systems, workflow and related problems, version control, normalisation of tables, plus loads more.

Read it and listen to the podcast on IT Conversations – both are a wonderful insight into the web building community.

Entry level system for podcasting

Jonathan general , , ,

If you want to go to a site that explains about what pod casting equipment you may want to buy from entry level to advanced, visit this site.

pcrig4 Entry level system to start podcasting. This site has loads of different setups ranging from next to nothing to ultra expensive.

Various things that interest me for the moment.

Podcasting Tutorial

Jonathan general , ,

Podcasting Tutorial

Step by Step … How to Podcast Using FeedForAll

Podcasting is simply distributing audio content using RSS. The process is suprisingly simple, and by making audio content available using RSS, podcasters give listeners more control over what they listen to and when. Also, many podcasts are available for syndication, which increases a broadcasters exposure.

Podcasting Tools and Resource Article

Jonathan utils ,

Podcasting Tools and Resource Article:

Podcasting Tools

Podcasting is increasing in popularity and, realizing that many are interested in providing audio content in a podcast, we have assembled a collection of tools that make creation, promotion and listening to podcasts a little easier.