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Media centre PC‘s and standalone PC‘s to serve music are all well and good. Unfortunately, their use generally depends on a bit of technical know-how and a fair bit of fiddling with extra kit. It’s just never a seamless experience. With a wireless network already blanketing 90% of the house, I decided to try out a gadget that I’ve been eyeing for some time: a Squeezebox. Now owned by Logitech and probably one of the few worthy Sonos competitors, I favour the Squeezebox primarily for its Logitech branding and a more reasonable price point.

Availability of the Squeezebox products is somewhat limited – with little to choose from, I selected the Squeezebox Boom.

In simple terms, the Boom is an attractive, black box featuring speakers on either end and a control panel midsection. In contrast to the Squeezebox Radio, there is no colour screen – no album art can be displayed. Whilst that initially may seem like a disadvantage, the Boom‘s green, text-only display is very functional. There’s no need to view album art the size of a matchbox from 10m away – it’s the sound that matters.

The box contains the Squeezebox Boom, a remote control with a battery included, power adapter and 3.5mm connector cable. If you have any thoughts of taking the Boom with you, a handy protective pouch is provided, though the unit is on the heavy side and you’ll need to remember the power adapter. Without a network and Internet connection, the Squeezebox is of little use. In this mode, it functions as an amplifier for a music source connected by the 3.5mm cable. When connected to a wired or wireless network, however, the functionality of this music device comes to the fore.

It starts with the setup, which is seamless and absolutely first-rate. Prior to starting up the device, I downloaded and installed the SqueezeCenter software on the iMac. This service collates music from iTunes and interacts with Logitech‘s SqueezeNetwork. Signing up is free – I entered my user name and password into the SqueezeCenter, then allowed the service to run through my 300GB iTunes music library. SqueezeCenter also runs on Linux and Windows and is able to serve music files from a variety of sources.

The Boom will live in the kitchen. There’s no wired network connection there, so I decided to try out the wireless connection. After plugging the unit into the power adapter, I watched the Squeezebox Boom go through its setup routine. It’s all automated and the process of entering values using only the dial or remote control unit a no-brainer. By way of DHCP, the unit obtains an IP address. The only other requirement is to enter the IP address of the iMac serving the music and running the SqueezeCenter. A reboot after updating its firmware meant the Boom was ready for service in an area with a wireless signal strength of less than 30%.

First off, I selected an MP3 from the iTunes library. Good sound quality and immediate response. The same when selecting a playlist. The Boom provides a number of onboard features, the creation of ad-hoc playlists being one. Searching for artists and titles is intuitive and easy: scroll through possible entries and enter text one letter at a time by turning the dial or the buttons on the remote. One feature I miss is the ability to play Audible books. That playlist doesn’t show up on the player. I guess issues with the DRM preclude this, but it would be a great addition to the Squeezebox. What amazed me most was the instant access and clear reproduction of Internet radio stations. A host of presets featuring radio stations across the world is provided, selectable from the menu. In all cases, I experienced no lag and no buffering – all radio stations played clearly and without a hitch.

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3D Mini Golf Challenge is one of the games I play most often when I have a couple of minutes to spare. There’s nothing much to it: play some putt-putt over a couple of different, wacky courses trying either to beat par or trounce the computer opponent. As one accomplishes these various goals by scoring points, additional courses to play are unlocked.

The controls are extremely intuitive and simple. Other than aiming the club to select a path for the ball, the only other action is to select the strength with which the ball will be propelled forward. A touch and drag on the ball is all that is required.

That’s probably what makes this so much fun to play – no complicated controls to master and the ability to improve quite quickly as one learns how gradients affect the direction and travel of the golf ball.

The 3D environment is attractive and the animation and panning well executed. There are occasions when the view of the intended shot is obstructed. Otherwise, the ability to rotate the view and zoom out to some degree is adequate. The course are quirky and contain numerous traps to ensure the ball is prevented from making it to the hole too easily. The game contains 100 holes for play in various modes: against par, against the clock, against the computer opponent or try for a hole in one challenge.

If you’re interested in a game that is quick to learn, fun to play and doesn’t require a huge time investment, give 3D Mini Golf Challenge a try. It’s available for USD 4.99 from the Apple App Store.

The one aspect of the MiFi that should be improved in a future version is the fact that it is unable to display the battery state on the device itself. One is reliant on the web interface to determine roughly how much the battery has been run down. Whilst virtually every device one will be using the MiFi with will feature a web browser, additional software is always useful. Enter Mi-fi for the iPhone or iPod Touch.

The application is a free download from the iTunes App Store – yesterday, a new version was released that works with the European firmware loaded on the MiFi sold in South Africa. The previous version of the application displayed garbage on the screen and was unusable. The new version runs quite nicely, though it is basic and suited to only a single purpose.

When started, the application connects via the wireless network connection to the MiFi and reads data regarding the signal strength, battery level, data volumes and IP addresses. The data is displayed on the screen and is updated every few seconds.

If you have a MiFi and iPod Touch or iPhone, this application may be very useful to have at hand when wanting to gain a quick insight into your MiFi‘s status.

Today, we move to page 2 of my iPhone application collection. This page contains news sources that I enjoy reading and two important reference sources: Wikipedia and a dictionary. All of these are free to download and rely on their respective backend data sources to populate their information. Using these apps a lot is a bit of a drain on bandwidth consumption, so I tend to use these more when I’m in reach of my home wireless network.

With very few exceptions, all news apps are created equal: access to content that is also available from any web browser, a selection of news stories belonging to various categories, images, video and the ability to comment and interact with other users.

News24 is the mobile portal to the popular South African news site. News on current events with a focus on South Africa but with a fair bit of coverage of important international news.

I’m also always interested in the financial and motoring news provided. The layout is clean and neat and easily navigable.

Visit the News24 website here.

Frequency of use: occasional

My rating (cost and usability taken into account): 3/5

Price: free

iTunes App Store URL for News24

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I took the easy way out with my first post on detailing the applications I house on the iPhone and iPod Touch. I presently have 10 pages of applications on there, with page 10 being a landing pad for things I’m trying out or considering deleting. I’ve downloaded many apps for the iPhone and am constantly adding new ones. If you have an iPhone in South Africa and haven’t yet applied (by fair means or foul) for an account on the US store, you’re seriously missing out on a lot of content.

I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to organizing the application icons, and I’ve developed my own categorization to help me find things more speedily. Of all the things I want to see in iTunes 9 (or whatever the rumoured new version to be launched September 9 will be) is something to allow me to organize the icons quickly and easily. Currently, it takes a fair bit of time to drag and place icons where I want them.

Page 1/10 is the home screen and contains all the applications I consider most important for daily use. These are the applications I use most often, with the most critical ones stored in the dock: Phone, Mail, Calendar and Contacts.

We’ll skip the standard iPhone applications Settings, Messages, Clock, App Store, Safari, Calculator, Maps and Weather.

NetNewsWire is an RSS aggregator that works in conjunction with Newsgator. Yes, I use RSS even though I’m an ardent reader of Twitter streams. I set up an online account and added RSS feeds to that. Using a browser, native app for Linux/Mac/Windows or NetNewsWire on the iPhone I have access to all RSS feeds I’ve subscribed to.

Reading on any one platform will update my read counts.

What I like best about NetNewsWire is its ability to store clippings of stories I want to remember for follow up later on. Unfortunately, the online interface at Newsgator will no longer be available soon: Google Reader is my next best bet, but NetNewsWire is unaffected and will still work.

Frequency of use: frequent

My rating (cost and usability taken into account): 4/5

Price: free

iTunes App Store URL for NetNewsWire

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Similar in function to the Multichoice DStv iPhone application, the ZA TV Guide is a Durban-developed iPhone application. A no-charge download, the ZA TV Guide is less than 1MB in size and installs rather quickly.

The premise of the application is rather simple: a computerized TV guide for South Africans including programming information for SABC, eTV and DStv broadcasts. A brief view of the splash screen leads to the opening screen that contains favourite shows and channels as selected by the user.

The launchpad of the application provides space for favourites, both channels and TV shows. These favourites are selected from a list that the application has access to – the lists are updated over the air and refreshed whenever the application is launched and programming information accessed.

Full search functions are provided for you to find whatever programming may be relevant.

Some detail is provided for the selected TV show, providing a bit of an overview of what’s on show.

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