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I use a PS3 too, but drive it from my mac using Medialink software http://www.nullriver.com/products/medialink.
It can transcode video formats that the ps3 doesn't support on the fly which is pretty cool (but means it just breaks if you try to fastfoward/rewind)
I use ethernet-over-power adapters (200M/b) between the ps3 and the router (gigabit/802.11n)

mostly works as intended, can stream 1080p over 11n no problems. Its a little wobbly and requires occasional server restart on the mac, but the wifes figured out that part now too (go to mac, open system preferences and restart medialink )

It can see our itunes library and iphoto library, including all playlists/albums etc too, which is pretty nice , I have some large usb drives hanging off the mac where my library lives. I also have a maxtor nas drive which the ps3 can also see and play video/music from but the upnp server in it isn't so good. (no thumbnails, silly ordering)

Any Xbox 360 has been able to play 1080p video for years. I use connect360 on my OS X box for streaming video and it works perfectly, so I don't know what's wrong with the clients you've tried.

USB mass storage support

So basically Air Sharing?

Tethering

So basically bring back NetShare?

Get a Mac and install Connect360. Works flawlessly. :)

For the fanboys - I'm not seriously recommending he buy a Mac. Just a tongue-in-cheek comment based on the irony that my Mac works better with my 360 than his XP box.

A boycott of the iPhone Apple Design Awards would undoubtedly send a message to Apple, but I doubt it could be pulled off. Those awards are coveted; it's such a big temptation for developers that they won't miss out on it just for a stand on principles.

If that be the case, then what they have are not principles at all.

I for one would love to see NetShare enter and win an award for their iPhone application.

It was a great idea, filled an important need many users were having, and got pulled due to seemingly contradictory reasoning (AT&T allows other mobiles to "tether" on their network).

What a great way to shame Apple and get some easy media attention on the issue.

September 13th, 2008 NetShare, banned from the AppStore Looks like Apple has decided they will not be allowing any tethering applications in the AppStore. As such, NetShare will not be available in the iTunes AppStore. We are seeing a lot of similar reports from various developers who's applications were abruptly removed and banned from the AppStore without any violations of the terms of service. This is all unfortunate news for the iPhone platform end-users.

http://www.nullriver.com/

I noticed Tris is gone too.

I upgraded an iMac at work and, after ensuring that the VPN client is compatible, a MacBook at home. The iMac at home stays on 10.4 until I have a Leopard-compatible SuperDuper. Time Machine looks cool and all, but I really like having a bootable backup.

In my case, OSXPlanet, GeekTool, MenuShade, and Butler have various levels of breakage. In the case of Butler, I'm trying out Spotlight as an application launcher (much faster than in 10.4), and I'm looking into System Events with AppleScript for keyboard macros. SSHKeychain seems to work, but 10.5 has a similar built-in feature that I'm trying out. Think still works, but only within a single virtual desktop. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature.

Think synaptic, only for the iPhone.

Done. Of course you need to hack your iPhone in order to use it, but it works great.

You realize there are 3rd party applications for the iPhone (and thus for ipod touch) already, right? They are no exactly supported by Apple, but they work just fine. Take a look: http://iphone.nullriver.com/beta/

A) The hack in question isn't about running unauthorized programs, but about allowing the iPhone to work on any GSM network.

B) "Normal" iPhone users might not be willing to go through the trouble of hacking the iPhone to run additional problems, but thankfully there are some clever iPhone users who have made it easy for the rest of us. Run a simple GUI program, wait a couple minutes, and you have a nice little package manager built right into your iPhone. It gives you a list of installable applications, and with a couple taps of your finger, it will download apps from the internet and install them.

Xbox 360 upscales DVDs and video files/streams to 1080i just great.

Only if you use the VGA cable. There's no upscaling on the standard component connection. Not sure about the Elite's HDMI connection.

It is very unfortunate that it only support streaming from Windows based computers, but that's a side effect of it being made by Microsoft.

Not so. The Xbox 360 acts as a standard UPnP streaming media consumer. Any software that can stream music or videos to a UPnP media client can feed the 360. In Windows, that would be WMP11 or Windows Media Connect. On Mac, Connect360 works just fine. On Linux, you can use GeeXbox uShare. The 360 still mostly prefers Microsoft-specific formats (though it should do h.264 now), but as long as you have media in a format it wants it's not difficult to serve it up.

There's no question that the PS3 has a ton more potential for new games than the Xbox 360 has. Unfortunately potential means jack and shit if you don't have the games and the features, so lets just see if they can deliver.

I'm not sure I'd say "a ton", though the BD format does have some potential over what the 360 can provide. Technically, the 360 and the PS3 are pretty much on par, with the PS3 being just slightly more powerful and the 360 being easier/nicer to work with. The 360's biggest asset is Xbox Live, and I just don't see Sony catching up any time soon (they killed themselves last generation when they refused to define a real online strategy and just gave up the market to Xbox Live). I could see a crazy future where full retail games are delivered via Xbox Live, stored on hard drives, and swapped around with the 360's removable hard drive.

I use Connect360 from Nullriver. It allows me to stream iTunes to my Xbox easily, and gives me all my playlists like you would expect. It also looks at my iPhoto library and pulls out the Albums for display by the Xbox, and any WMV files you have in your Movies folder are also streamed. Apparently, it will stream internet radio, all you have to do is create a playlist with those stations. The only thing lacking would be video transcoding, so you could play a wider variety of video types. But hey, Mediacenter doesn't even off you that, so I don't consider that a big loss.

http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/connect360

The product that lets you stream music (along with photos and WMVs) from a Mac to the 360 is Connect 360. It seems to work pretty well and they have a demo version too, though it limits you to, I think, 100 songs.

Again - why should I have to install another little widget on my laptop or PC (which has to be MS, btw) for functionality that is technically already in the X360? Furthermore, if a change in GUI is all it takes to make you forget your using an MS product... I'm assuming that your entire network is already MS centric.

You don't. You could certainly copy all of your music to the Xbox 360 hard drive, if you really wanted to. You can also connect mp3 players and external hard drives (FAT32-formatted only) via USB and read from those. However, if you want to do the streaming thing you need something that will feed it the data. Windows Media Connect is little more than an app that feeds UPnP media devices (like the Xbox 360, or the Roku Soundbridge, or one of the many other "networked media devices out there). As such, you don't really need WMC to get your data. You just need something that will do the same thing as WMC, like Connect360 for OS X. I'd be surprised if nobody's working on (or already finished) a similar app for Linux.

How loud are your regular drives exactly? The drive in my laptop (IBM T41) is audible during spin-up, and quiets down a lot afterwards. The X360 on the other hand starts loud and stays loud - loud enough that sitting about 5 feet away from it, I have to turn up the volume on the stereo significantly to mask the drive noise. Yes, I understand that loud drives are common. But the day that a quiet gizmo will come out that does what I want it to do, the X360 will be relegated to strictly playing games that are exclusive to the X360. And that's not MS' goal.

Supposedly the new Samsung drive is quieter than the orignal Hitachi drive. You can try talking Microsoft into doing a gratis swap, or you could try to find one for sale somewhere (I'm sure the llamma will get some eventually, but who knows when or for what price?). Then again, my 360 has a Hitachi drive and the sound is not so overwhelming when it's ~10 feet away in my media center. Maybe I've just gotten used to it.

I've been a Mac user for some time now, yet I still need to write Windows versions of our software. Before I had a PowerBook(15) and a Desktop, but got pissed because I was tied to my desk to do Windows programming. I searched for months to find a computer that measured up to my PowerBook. In the end I got an IBM Z60m. After hating that, I decided on a MacBook Pro to replace both my laptops. (Thank god for IBM's 30 day return policy)

I don't feel like a sucker...
IBM (Lenovo) is a sucker because demand for their product has gone down...
MS is a sucker because I wasn't forced to buy another copy of XP with a new laptop...

I win.

I'm not really sure I understand your complaint. Or that you even understand your complaint.

You can rip music to the Xbox 360 hard drive, yes. It would be incredibly dumb given the limited space, and that's why you find that option near the bottom of the list.

Near the top of the list are options far more palatable. You can connect an iPod (or another MP3 player, or a PSP, or just a regular USB drive with music) right to the front of the Xbox. It'll play MP3, unprotected AACs, etc., whatever bitrate you want. It'll even decipher the iPod built-in database format (which Apple was ungracious enough not to license to anyone). You can also play this music in-games, just like music off the hard drive.

If you don't like that approach, another option near the top is that you can play music off of any Windows PC in your house using the Media Connect software. That music can be housed on a NAS somewhere -- as long as you have some Windows box as the front-end it'll work. Again, any bitrate you want, play in-game/out-of-game/etc. There are also some 3rd-party apps for other OSes -- notably Mac has Connect360 (http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/connect36 0). And if you really want to go crazy, you can pick up a WLAN adapter and carry the Xbox 360 to any room in the house. As long as it can hit the network, you can play your godzilla music collection of 250GB+.

So, what's the complaint here? The Xbox team provided a bunch of different ways to access huge libraries of music, in different formats, at different bitrates. Given the complexity of stuff like deciphering the iPod database and having a UI properly recognize all the ID3 tags of MP3s on a random USB drive (try it -- it does it really elegantly) it doesn't sound like a "half-baked" solution at all. They did their homework -- it's a solid solution.

According to Microsoft, it's just HTTP.

Mac software that streams to an XBox360 was just released, so the Linux stuff can't be too far behind.

Perhaps more important for existing 360 owners who don't wish to change any hardware or software of their console is the ability to stream or read video off the console's hard drive or an attached external USB drive. Right now, that can be done with pictures and audio, but not video. Sure, you can do it if you have a Windows Media Center PC (or Vista) but in the meantime there's nothing else.

For Mac users, a company has software that will allegedly let you stream audio and see pictures from a Mac OS X box. It is not free but I have heard reports on forums that it does work.

I would imagine that just like last time for large changes in hardware or software, people who want to run Xbox Live and have homebrew apps are going to be SOL. And buying a second 360 right now is not only pricey, but also difficult because of the continuing availability problems.

OK, I'll bite. It's because I don't want to load ten web pages one after another to get all the info I get in a few seconds from Dashboard. Wait, is it possible that a widget developer might also parse out all the crap I don't want from a website and help me customize the way I view oh, I don't know, train schedules? A well designed widget does more than provide info, it also reduces clutter.

So if it's so ugly, boring & uninspired, there should be a ton of examples as to how, say, Mac OS X is so much more beautiful, exciting and uplifting? Yet, he's only able to give us one:

Oh, shit... I misread the other recommendations like Comic Life and PSPWare .

Also, you cite performance issues with an MDD dual 1.25. I have the same damn machine you have and I don't have any problems with Dashboard. I'm also willing to bet I'm running more at once than someone who claims that it's "retarded."

Troll troll troll.

For Mac OS X, I tried the two major Mac PSP sync apps, iPSP and PSPWare.

After testing the two, I preferred PSPWare -- and immediately paid the US$10 to register. It synced up my iTunes mp3 playlists and iPhoto libraries easily, and has a dead-simple movie conversion and sync function.

Very elegant software, nice work.

~jeff

Agreed. The ticker is not a bad design in itself, but most of them have been poorly designed.

RSS tickers drove me batty until I found that some remove headlines from the ticker when I mark them "not interested" as well as when I click on them to open a story. Only the headlines I want to keep stay in the ticker.

PS: For me, it was a very close call between Tickershock and NewsTicker, but NewsTicker won. Their site and help are not that informative, but I liked seeing headlines from different sources in different colors.

I feel so spoiled having a *nix-based system with so many great apps to choose from.

NewsTicker?