App Store hates Canada, and some progress.
Been a while, busy with life, whatever.
First of all, I’ve reached a happy medium with the iPod touch, manually downloading the mp3’s for my podcasts and listening to them with dTunes. However, my dreams have been realized, as there are now at least three podcatchers available through Cydia, but two of them, including the infamous Podcaster, are rigged to lock after a certain amount of time or uses and can’t be used unless you pay them. Now I’ve got nothing wrong with paying for software, but I just don’t won’t to.
So I went with , which is free (both as in speech and beer). Its been out for a while but I was annoyed at what I thought was the inability to remove feeds. I finally got around to googling it, and the function for deleting files is actually the most elegant I have seen. You swipe your finger to the left, and the delete button comes up. Brilliant, but not so intuitive, as it is not congruent with how first party apps do it.
One other reason I kept using dTunes is its wonderful ability to keep playing when you close it to go to another application. However, this advantage has recently been lost with the advent of Backgrounder, which gives any app the ability to run in the background. However (as the notes for Backgrounder will state) the iPhone/ iPod touch hardware is not very well suited to multitasking. I have noticed that doing anything while listening to an mp3 gets very pokey and slow, and sometimes the background app will simply crash.
On the syncing front, the efforts for breaking the iTunesDB hash have shifted to the iFuse/libiphone project, and definite progress is being made. Its hard sometimes to decypher the programmer-speak on the mailing list, but it looks like its getting close.
As a final note, I just wanted to vent my frustration at the App Store, where I can’t even get the paltry few apps I actually WANT because they aren’t available for the Canadian App Store. Pandora, Stanza, and Galcon Lite are are denied to me.