sidv : work is play is life » iphone

Seamless Media Home – Part 1: Music

Siddharth Vanchinathan — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:43:49 +0000

So I’m on this mission lately. I want to make all media sources in my house wirelessly integrated. I listen to a lot of music, different kinds, varying by my mood and where I am in the house. The various sources of music in my house are:

Macbook Pro
PC
iPhone
Sony Hifi
Television

And here are the various output sources I have at home:

Inbuilt Laptop Speakers
Bose SoundDock Portable
Sony Hifi
Creative Inspire 2.1

I bought the SoundDock for obvious sound superiority and the ability to play music directly off my phone. Now the problem was that whenever I would get an SMS or a call, the music would stop and to attend to my phone I would have to disconnect it from the dock. The SoundDock has a 3.5mm audio port for aux inputs. I figured I could use that more effectively. So here’s what I did:

Bought a Apple AirPort Express 802.11n (Rs. 4700 in India) which coupled with iTunes can stream music wirelessly from your computer and output to any speaker that is connected to it.
I configured it to connect to my wireless network and connected it to the Bose SoundDock using a 2m audio cable (The 2m is not needed, the store didn’t have a shorter cable!)
Now via iTunes and AirTunes I can stream music wirelessly around my house. Also, I can play music simultaneously on all the speakers connected via AirTunes (Note: For every speaker you want to connect, you will need one AirPort Express)
Installed the Remote app on my iPhone via the AppStore and I have an easy access to my iTunes library. I can also switch AirTunes speakers through the Remote app. Brilliant!
Now I got a little more greedy. The problem with AirTunes is that you can stream audio only from iTunes. No system sounds or movies etc. Did some googling and voila! – AirFoil to the rescue. This small application runs in the background and “hacks” into your AirTunes to allow audio to be streamed from videos as well. There is an obvious lag of 2 seconds or so due to the wireless nature of the link. But this can be overcome if you use the video player that AirFoil provides. Another alternative is to use VLCs audio desync feature to manually adjust the synchronisation of the audio and video streams (hit and try to get the right settings).

So there you go, listen to music wirelessly throughout your house. Also try out SweetFM – it’s a last.fm client (only for macs presently). There are obviously a lot of different ways you can achieve this and I would like to hear how you did it. This method is much cheaper than alternatives such as Bose that offer similar results but at a much much higher price.

iPhone 3.0 First Impressions

Siddharth Vanchinathan — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:45:24 +0000

The 3.0 software update released a couple of days ago and almost soon after the generous iPhone dev-team released the updated version of their jailbreaking/unlocking software Pwnage. Now for those of you who are still on 2.2.1 or below and have used pwnage before (I’m talking only about iPhone 2g), go ahead and update directly through iTunes. For those who haven’t used pwnage before or have used quickpwn then try redsn0w. It’s simple, quick, easy and similar to quickpwn.

I used pwnage intially and after 2 days of using the phone I realised my battery was dying within a day and my network was not as stable as it used to be. Decided to give redsn0w a try and I’m currently restoring my phone settings after successfully unlocking. Will post an update as to the results in one or two days. So here’s the deal with 3.0 if you’ve noticed lower battery life and other problems. Turn off all push notifications, whether in your email settings or in the apps supporting push – all problems solved. As for impressions of 3.0 here are some things I noticed immediately.

SMS landscape isn’t that great, specially if you’re used to typing in portrait mode. You will still hit trees if you text while walking though, a bigger keypad doesnt help.
Copy Paste was a little cumbersome initially, but the ability to select and delete large amounts of text at a go is a great help.
“Lol” doesn’t get capitalized anymore!
The phone seems much faster than before. Apps load up quicker too.
When you go from an app to the home screen (by pressing the button), previously the screen simply vanished into the center. Now, opacity is also gradually reduced when the vanishing happens (yes, I notice such stuff!).
The bottom padding for the SMS input text box seems to have increased, and the text that is input is not in the center of the box anymore. Cursor has become blue as well!
Shake to shuffle music is good, but what good is it when the phone is in your pocket?
Camera loads up much quicker and shows a thumbnail of your last picture. Well, I’m still wondering why video was not included in the update?!
Same with the voice controls – it’s not a hardware deficiency!
Wifi seemed to remain connected for a longer period of time. Earlier if it wasn’t being used, it was turned off automatically – maybe that’s why my battery is lasting less longer as well.
App store still doesn’t cache results! When will apple fix this? It is extremely irritating when the list has to load every single time you see more details of an app.
I still haven’t got any push notifications! Push has only been enabled in Tap Tap Revenge. Yet to see more apps using it effectively.

More when I come across them, till then hit up comments to tell me what you noticed!

Blogging on the go

Siddharth Vanchinathan — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 05:43:29 +0000

This post was written while testing the new wordpress iphone app. This app is cool and it allows me to blog while not at my computer. Not that I am a jet setting travelling hot shot. But well it’s cool nonetheless. More later!