TiVo, the time-shifting digital video recorder that became a household name in the US, will come to Australia in 2008.

For a small subscription fee plus the price of the hardware, Australians will be able to pause live high definition TV, fast-forward ads, record shows and series from any of the free-to-air digital TV channels, and access broadband content such as video-on-demand.

The company today announced a partnership with the Seven Network, which will build the digital platform behind the service.

Sweet.  I really wish Australia didn’t lag so far behind the US on these sort of things.  We need to get much better & cheaper broadband into this country very soon.

On behalf of the entire WordPress team, I’m proud and excited to announce the immediate availability of version 2.2 ‘Getz’ for download. This version includes a number of new features, most notably Widgets integration, and over two hundred bug fixes. It’s named in honor of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz.

WordPress Development Blog - WordPress 2.2

So much great stuff in this release, built in widgets, full Atom 1.0 support (finally), plugin sandbox for testing new plugins & heaps more.  Lots of new hooks & other features for plugin developers too, which is great.  For a full list see the post above, and make sure you check out Technosailor’s 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.2 post.

As always, congratulations and thanks to Matt and his team for all their work.

[tags]WordPress, Getz, Plugins, Blogging[/tags]

I could sit and watch this site all day: Flickrvision, it’s fascinating just to literally watch the world go by.  From David Troy, the man behind Twitervision.  Here’s my Twittervision site.

[tags]Flickr, Twitter, Google Maps[/tags]

The Austrian MSDN blog has posted on Windows Live Writer resources, which includes a screenshot of the new (currently unreleased) build.  As I don’t understand Austrian, here’s a link to the LiveSide article on it:

So from this screenshot we can see that they have done away with the option to hide the menu bar (like you can do with Windows Live Mail desktop), moved around the weblog management, it’s no long a drop down menu on the top right (as with previous builds), but next to the Tools button, and they have also added in a much needed link to easily add more plugins. It also looks like they have done away with the flair and Windows Live Search box they had.

Come on, release a new beta version already.  Release early, release often!

[tags]Windows Live Writer, Microsoft, Blogging[/tags]

I’ve been using DivShare for a while now to host a lot of the images on this site and some large download files. It’s been a great service, totally reliable, fast speeds and a really nice, clean interface. Recently they released some nice embeddable flash players for mp3s and video files too. That opened up a whole new range of possibilities for hosting podcast files (such as our church’s), but in the back of my mind I’ve had a nagging doubt about their long-term staying power. There didn’t seem to be any revenue generation model other than a couple of Google ads. Considering the fact they’ve been offering unlimited storage and transfers with a 200MB file size limit, this didn’t seem like a profit-making enterprise.

Fortunately my fears have been unfounded and DivShare have just announce a ‘pro’ version of their service which allows for a 2GB maximum file size, unlimited number of uploads at a time using the Power Uploader application (normally max of 10) and possibly the most important feature: FTP access. These features are available at either US$0.99 per 2GB file or a US$9.95 per month subscription. This now puts them in direct competition of services like DropSend, and with double the individual file size and no storage or transfer limit, they beat out DropSend’s pricing by a country mile and that’s without the image / video / audio hosting options DivShare provide. DivShare already provided a facility to directly email people a download link for any file you upload.

Now I don’t have a huge need for the pro subscription. US$9.95 per month is not really a lot if you’re doing massive data transfers, but then, I don’t need to upload 2GB files. Even if I started using it as a podcasting hosting service, the files are usually less than 5MB in size, so that’s well under the free 200MB limit. What this new service means for me though is that they now have a revenue stream, and are therefore more likely to be a stable, long-term hosting option. And it’s nice to know that if I do have some need to upload some huge file, I can.

I’ll still be keeping a local backup of all my files just in case, but I do that for any hosting service I use, paid or not. Kudos to the DivShare guys for creating such a great service & I hope they make an insane amount of money off this new service, they deserve a payoff for all their hard work.

[tags]DivShare, Images, Hosting, Uploads, Podcasts[/tags]

Matt Mullenweg has announced that the 2.2 release of WordPress that was due on Monday (23rd April) will be delayed.

The WP dev team has decided to hold back version 2.2 for at least a week or two from the original date of April 23 while we polish things up. I’ll post an updated release date as soon as we figure out how long everything is going to take. (Which is extra-hard in open source development.)

This is a real pity, but I guess it’s better that they get all the bugs sorted out now rather than later. Lorelle VanFossen has more details on what is coming.

[tags]WordPress, WordPress 2.2, Matt Mullenweg[/tags]