Hanselminutes Podcast 34 - Scott talks to Chris Sells
My thirty-fourth Podcast is up In this unusual episode I head over to Chris Sells' house to chat. It's a little longer than usual, but Chris is an interesting guy. We ramble, but cover software design, user experience, programmer personality types, and Windows Vista. This is the first show I interviewed someone on (not counting the TechEd "on the floor" show) so if it's interesting (or not) let me know and we might do others.
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About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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I like less formal conversations that are chock-full of real content, rather than structured interviews.
I met Chris Sells at PDC03. I planned on asking him a bunch of stuff, but I just walked up, stammered "I know you", and scampered off. I ;)
Anyway maybe you should set up a blog/comments on hanselminutes.com.
You could even duplicate the posts here some how.
http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2006/10/get-key-state-from-console-application.html
Hope it can help...
It’s obvious from the other comments that we are not alone in our iTunes pet peeves. Your show inspired me to finally submit my list of enhancements to iTunes at:
a@http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html@http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html
My #1 pet peeve: after any podcast finishes playing on your iPod you get taken to the start menu! Of course no one ever listens to two episodes of the same podcast in a row. Apple must think that after something as mentally taxing as listening to a podcast you need to browse some photos or play some games.
Maybe if we all submit our ideas iTunes will be wicked awesome by v8...
Tom
re: iTunes authorization. You can de-authorize computers from within iTunes. In 7.01 you click on the "Store" menu and select "View My Account". Then you can sign in and it will show you your account information, including how many machines are authorized to play music from this account. If you are signed into the ITMS, you can also click on your account name in the upper right hand corner. That's not very intuitive. Once you have authorized all 5 machines, a new button will appear that says "de-authorize all machines". This reset button will allow you to start over.
I ran into the same problem you did, I paved a few machines and lost a few of my "authorizations". At first I thought it was a pain to have the "authorizations" being unavailable to me, but I realized that as long as I could authorize more machines, I was still OK. Fortunatly, they aren't gone forever.
Comments are closed.
Re: Itunes
While I don't think there's a way to say "fill up the rest of my space", fixed quotas are easy to do. It's pretty common to use a smart playlist along the lines of "Give me a randomly selected gigabyte of music I have never listened to" or "a randomly selected gigabyte of music that I have rated 5 stars"
By combining different smart playlists together, you can maek more complicated rules. For example, if you want to combine 'And' and 'Or' rules, you have to use at least two playlists and have one playlist reference the other.
For me, the feature that makes me feel like a loner among the millions of users is that there's no way to delete things from the iPod itsself. I put a ton of one-off content on my iPod like Podcasts. In fact, that's pretty much all of the content on my nano. I frequently skip through them like the radio and only listen to a few of them all of the way through. But there's no way to mark a podcast and say "Get this off my iPod the next time I synch". So everytime I sit down at my home desktop, I have to spent 10 minutes pouring over the content on my Ipod, straining to remember whether I decided to skip that particular show or not. You can't use a smart playlist that filters on playcount, because when you only listen to a portion of a podcast it won't increment the playcount.