Category: Software

I use this category to discuss software that I use and either like or…. not.

I started trying to backup all my music from my iPod to DVD-Rs last night and K3B said it successfully burned all the files straight from the iPod to disc, but upon looking at the disc; it was obviously a bad burn (only the center of the disc had “grooves”). I was busy with other things and didn’t get a chance to work on this any further than that last night.

Today while I was home for lunch, I tried playing around with iTunes & the iPod under Windows some more; it’s free single Tuesday, after all! Initially I didn’t have much luck but I did some more searching online and found more suggestions. Most of them didn’t look very helpful or promising, but one said to drop the iPod into the dock, disconnect the dock from the computer and reconnect it.

For whatever reason, that worked! Yeah baby! I got the new free single and a bunch of MP3s I downloaded the other day; so now I’m good to go with additional music. *joy* 🙂

Over the weekend, I started visiting some MP3 blogs and downloading some of the free tracks out there for extra listening material on my iPod. Today over lunch, I booted my home computer into Windows; so I could transfer those tracks to the iPod1. However it seems I’ve been biten by a bug in the iTunes/iPod software.

See, iTunes wouldn’t launch with the iPod connected; it would start in the background but wouldn’t display the GUI (at least it wouldn’t do it quick enough to satisfy me). If I disconnected the iPod, launched iTunes, reconnected the iPod then iTunes would continue to run but would fail to see the iPod. I tried dinking around with this for a while (rebooting, disconnecting, reconnecting, checking for updates and whatnot) but didn’t get any closer to having iTunes recognize the iPod. Though at one point an error message did pop-up telling me I needed to reformat the iPod.

I started searching Apple’s website, as I remembered hearing that there was an issue like this back in April when the last update for iTunes/iPod was released. The most info I could find basically told me to backup, reformat the iPod and try again. *sigh*

That’s not something I really wanted to hear. I guess tonight I’ll be booting back into Linux; backing up the data from the iPod to DVD-Rs and then trying some more drastic measures to get the iPod working right again.

Oh and the other reason I’m upset with iTunes; is that I forgot to go buy some songs from them over the weekend and hence had zero chance to win a free Powerbook. *double sigh*

1 For the record, I am familiar with gtkPod but it gives me errors everytime I try and get it just to read from my iPod which makes me disinclined to use it to write to the iPod.

I’ve been working on a project designing a personal website for AWelkin. Last Friday, I gave her the templates I’d constructed for her. She seemed pretty excited & happy with them, but then I tried to start showing her how to edit them; only to find that she doesn’t have any good tools for doing such a thing. The only real editor she had was TextEdit (I think it just comes with OS X) and it doesn’t do syntax highlighting; which would make life hard for her. Since I don’t have a Mac1; I couldn’t really offer recommendations to her.

The only editor for Macs that I’d heard of is BBEdit but I had heard that was a rather complex program and I really thought it was more than she’d need. Then I talked to my local Mac geek and found out that BBEdit is really expensive! So I asked if he could recommend any other cheaper/simpler editors. He did a bit of searching and said PageSpinner would be a good option. I looked at the PageSpinner website and it uses valid HTML; which is a good sign. The screenshots also looked promising, but were kind of small and there doesn’t appear to be any larger versions available2. On the plus side, the feature list for PageSpinner does appear to cover everything that I think AWelkin would need (e.g. syntax highlighting and a preview function).

Anyhoo, I’m posting this note in hopes that AWelkin might read it and let me know if this PageSpinner program will work for her.

1 I’m not a PC evangelist or a Mac-Hater. I just don’t have the money to buy a Mac right now and I’m not likely to any time soon. Oh and for the record, those 15 inch G4 Powerbooks look like the sweetest laptops on this planet!
2 Guys, you really need to get some larger screenshots up. Some of us are nearly blind as it is and trying to look at your product from tiny shots like these really doesn’t help our eyesight. So please, please, please post some larger images for us to look at. Remember, not everybody visiting your site will be willing to download your app just to see if it will work for them; they may be stuck using WinBlows and trying to find something suitable for their Mac using friends.