Lemonz Dream Blog

We met up with Blake Burris of CocoaRadio at the Macworld Expo. Blake gave us these stickers and we wanted to pass out all of them since we love the show so much, but we still have some left. So I’m passing them out here in the blogosphere. CocoaRadio is a podcast that features interviews with various cool Mac software developers. We have been listening to this podcast from day one back when we had to turn up the volume all the way. I heartedly recommend the recent episode with Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster who is a veteran in this industry. I think you will find it fascinating even if you are not a developer.

We should be on there pretty soon as well.

Subscribe to CocoaRadio Podcast

Visit CocoaRadio homepage

We are back from Macworld. It was great fun, we got to meet lots of cool people doing cool things. We did a short interview with CocoaRadio, met the AppZapper guys, and Phil Ryu from Widget Machine (thanks for the party passes Phil!), among others.

We got to see a glimpse of how the rock stars of this industry such as Plasq, Panic, Delicious Monster, and Rogue Amoeba handle themselves at an event such as this.

As a developer who is affected by the announcements at the show, it was nice to get a chance to have a chat with the guys at Karelia Software at the macsb dinner hosted by Niall Kennedy. They have an excellent web page creation software that just came out called Sandvox. It is far superior to the new iWeb in iLife ‘06. It should give the RapidWeaver folks at Realmac Software a healthy dose of competition.

The Stevenote was very interesting. I’m a little annoyed that the Intel iMacs are shipping the same day instead of say in two weeks or a month to give us time to prepare. The most exciting news for us was GarageBand. It looks like the most awesome podcasting software ever. It had lots of features that we dreamed of implemending in Podcast Maker, but just knew was going to be really hard or next to impossible.

The Intel laptop news is a very welcome change. The new name makes me wonder if the iBooks are going to be renamed to MacBooks because why else would they change the PowerBook to MacBook Pro? Apple is famous for being minimal in everything that they do and that “Pro” to me is painfully ugly. And the PowerMac? I suppose it will be renamed Mac Pro. Repeat with me 10 times! Mac Pro, Mac Pro… I feel a bit better now.

I totally dig the new commercial they put out by the way. That smile on the woman’s face after she does whatever she’s doing with the silicon wafer is priceless. I’m guessing that it’s done by the folks at Chiat Day and I think they deserve a round of applause.

One thing that I wish I had seen more of at the expo are small developers. There are just so many gems for the Mac that I wish there were a space to showcase them. It costs far too much resources to do it at the Macworld Expo. With this frame of mind, it was very sickening to see the usual tradeshow spam companies totally unrelated to the Mac selling massage services and such at Macworld. Somebody should take this idea and run with it. Perhaps an online expo? Is there such a thing? Or at least do it in a cheap place like Ontario, California like the Portable Media and Podcast Expo.

We are about to take off to MacWorld. We are all packed up with all the podcasts that we’ve been putting off for a while. This should be a good trip. We booked at a hotel with good Internet access so we should be able to answer support emails.

Justin Valiquette emailed us an excellent question which I will share with everyone.

I have an existing Podcast that is registered with iTunes already. To create this podcast, I used the difficult method of creating a blog, and a feedburner account to create the .xml feed. I want to begin using Podcast Maker from now on. Also, I just purchased new hosting space that I want to transfer all our existing podcasts to, and put all the new ones on.

How can I create new podcasts using Podcast Maker that will register under the same podcast title on iTunes so people don’t have to re-subscribe.

Thanks,
Justin

The nice thing about FeedBurner is that it acts as a layer between your real feed and your listeners. So even if your real feed moves, all you have to do is point FeedBurner to the new feed and your listeners won’t even know that the switch happened. There are two parts to this move. Publishing your new feed, and reconfiguring FeedBurner.

Part 1 - Publishing Your New Feed

To publish the new feed, open up Podcast Maker and choose File then Import Podcast Feed in the menus.

Put in your current feed URL in the dialog that pops up.

After you hit the Import button you will see a new document with your podcast. Now, if you don’t need to move all your existing media files from its current location, all you have to do at this point is hit the Publish button and upload your feed to the new server. Move on to Part 2 if this is you.

If you also want to move all of your media files to the new server, transfer all those files to a new directory on the new server using your favorite FTP program. Make sure that it’s accessible from a web browser.

In Podcast Maker, choose each episode and look at its Basic tab. At the bottom you will see a URL in the Location field. Edit the URL of each episode to match your new server’s URL.

Now publish your feed. You are almost done. You just need a simple configuration change in FeedBurner.

Part 2 - Configure FeedBurner

1. Login to FeedBurner and choose the feed that you are moving.
2. Click on Edit Feed Details…
3. Put in your new feed URL in the Original Feed field.

After this maneuver it will be easy to publish new episodes since you will be using Podcast Maker. The best part is that nobody will know that you changed anything.

Thank you Justin for the excellent question.

Podcast Maker is featured at Kevin Allgaier’s MacTipOfTheDay.com site.

Excerpt:

The absolute easiest way to create and publish your podcast is to use an application called “Podcast Maker” (by Potion Factory). Not only is it a simple-to-use interface, but it’s very powerful. And posting to your .Mac account couldn’t be easier.

Check out Mac Tip of the Day for this and other great tips.

Read the tip at Mac Tip of the Day

This version has the feature that we’ve been wanting to implement from the beginning: being able to edit enhanced podcast files. Now you can import published enhanced podcasts and edit them again. Just try dragging in some enhanced podcast from iTunes into PM. If you are an educator, this means that you can have your students publish their enhanced podcast episodes into a shared network volume, aggregate them into a single feed, edit them if necessary, and publish to a public server.

Another important feature that made it into this release is drag and drop of episodes between multiple podcast documents. If you need to create more than one feed for your podcast, this feature will be a life-saver for you.

Enjoy the release. Happy podcasting.

Oh, we have a new icon and website too.

May all your dreams come true and your resolutions last more than a week. Happy new year.

A tutorial on creating a fake software box was promoted to the digg front page a while back (516 diggs, no less).

If you are a programmer or someone who is distributing or selling a product that comes on CD/DVD, then nothing helps solidify your image than a software box. It gives off the impression that you are an established business and is an asthetically pleasing way of presenting your software or application.

Hmm… why would you photoshop a fake box, if you had a physical box you could photograph? As someone points out in the digg comments, why have a picture of a box if you don’t sell a physical box at all? Basically, this is a tutorial on how to fake out your customers. To the people who can see through the trick, it gives the impression that the product and the company are fake.

Well, we couldn’t just idly sit by and watch the cheesiness.

Hrmm… What would a real podcasting potion look like if it were created and sold in todays industrialized society? Quaint little mom and pop potion shops and their glass bottles are so passé. They wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demand anyway. We need something that looks like is produced in a factory…

We are proud to announce that we have managed to make something cheesier than the fake software box — a fake podcastin’ potion:

Can you speak 4+ languages? StuFF mc does. He has a couple of popular podcasts in French and German and now he’s launching Pom Pom Pom Pom, EN , a Mac centric podcast for the English speaking audience. I’m featured there as a guest for the first episode. Listening to it I realize that I talk like a valley girl. Argh! There is also a contest for some Elgato eyetv stuff there. Check it out, yo.

Listen in iTunes

Video tutorial at Creative Cow

Seth Taylor, who writes for Creative Cow, has done a video tutorial on how to get a simple podcast started using Podcast Maker. The tutorial covers the basics and will have you podcasting in 5 minutes. Seth is a talented graphics designer. You can browse his portfolio here.

Watch the tutorial at creativecow.net

Review/Tutorial by the Chip Creeps

We were pleasantly surprised when we found this while googling.

You ever drop a piece of software in your machine and immediately achieve the intended results in such a clean trouble free way that you immediately proclaim: “These guys are getting my 30 bux!�? It has just happened to me for the first time. I cannot type fast enough.

Wow, thanks a bunch Rob!

Read the rest of the review at robztechblog.com