The premise is reasonably simple: you’ve got audio on your desktop computer, you want to listen to it somewhere else. For example, you’re running Spotify and want to listen to it as you clean around the house. Unless you’re paying for Spotify Premium, there’s no way to get the music out of Spotify onto your stereo short of plugging the audio of your computer into your stereo.

With Airfoil, you gain a bunch of options. When you run Airfoil, you can send the audio to any Apple TV you’ve got. You can send the audio to any device running the free Airfoil Speakers application — another desktop, a laptop in another room, or even your iPhone.

Pretty awesome.

But, for me, the coolest thing with Airfoil happened the other day. I was watching some TV off of our iMac, and was trying to be polite and keep the sound low.

“Self,” I thought, “why not use Airfoil and broadcast the sound to your iPhone.”

Brilliant. Except, the sound was a couple of seconds behind the video. Which was incredibly annoying.

The smart folks at Rogue Amoeba have it covered, though. Turns out, the Airplay format inserts a 2 second delay. But, if you run the Airfoil Video Player, it will delay the video 2 seconds, so the sound and video are in sync. Including for web videos. So, I laid back and watched some TV off of Hulu, while listening to the sound as it played through my iPhone.

For $25, I continually find uses for Airfoil. It’s easily worth it (and it works for PCs too).

What Spotify (and, presumably, all of the other streaming music services) is really good at is listening to the music you don’t like enough (i.e. you’re too embarrassed) to keep in your iTunes library. When you’re playing foosball and someone references Michael McDonald, you can go back and listen to “I Keep Forgettin’”. When you hear some 90s R&B on the radio, you can play yourself some Jodeci and Joe Public. You can binge on Dan Folgelberg and the Little River Band.

Spotify fills in the gaps in your library with the music you would never really buy. Because you’re too ashamed of it.

Which is awesome.

And also, likely, its downfall.

If Spotify (or Rhapsody or any of the other streaming services) really take off, why wouldn’t Apple (or Amazon) get the same streaming licenses that Spotify has? If iTunes let you stream any music off of the music store (and create playlists, tag songs, etc), wouldn’t that be about the best complement to buying music? Sure, there are some folks who will buy less music (trading it for whatever monthly fee Apple charges), but a whole bunch of people will stream a bunch of music, then buy more (when they realize they’ve listened to Hall & Oates 10 times in a row).

This seems like the logical next step for iTunes/iCloud (as well as for Amazon’s MP3 Store/Cloud Player, and probably for Google Music, too). And a likely death (or, in a best case, acquisition) for the streaming music services. One of them will probably survive, just as an alternative to the Apple/Amazon cartel.

So enjoy it while it lasts. In a couple of years, it’ll be part of iTunes (like everything else).

But, 99 cents for NBA Jam?

It didn’t really matter how bad it might have been, because that’s a price I couldn’t possibly pass up.

And, oh, how it is awesome.

To be fair, let’s start with the bad.

• As with almost any iOS action game, the controls are an on-screen joystick and buttons. It doesn’t matter how well they’re implemented, it’s still a shitty control scheme and probably the weakest part of iOS as a gaming platform.
• If you’re not wearing headphones, your hand is going to cover the speakers and you won’t hear the sound.

That’s pretty much it.

What’s awesome? Everything. The rosters are pretty up-to-date and full of awesome unlockable and hidden players (Bird and McHale, Spud Webb and ‘Nique, Stockton and Malone). The gameplay is simple enough that the touchscreen controls, as cumbersome as they might be, work well enough. The graphics are fun and solid. The sound is good, and has brought back the announcer (or at least a sound-alike) from old-school NBA Jam.

Basically, it’s the same old NBA Jam with prettier graphics, modern players, and it’s on a device that fits in your pocket.

Oh yeah, and it’s 99 cents.

If you enjoyed NBA Jam at all when it was in the arcades or on the home systems in the 90s, you’ll like it now. There’s a difficulty that works for everyone, you can pause a game at any point and pick it back up again. There’s a campaign mode that let’s you work through all the teams, unlocking players and special attributes as you go.

NBA Jam for the iPhone will be your favorite time killer for at least a couple of weeks.

Go buy it. Now.

Why would you need to replace iOS’ built-in podcast management? There’s only one reason, really: if I want to get new podcasts on my device, I have to physically sync it (or go through a ridiculous process of finding that podcast in the iTunes store and downloading it or syncing it). That’s annoying.

So, what does Instacaster having going for it?

• It’s got the basic functionality you need (stream, download, play, pause, double-speed)
• It’s got OPML support (as of version 1.2) to let you easily (not quickly, but easily) add your podcast subscriptions
• It let’s you pseudo-automatically download new podcasts right on your phone, without having to sync it

That last bullet is pretty much the big one. You can refresh your list of podcasts (on 3G or wifi) and pull down any new episodes, reasonably quickly. So, if you’re away from your computer and need something new to listen to, there’s always something available, and it’s easier than the iTunes phone interface.

What’s not so hot?

• The interface isn’t the most straightforward thing ever. Expect a good bit of “oh, that’s what that button does” and “wait, why isn’t this thing cached on my phone” until you figure it out. It’ll only take you a few tries.
• It’s hindered by a fundamental limitation: the iOS APIs won’t let you add songs into the device’s music library. That means that I have to listen to these tracks inside of the application. That’s fine, but it makes it much harder to listen to stuff through my car’s iPhone interface. I have to keep track of where I was at for when I get to work and switch to using my computer and headphones (whereas podcasts in the iPod player simply sync their location and you’re good to go.)

The app is $2, so regardless of the limitations, it’s worth it to me to have the convenience, but if you’re on the fence, wait until you see iOS 5. It wouldn’t shock me to see the podcast interface overhauled, rendering the app obsolete.

Weather app uses notifications to display info on home screen: “We are all familar with the red iOS badge that displays the number of missed calls or unread emails on your home screen. The Fahrenheit – Weather and Temperature on your Home Screen app takes advantage of this notification system to display the temperature on your home screen. It’s a clever use of Apple’s built-in system that does not run afoul of the App Store guidelines.”

Ha, this is very, very clever. It’s a workaround that shouldn’t have to exist (and, I’m guessing, won’t have to exist after iOS 5 is released). But it’s still super clever.

(Via TUAW.)

»

I’ve collected a handful of things that have proven very useful lately, so I figured I’d throw them up here so I can find them again in a year when I’m trying to dig myself out of another hole.

This isn’t really much of a blog post, as much as it’s just a collection of stuff that is useful to me. Feel free to stop here.

Skitch

Skitch is a super handy screenshot/quick image editing tool. It sits in your menu bar until you need it, and then you just quickly grab a screenshot, throw in some arrows or text or whatever you need, and then it shoots it off to an FTP site or wherever you want. It’s super handy.

See, handy!

Ruby/Rails

One of the things I’ve been trying to spend more time doing is building little web sites. I’m a big fan of Ruby on Rails, but I hadn’t upgraded to Rails 3, since building Rails on the Mac has always proven to be a big pain in the ass. After a whole bunch of Googling and piecing together different sets of instructions, I think I’ve got the steps down. They are, roughly:

• Build a local version of readline and dump it in something like /opt/local or /usr/local
• curl the latest version of ruby, untar it, enter the directory
• run autoconf
• run ./configure –enable-shared –enable-pthread –prefix=/opt/local –with-readline-dir=/opt/local CFLAGS=-D_XOPEN_SOURCE=1
• make, sudo make install
• Boom, you’ve got ruby in /opt/local

Next, you want to install rubygems and then rails:

• curl the latest version of rubygems, untar, enter
• sudo ruby setup.rb
• sudo gem install rails

Now you’ve got ruby, rails, and your gems all setup in /opt/local (or wherever).

csshX

Cluster SSH is something I’d never seen before until one of my co-workers was using it the other day. We have a lot of servers where you need to do something on a bunch of boxes at once (or tail the logs on a bunch of boxes at once). Normally, I end up with 10 tabs in Terminal and flipping back and forth between them.

csshX is a nifty, Mac-native cluster ssh client. You open up a bunch of hosts, and then you can send the same command to them all, and it nicely tiles your windows so you can see them all. It’s so simple, and so brilliant.

ddrescue

Finally, as I’ve been building up a media server to feed my AppleTV, I decided to go back to the many CDs I burned in school and grab some old music. It was like opening a time capsule–little video clips, email, school work, music–reminding me of who I was 10 years ago.

Sadly, my memory works better than the memory of an optical disk. There were a handful of CDs that I burned that weren’t working very well (or, well, at all).

That sucked.

Thankfully, there’s a little tool called ddrescue. I downloaded and built it. It’s been running for the last week trying to scrape every last valuable bit off of those CDs (and has saved some of the amazing papers I wrote in college. Amazing.).

The big takeaway? Don’t use ddrescue. If you’re relying on CDs as backups, burn copies of CDs. Spend 100 bucks and buy a big ass hard disk ad back things up there. Back things up the cloud (Amazon, Mozy, whatever).

Basically, avoid having to use ddrescue.

For instance . . .

The Google Calendar sync tool should support syncing Outlook to secondary Google Calendars, not just your primary calendar. That would mean I could drop SyncMyCal which runs in my Outlook-only Parallels Virtual Machine. I’d have a nifty, no-click workflow to sync my Work calendar to my secondary Work Google Calendar, which get sync’d down to iCal and to my iPhone.

Better yet . . .

The iPhone should support syncing both iCal and Outlook calendars. It’s sort of a dumb thing that if you turn on Outlook calendar and contact syncing, that’s the *only* calendars and contacts you get. Why not keep them separate? If Apple added the ability to have your Outlook calendar sit right along side your iCal calendars, then I wouldn’t even need to sync my Work calendar up. I could just accept meeting invites on my phone and have everything work nice and happy.

Oh, and same goes for Contacts. Just let me sync my Exchange contacts as a separate group. Seriously.

Even better . . .

Apple Mail and iCal should build in real Exchange support. Then I could actually not run Outlook in my virtual machine all day. Instead, I could just use Mail and iCal as Exchange clients and have the most simplified workflow of all. Supposedly, this is going to happen in Snow Leopard. That would be awesome.

Making life even sweeter . . .

Google should fix contact management. I love Gmail. I use it for everything. I hate Google’s Contact stuff. It is awful. They tried to make it better. It didn’t work very well. But they’ve got the keys right in their hands … Social Graph. Imagine you gave Google some information about you that they could use some OAuth or other authentication means to determine that it is really you. So you hand them some keys to Flickr and Twitter and (if they can work out their differences), Facebook. Now, Google pulls all that information together and makes a nifty contact for you. Name, picture, email address, home address, work address, phone number, Twitter, Flickr, etc, etc. You only get as much information as the contact allows (if we’re not friends on Facebook, you don’t get my phone # or address).

Now, Google can do all this behind the scenes and give you a little button to “add so-and-so” as a contact. If I add them, they go into my Contacts section. Then, I subscribe to my Google Contacts like they’re an LDAP source or however else they want to get hooked into your setup.

Boom. All of a sudden I’ve got a real contact solution that’s continually updated.

Ok, sure, that’s a lot like what Plaxo promises. Except Plaxo really doesn’t work all that well.

So. When all this happens, I’ll have my calendars all seamlessly syncing together to my computer and to my phone. On top of that, my contacts (work and personal) will all sync nicely as well. And stay up-to-date, thanks to something like Social Graph or the like. Plus, Snow Leopard will mean I don’t have to run a Virtual Machine just to use Outlook (and don’t tell me to use Entourage … it barely works).

With my work life (and personal contacts) working so seamlessly . . .

I’ve got time to kill. I want to get through some movies or TV while I’m out and about.

Give me Netflix Watch Instantly and Hulu on my iPhone! Now that they’re on my XBox and Mac, I’d love them remotely. When I’m out eating lunch or riding in a car, I don’t need HD video. I just need crappy streaming video that will let me knock off an old episode of Newsradio or watch 15 minutes of a crappy movie.

But, if I don’t want to watch something . . .

Sometimes I just want to listen. The fact that the new version of the iPhone firmware lets you download podcasts is great. By why doesn’t it sync my entire podcast list and let me just quickly scan for a new episode of something I listen to? Even better, why not do something similar to Genius and recommend me a podcast I might like?

All that would be very cool.

Oh, and why can’t I sync stuff over bluetooth. That would be good too.

Then, if you want, you can do some fun stuff to it. Like add some comments:

Tada!

Awesome. Takes about 2 seconds.

Jerry had a good deal for me: a free copy of Awaken.

That’s pretty amazing. I’m a small little blog, written by a web dork. My readership is pretty small. But Jerry is the smartest of marketers. What better way to get the word out about your product than to get it into someone’s hands who’ll try it, write about it, and probably evangelize for it (just based off the fact that it was such a great out of the blue offer).

So I installed Awaken last night, and I woke up to this morning to Bloc Party. It works as advertised, has a pretty nifty interface, and has one feature that Aurora doesn’t: it doesn’t require you to turn off your screen saver password or turn on auto-login. Both of those lower the security of your Mac (particularly if you’re using a laptop, like me), and it always bugged me about Aurora.

Now, with Awaken, even though my machine was locked, the alarm clock turned on and work me up, allowed me to snooze it or turn off the alarm, and then I could go about my daily business.

I like that. A lot.

It’s a pretty app too (especially in full screen mode when you wake up). Here’s a taste (from Embraceware’s flickr account):

Awaken rocks a good bit. I’m probably going to move to it as my alarm clock–it’ll be a whole lot less abrasive than my blaring alarm clock from 1988 (that my girlfriend despises). And then I’ll probably start using it as my sleep timer too, since it’d be pretty cool to toss a movie into iTunes and have it shut down my Mac when it’s done.

Jerry’s done pretty darn good marketing here. I would probably have not even considered Awaken before, but now I’m evangelizing it. I love the internet.

You can check out Jerry’s blog for more info on Awaken.

I like things that are free.

Unfortunately, Aurora’s become a shareware app. Well, it’s not really unfortunate. It’s a cool app. I’m sure there’s people for whom it’ll be worth the $15. It’s just not for me; I don’t use it enough. So now I’m left to wonder “Do I keep the old version and get taunted by the AppUpdate widget every time there’s a new release? Or do I remove the old version and learn to live without it?”

Really, that’s what’s currently going through my brain. I think I might actually remove the app. It’s no offense to Aurora, I just don’t want to have that pang every time the widget displays new stuff.