Monthly Archives: February 2012

February 29, 2012

MLB.com At Bat ’12 is out!

By Dave M.

UPDATE 3/3/12: A quick follow-up to this post. I found out today that this app will not run on iPhone’s earlier than the 3GS. My wife is using my old iPhone 3G and when she tried to install it on her phone, she got an error saying it won’t run on her device. A quick look at the iTunes entry for MLB.com At Bat shows:

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 4.2 or later.

That rules out her phone. I’m dissapointed that they couldn’t support older hardware. I suppose they want to take advantage of AirPlay (which they do) and the API for AirPlay must not support the iPhone 3G. Ah well.

As of 9:11AM, MLB.com At Bat is available in the iOS App Store. (Can you tell if I am excited?)

The app starts up displaying the MLB.com At Bat splash screen:

MLB.com At Bat Splash Screen

MLB.com At Bat Splash Screen

Followed quickly by the in-app purchase screen:

MLB.com At Bat In-App Purchase Screen

MLB.com At Bat In-App Purchase Screen

This screen presents the user with the choice of purchasing a $14.99 season or a $2.99 monthly subscription to the Gameday, Live Radio, In-Game Highlights, etc… subscription, using the “Lite” version of the app, linking the MLB.TV subscription purchased on the MLB.com website to the app, or restoring a previous in-app purchase.

The top half of the screen rotates through 5 screens describing the benefits of the $2.99/$14.99 subscription.

First sales pitch screen

First sales pitch screen

Second sales pitch screen

Second sales pitch screen

Third sales pitch screen

Third sales pitch screen

Fourth sales pitch screen

Fourth sales pitch screen

Fifth sales pitch screen

Fifth sales pitch screen

After making my in-app purchase for the full season, and a short delay, I was presented with a screen to pick my favorite teams. I was then presented with, wait for it…

MLB.com At Bat '12 Main Screen

MLB.com At Bat '12 Main Screen

I then selected Scoreboard and see that there is a game today at 12:05PM CST; The Florida State University Seminoles vs. The Philadelphia Phillies!

MLB.com At Bat Scoreboard screen

MLB.com At Bat Scoreboard screen

Boy am I looking forward to this years baseball season!

Oh, I also installed the app on my iPad and used the Restore button to activate the full app on my iPad. So, as long as you use the same AppleID for your iDevices, you will be able to activate MLB.com.

Happy MLB’ing guys!

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in AppStore, iOS

February 29, 2012

Don’t forget about my Tumblr blog…

By Dave M.

Tumblr Logo

It’s where I post a lot of links, videos, reblogs and blog comments for other sites.

It’s called Dave’s Whiteboard and located here: http://daveswhiteboard.tumblr.com/

Check it out! :)

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in Site News

February 27, 2012

Update to MLB.com At Bat ’12 info

By Dave M.

UPDATE 2/28/12: Macworld just put up a post about the app: MLB.com At Bat warms up for 2012 season.

UPDATE 2/29/12: The MLB.com At Bat ’12 app is out! Take a look!

I was looking for more info on MLB.com At Bat ’12 app and how much it will cost to use as just a way to watch the Gameday (pitch tracking, box scores, etc..) stuff that they did last season. I came across a PDF document at “mlb.custhelp.com”. It describes how the new app will work and how the in-app purchases will work on iOS and Android as well as how the app will work on Windows Phone 7.

Here is the text from the iOS section of the document:

Key Features:

  • At Bat 12 will be a universal application for the 2012 season. This means the same application will contain the iPhone and iPad experience.
  • At Bat 12 will be free to download.  Customers will have the option between a $2.99 monthly subscription and $14.99 season pass.  These purchase options will be supported via ‘in-app purchase’, and will be charged against the customer’s iTunes account.
  • At Bat 12 premium features include Gameday Audio (home/away), Gameday, real time highlights, Notifications, and 1 Free MLB.TV game of the day.
  • At Bat 12 standard/free features include scores, news, standings.
  • An existing MLB.TV Premium customer will have access to all At Bat features upon login.  MLB.TV Standard customers will have to purchase the At Bat features via in-app purchase.
  • Customer will also have the ability to purchase MLB.TV monthly subscription from the Apple At Bat 12 application via in-app purchase for $24.99/Monthly.  After purchase, customer can link this subscription to his account to use on
  • The customer has the ability to link the MLB.TV monthly subscription to an MLB.com account and leverage across the wired web or on Android devices.

Price Point:

  • At Bat 12 In-app purchase: $14.99/Season or $2.99/Monthly
  • MLB.TV Monthly In-app purchase: $24.99

Supported Devices:

  • Tentatively scheduled to support devices (ipad, iphone, ipod touch) on OS 4.0 and up.
  • Note: iPhone is now supported on Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.

My take on all that is that the “Free” Universal app coming out on the 29th will only give you game scores, news and standings. That’s it. No Gameday (pitch tracking, box scores, etc..), no highlights, etc… Just the bare minimum.

If you want more, you pay $2.99 a month (8 months, March through October) or $14.99 for the whole season.

The next page of the PDF kind of shows this with the screenshots:

Purchase Screen:

Purchased

Selected:

Selected

Detail:

Preview SS002

The Detail screen above shows what you get when you pay the $2.99 a month or $14.99 season price. It shows that you get the game audio, Gameday, Highlights, etc…

So, MLB.com At Bat ’12 will still cost us $15 for the season if we want it to work the way it did last season. Otherwise your getting a very basic view of the games, news, and standings. That might be fine for most people, but we buy MLB.com At Bat for the Gameday info and the audio.

24 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in iOS, News

February 26, 2012

Android Measuring Stick

By Dave M.

Android logo font

pxldot has a great article on how Android is fairing and just how fragmented the OS is as new versions of the OS are distributed.

The problem of Android fragmentation is partially caused by the cell carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint) having control over when new OS’s get distributed. It also has a lot to do with cell manufacturers being allowed to alter the base Android OS putting their own spin on it before it goes onto their devices. The latter being a big factor in slowing down the distribution of new OS’s to users.

The article shows one very interesting graph of the percentage of handsets that have the most recent version of Android:

Preview SS001

It’s interesting to me because the percentage never exceeds 55%! So currently, about 53% of all Android handsets out there are running Gingerbread/Honeycomb (I wonder what the percentage is for each of those OS’s?) and maybe 1% to 2% are on Ice Cream Sandwich. That leaves about 45% for all the other OS’s.

In attempting to find some fragmentation info on iOS, I mostly found article discussing which OS’s app crash more frequently. Really?

I did find one site showing iOS distribution based on web impressions:

4lTUT

I’m disappointed that I couldn’t find more info on iOS fragmentation. I know it exists and I would love to see the number of users per iPhone and OS version.

Let’s face it, there have been 5 iPhones since 2007. iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. 2 versions of the iPhone have been discontinued (Original and 3G). 3 versions of iOS are used by those 5 phones. iOS version 3.1.3 for the original iPhone, 4.2.1 for the 3G and 5.0.1 for the 3GS, 4 and 4S.

If someone reading this has seen some decent stats on iOS distribution, I would love to know where to find it.

2 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Opinion

February 26, 2012

New shows I have discovered since cutting the cord

By Dave M.

Since we cut the cord here, we have discovered several shows. Some we might have discovered if we were still watching cable, but maybe not. After all, we skipped pretty much all the commercials we could with the TiVo and the DVR that we got from Charter. iTunes helps out a little by offering free pilot episodes of many new shows. That’s how I found out about Ringer.

Most of what we have discovered were thanks to Hulu.

34001692 2 440 DT6

Hulu’s first screen shows 7 shows they are highlighting at the moment. I suppose it’s similar to iTunes main screen highlighting several items. I found quite a few interesting shows thanks to that screen.

Continue reading

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Television

February 26, 2012

Is it really piracy if…

By Dave M.

Pirate flag iconMarco Arment had a very interesting post about addressing problems to do with the layout of an office’s bathroom and torrent’ing movie’s/TV shows.

Not all piracy represents lost sales: many pirates would never have paid, and would rather go without whatever they can’t easily pirate. That’s not a market worth worrying too much about, because there’s not much anyone can do to stop it, and any attempts to slow it down usually just limit, inconvenience, frustrate, and anger the paying customers.

But there are a lot of people who will pay to get content legally, even if it’s easy to pirate, when getting it legally is easier. (This is now the case, to a large extent, with music.)

In response to The Oatmeal’s comic, Andy Ihnatko makes a good counterargument:

The single least-attractive attribute of many of the people who download content illegally is their smug sense of entitlement. …

The world does not OWE you Season 1 of “Game Of Thrones” in the form you want it at the moment you want it at the price you want to pay for it. If it’s not available under 100% your terms, you have the free-and-clear option of not having it.

Andy’s right. But it’s not going to solve the problem.

Relying solely on yelling about what’s right isn’t a pragmatic approach for the media industry to take. And it’s not working. It’s unrealistic and naïve to expect everyone to do the “right” thing when the alternative is so much easier, faster, cheaper, and better for so many of them.

The pragmatic approach is to address the demand.

My question to ponder is: Is it piracy if the person torrent’ing a TV show is only doing so to watch it once, then he throws away the video file?

Sure, I understand Andy’s “counterargument” perfectly. It is my choice not to spend $115 a month for the privilege to watch 10 episodes of Game of Thrones. HBO doesn’t have to bend it’s way of doing business just so I can watch Game of Thrones for a much more reasonable price.

Apparently, I could just wait a period of time and rent the DVD’s when they become available on Netflix. However, even this is difficult. 5 DVD’s for 10 episodes? What in the world is on these DVD’s that only 2 1 hour episodes fit on a standard DVD? Even if there is bonus content, only being able to watch 2 episodes before having to send the Disc back to Netflix and wait for them to send the next DVD in the series, kind of ruins the whole “renting” experience. At least for me.

It would be much better is we could just stream the show, but that probably won’t be available for quite some time. Maybe not until after season two is finished.

I suppose I should just accept the fact that HBO doesn’t give a f**k if their shows are watched or not. So long as they get their precious money from cable companies like Charter, Comcast and the others, they are more than happy with their situation.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Blog Comment, Opinion

February 20, 2012

News about MLB.com At Bat ’12

By Dave M.

Quick look at todays free amazon app mlbcom at bat mzbo 0

UPDATE 2/27/12: I just found some new info about MLB.com At Bat ’12 that you should check out. It’s in this new blog post: Update to MLB.com At Bat ’12 info.

UPDATE 2/28/12: Macworld just put up a post about the app: MLB.com At Bat warms up for 2012 season.

UPDATE 2/29/12: The MLB.com At Bat ’12 app is finally out! Take a look!

I was just informed by a friend that MLB in their infinite wisdom has drastically changed the MLB.com At Bat app for 2012. After doing a little digging, I found an article that pretty much says it all.

This year, we’ve just confirmed that MLB At Bat 12 will be free  with your subscription, which remains at $119.99 for existing subscribers. New subscriptions will be priced at $124.99. This enables you to receive 150 Spring Training games and all 2430 regular season games (some games are subject to blackout), with no added cost for either the iPhone or iPad apps.

Every article I found about this change made it sound wonderful! This would be true if you were writing to all the folks that paid the $125 subscription last season.

First off, you do not get 2,430 games! There is no way that anyone will be able to stream every game! There are games that start at similar times, the AppleTV and iOS devices can only play one stream at a time. Sure, your computer can do more than one, but how many people are going to sit in front of their “computer” and watch several games at a time. I guess, if that computer were hooked up to an HDTV, they might, but that’s about it.

Secondly, last season, people were able to pay $15 for the Game Day Audio streams. Being forced to pay almost 10x that for the ability to listen to Game Day Audio again is ludicrous!
I’m having a hard time understanding why all the reviews I have read so far about this news is positive! I would much rather pay $30 or even $50 for MLB.com At Bat ’12!

In this household. We paid the $15 for MLB.com At Bat ’11 and $15 for the Game Day Audio. We were fine with that. In fact, I paid $30 for the apps because I bought both the iPhone and iPad versions!

To be fair, it’s not all that clear if the Game Day Audio can be purchased separately and used with the app, or the only subscription that will work with the app is the full $125 one.

The $125 subscription really caters best to people who root for a team that doesn’t play in the city they live in. My wife who is a huge Indians fan living in St. Louis would benefit the most from a $125 subscription, but as a Cardinals fan, there is no big advantage.

Ah well, time to look for a new app to track baseball!

10 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in News, Opinion, Rant

February 17, 2012

My poor tumblr blog…

By Dave M.

Google Chrome SS001I’m going to be posting short link posts to my old tumblr blog. I like putting images in my posts, but short link posts makes that very difficult. Even this post would be short, but I’m making it longer so that it fits my format. :)

I really just want to start using that poor tumblr blog I have had for years. I rarely put things in there and I do find a lot of things on the web as I read my feeds that I would like to share with the world.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in Site News

February 16, 2012

“Cutting the Cord”, a Month Later

By Dave M.

It’s been just under a month since we completely “Cut the Cord” with Cable. Last year, after I calculated how much money we were paying to the cable company for just television, I knew it was time to get rick of the cable part of my bill. We used to get Cable and Internet.

So, after a few days of confusion with the cable company, I brought the set-top box that we were renting back to the cable company and that ended our cable service. I did up the Internet speed we were getting to 30Mbps down for the price of 15Mbps. Nothing to complain about there at all.

Continue reading

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Review

February 9, 2012

Tweetbot

By Dave M.

ITunes SS001

I’ve been using Tweetbot for the iPhone ever since it arrived. I’ve been a huge fan of Tapbots apps since Weightbot hit the App Store back on Oct. 2008. I just really like the care given to the details of the UI and the overall look and feel.

So much functionality is compressed into a very small amount of screen space. The ingenious use of gestures and taps to accomplish many common twitter functions is really outstanding. For example, just swipe left on a tweet to see the conversation thread of that specific tweet. Double tapping a tweet will display more detail about that tweet. Tap and hold on a tweet to bring up options.

Continue reading

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in iOS, Mini Review

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 197 other followers