Scripting News: Caveat about 'initial' reviews

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Caveat about 'initial' reviews

One of the things I've learned from being a developer is to keep a notebook with my impressions, the things that confused me, the questions I have. That was before I had a weblog. Nowadays that notebook is public, which helps me share my process with others.

This has a lot of advantages, for one, it gets me answers more quickly. It also teaches other developers how users think, think of this as a small contribution to improved usability in all products. It also provides feedback to the developers of the products I'm using, if they're listening (I find out later they often are).

So with that caveat -- I'm still not able to synch the iPod in the iPhone the way I want to do it. I turned off the automatic synching on the front page of the iPhone panel in iTunes, now all the songs appear, but they're grayed out. I want to remove them all. I can't for the life of me figure out how to do it.

Another problem, I tried connecting a set of Bose headphones into the headphone jack on the iPhone. No music comes out the other end. Huh?

PS: I was able to reclaim all the space used by the deleted songs by choosing to Synch only selected playlists, and selecting none of them. When I hit the Apply button magically my used space went from 3.8GB to 0.2GB. I have no idea why this worked, but it did.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:01:03 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

May Jul