iPhone app for listening to Minnesota Public Radio

Apple will never install an FM tuner into the iPhone/iTouch/iPod, so MPR has introduced a streaming iPhone app for them alone ...

MPR: About Us: Mobile Services

... Listen to MPR on your iPhone and iPod Touch with the MPR Radio iPhone application. The Current, Classical MPR, and MPR News are all available to stream on your iPhone or iPod Touch when you install the free MPR Radio application from the iTunes App Store...

Funny to spend all those CPU cycles to do something that was once so very cheap. Digital radio, of a sort.

PS. There's a cute preview of their iPhone oriented news service. Sooner or later mmprnews.publicradio.org/iphone will go live.

It will be interesting to compare the quality of classical MPR to, say, Sirius or XM.

Spaces, expose and custom mouse buttons - sweet

Until now 10.5 hasn't really done anything for me. Yeah, I can now share the shared folder, and that's good -- but, on the other hand, Leopard remote desktop is a toy.

Spaces, though, they're nicer than I thought. For example:

macosxhints.com - 10.5: Drag and drop between Spaces

... If you have two applications in two separate spaces (e.g iPhoto and Keynote), and you would like to drag an item from the first application to drop in the second application, here are two easy ways to do just that.

First, you can drag the item (file, photo, etc..), press F8 and then select the other space, then drop the item into the other application. Or you can drag the file, press Command-Tab, and then drop the dragged icon on the other application. You will then be switched automatically to the other space to drop your stuff, just like in Tiger.

But it gets better. My Microsoft Mouse has four buttons and a clickable scroll wheel. I mapped button 3 Expose - desktop, button 4 to Spaces, and the wheel to Expose - all windows. (To do this I set button 4 to "Mac OS controlled", then in Spaces Preferences set button 4 to show Spaces).

Now, if I'm working on something, I can click button 4, then I can drag windows between spaces (nice). I can also use the expose buttons within any spaces window I click on.

I have 4 spaces now and will probably scale up. You can assign an app to a space, and I might do that for the Finder, but in general I prefer to organize by task. That's why I'm de-emphasizing tabbed browser use -- I prefer to use windows and Spaces to organize my work.

Google Reader now has tagged streams

Google reader shared feeds now inherit the tag of the folder(s) they are assigned to in Google Reader. You can see them in the post footer when you view a post within Reader, and if you click on them you get a filtered version of the shared post list:

For example:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/user%2F06457543619879090746%2Flabel%2FSciTech

shows only posts from my "SciTech" tagged feeds, or posts to which that tag has been manually added during Sharing.

The above link requires a Google reader account. For heck of it I tried:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/06457543619879090746%2Flabel%2FSciTech

but today that gives "permission denied". Likewise I wasn't able to discover a feed for this stream; the feed associated with the filtered page is the general shared item feed.

Still, it's progress. Soon I might be able to share my sci and tech posts without sharing my (very Dem) political posts.

Making your Google custom search the IE and Firefox defaults

I love my Google custom searches, I’ve made a subset of them the “start” page I use on all browsers and platforms.

My favorite search engine includes Google, but I’ve added biases including

1. everything linked to from links in my Google Reader exported OPML file
2. my Gordon’s Tech/Notes extended memory [1]
3. my legacy web pages
4. everything I like and add via my toolbar embedded Google Marker

Why do I love this search?

Say you search on “In our Time" and “Social Contract” in standard Google. Today you go to the evil iPlayer oriented BBC site, the streaming-centric site that never mentions podcasts. With my custom search engine I go instead to the virtuous original site.

My biased Google is flat out better than straight Google. For me, anyway.

It’s annoying to have to go to my special page to run it though. I’d like to replace my browser search in Firefox and IE with the Google-Gordon search. In the old days that was easy – just run a search, extract the URL, add a wild card, and paste it into the browser like so:

• http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&ie=UTF-8&q=TEST&sa=Search to something like
• http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&q=$w (Windows Live Toolbar syntax)

Now it’s harder, but not terribly harder. It’s just terribly hard to find out how to do it.

For Internet Explorer 7 it’s very easy. From the search drop down choose “find more providers” and follow the simple directions to “create your own”:

So I just pasted in:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&ie=UTF-8&q=TEST&sa=Search

and it works:

You can also create a Google Toolbar 5 custom button and in Windows Live toolbar search you just enter this URL:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&q=$w

I don’t know how to create a custom search to over-ride the Firefox default search, but, and this was surprisingly hard to find, it’s not hard to create a custom Google/Firefox toolbar button:

The Google Toolbar's Custom Buttons feature makes it possible for you to create buttons and share them with other Google Toolbar users via our Custom Buttons download page at http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/buttons/gallery
To create a search button for your favorite site, please follow the instructions below:
1. Open Mozilla Firefox and visit the search page for which you'd like to create a custom button.
2. Place your cursor inside a search box on that site and right-click your mouse to view the context menu.
3. Select "Generate Custom Search" and click "Add."

Holy cow. These bizarre directions actually work. I added my button and made it my new default. A couple of caveats:

1. The directions are all for XP. It does work in Firefox 3/OS X, but some of the directions don't apply (ex: where xml is stored)
   
2. This wouldn't work from the Gadget form on my search page, I had to go the google hosted page directly.
3. To get the XML, so you can host the button, you use Google FirefoxToolbar:Manage:Select Button:Edit:Advanced Edit.
   

I put my search button XML file on one of my personal sites. This link is supposed to add it to a Google toolbar:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.faughnan.com/gordon_google.xml

Buttons can be submitted it to the Google Button Gallery, but I don't have delusions of grandeur.

[1] Damnit Blogger, give me backlinks! BTW, I remember when “extended memory” had a different meaning, as in “QEMM”.

Google Contacts is now a standalone page

I'd not realized that Google contacts was actually a standalone web page rendered within Gmail. In retrospect that explains why it seems so different from the rest of Gmail, and why Gmail integration is incomplete.

Personally I don't like Google's contact manager -- I preferred the prior approach. Still, it really does make sense for Google to have Contacts as a distinct service. They're used for more than email.

Here's how to see your contacts in their own page. This would look particularly good in chrome-less Chrome:

Google Contacts

Google has recently updated the stand-alone contacts page by adding a logo and a more prominent search box. Unfortunately, the URL is not user-friendly: http://mail.google.com/mail/contacts/ui/ContactManager.

Recent updates to my iPhone notes post

I keep finding more good and bad iPhone features.

Other than the missing cut and paste (I'm sure it's hung up by patent fights), the current bizarre problems are search and long launch times ...

Gordon's Tech: iPhone notes you won't read elsewhere:

...The Address Book was very slow to launch with 2.0 (4 secs on my phone), but Google Mobile search also searches the Address Book -- and it's fast. Apple 'improved' the launch time with version 2.1 by speeding address book launch and slowing down the launch time of every other iPhone app.

Search on the Address book is first and last name only. If you define a company name, search is on the company name only....

BBC mobile page for all and iPhone iPlayer for the UK

The BBC has a mobile page. Using the preferences link at page bottom you can experiment with various versions and bookmark the one you like. I have a version on my iPhone "home page" as an icon -- next to Google News mobile, the disappointing NYT reader, and the excellent Google Reader Mobile.

The BBC has also announced streaming audio support for the iPhone over WiFi only using their evil iPlayer service. This service allows only 7 days of access, in contrast to a far superior podcast alternatives that allows unlimited access after download. Evil, definitely.

Earlier versions of iPlayer were Flash based and wouldn't work on an iPhone, so they've had to concede to Apple's non-Flash policy.

The BBC announced this, but they don't say how to access iPlayer. If you go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer via a 3G connection from the US you get the Flash version -- it won't work. Comments point out that iPlayer service is UK only, so US users would need some kind of proxy service to test.