Vector Stage

My wife gave me a Zune for Christmas, and I was surprised to find that I like it a lot. After reading so much whining on the net about how it was DRM’ed to death and had a crappy screen and all, I had somehow let myself fall into the preconception that it would really suck. I’m surprised at all the complaining that was done before this device even hit market.

One thing that I loved and really stood out as a good decision on Microsoft’s part was the preloaded content. Right out of the box, I touched a button and it sprang to life with a cool variety of music and video. No need to fiddle around with the software and getting media onto it before getting to the experience. Thanks to the Zune team for turning me on to the laid back musical journeys of Brian Transeau. Now it may not have any marketing value as a feature I’m not sure, but it gave me immediate results.

My wife has had a video iPod for a while and we both agree video is a better experience on the Zune, a subjective opinion of course. The Zune software will convert most common video formats for it’s use. The screen looks great, good color depth, and you can change the background to any picture in the photo gallery.

I like the control buttons on the Zune just fine. One thing here definitely stood out over the iPod. I walk around with these things in my pocket and with the Zune, I can control it through my pocket without removing it, which is a little thing but I really noticed it in casual use because I would have it on random and want to skip a song or need to turn it down for just a moment for a conversation or something. The interface makes it easy to turn shuffle on and off also.

Although its wi-fi enabled, it has a long way to go to be of any use wirelessly, for me anyway, but things change fast these days. The only thing I’ve found really buggy has been the desktop software, which is built on Windows Media Player 11. Just seems clunky to me compared to iTunes. I had a lot of trouble with the store especially. There has just been an update finally to the software, so I’ll post an update if it’s any better.

iTunes, to me is the only thing Mac currently has over the Zune as far as the experience goes. But theres also no reason you can’t use iTunes for your music store. Over all I have been very happy with mine and think it technically competes very well with the iPod.

my favorite features:

I love Pandora’s new look, much slicker than before. Seems like I heard about it getting a facelift not long ago, but this is the first time its loaded up on my music box. Nice!

Although the race is over now, I was surprised to see that the Tour De Georgia, our major local rolling festival, was also covered using the Tour Tracker interface. This site was being promoted on even smaller local tv stations and print media, and probably exposed Flex and the RIA concept to many people outside the designer/developer space. They even mentioned that it was built in Flex on that page.

link:http://www.tourdegeorgia2.com/about-tour-tracker-2.html

Just noticed SceneMaker, a Flash app over at Gotuit Media that lets (registered) users deep link to scenes inside YouTube and Metacafe videos and share them via links and blog embeds aka Social Video Tagging. Here’s a test post to try it out.

Welcome MXNA readers!

I’ve used several web hosts over the last few years, with hugely varying service aspects, so I thought I’d share my experiences here. Some of these services may have fixed the bad parts I mention by now (hopefully), so your mileage may vary.

I had some stuff on ValueWeb for a while. I liked the admin console, it was easy to find what I needed, and the different admin sections actually looked like they belonged together, which was nice. I never once had a problem with website or network downtime on their end, never had a customer tell me they couldn’t get to their site, I was proud of that. However, their mail server system went down over, and over, and over again. Just when you’d go a month or so with no problems, there would be that sudden email downtime for days. Clients who can’t get their email can get pretty ill so we had to move on.

Hosthost. I always thought it was a weird name. I had good response from customer service from this one, total site uptime, and at the time they offered unlimited domains which was a big savings. They had a Java based chat app for live support from their website, which they actually used! I also really liked the Plesk admin console they used, one of the best I’ve seen. A prolonged service outage forced me to move the affected stuff. They’re still out there these days, with a much better public facing site and a friend of mine still swears by them.

Site 5 has been really good. They have a homegrown admin panel which is very nice looking, well organized, and highly functional. Service is affordable, and unless you need dedicated IP’s, you can setup multiple domains with most plans. I haven’t had any outages at all of any services in 6 months of usage. I have also gotten prompt and helpful responses from customer service when asking questions. My fave so far.

Dreamhost. I must say I’m torn on this one. I have enjoyed using the service from a setup perspective. Maybe the dynamics of DNS on the net have just gotten better overall, but using DH and Godaddy together, a new site can be live in just a few hours, where it used to take days. I love the admin setup, another homegrown one where everything I need to manage stuff is really easy to find, and clearly communicated. I have seen some complaining out there about their customer service, but they have always promptly responded, even when I submitted questions as very low priority. However, I have had more website downtime with Dreamhost than any other host I’ve used. They seem to have a huge number of internal network and router issues. What makes it worse is that the deals they offer entice you too put a lot on that one host which means a whole lot of stuff could go down at once. The packages are extremely enticing though.

Web hosting is a wild beast out there right now. There are thousands of hosting services to choose from, and it can be hard to tell sometimes which one will better suit you, and if they’re professional or not. Most services will have some sort of outages at some time.

Hosts range from state-of-the-art operations located in highly secure data centers to single Linux servers run by high-school kids out of their parents basement. Pricing varies hugely also, even for comparable packages, as it is a highly competitive business, but I have to say for the most part it still seems that if it sounds/looks too good to be true, it very likely is.