Dogear Nation » Podcast

This week, we continue to be at full strength, wondering how long that will last? We have a light selection of listener tags this week, but the ones we get are loads of fun, leaving us to wonder if we will all be playing games driven by social engineering. So listen in to this week’s show, and don’t forget to keep on tagging with “dogear-nation”.

What’s cool?
Andy — Michael Bay’s secret lego movie
Michael R — Favors from designers via Effie & bluebus
Michael M — Brick foosball

Obligatory 3-D Internet
Ikea augmented reality iPhone catalog heidigoseek
Metaio iOS4 augmented reality heidigoseek

Tech-no-tronic
Let the children lead the way – Future Tech from their POV heidigoseek / epredator
Telescopic Eye Implant – allerhead
Art of analog computing heidigoseek
Latest Kindle- Does it matter
iPad usage report

Final thoughts
Andy — Stickycomics
Michael M — Social vs sociopathic applications or why do people play farmville?
Michael R — Fifa World Cup – it’s been fun

Final final thought (from Andy)
Really sorry for the problems with my audio in this episode – I know it isn’t the easiest listen! Thanks for supporting the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:39 — 12.3MB)

So… I’ve you’ve been following my tweets then you know that over the holiday’s I’ve been studying to write an iPhone app. My goal is for the first app to be a Dogear-Nation application. I would love to hear what you would like that App to be like. I’ve got a few ideas:
1) RSS reader of the Dogear-Nation RSS Feed
2) Allow you to listen to the audio stream without having to download it via your podcatcher
3) Allow you to click thru to the links we talk about while the show continues to stream (take that apple for not allowing us to multi task)
4) Other ideas?

I have planned on using a lot of the code that Andy put together for the Dogear-Nation Dashcode Widget, but since only 25% of our audience uses a Mac, many of you may not know about it. How many of our listeners use an iPhone? Do we need to make it a web app so that it can be on the Android?

I’d love to hear your thoughts?

If you use Google Reader to check your feeds, you might have noticed the new “Send to” button at the bottom right of each article. Here’s how to quickly send items to the dogear-nation tag on del.icio.us to share them with us!

In case the URL you need is a little long to type, here’s the copy-and-paste version:

Name dogear-nation

URL https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/add?description=${title}&tags=dogear-nation&url=${url}&replace=no

Icon URL http://dogearnation.com/favicon.ico

So during last Friday’s show we covered a ton of iPhone apps that let you do augmented reality. Andy and I even got into a discussion on the social norms for using AR when talking face to face with someone. One of the apps we talked about was Yelp. I used to use Yelp, but had stopped after… for no apparent reason. Well now I have a reason to use it again. Check out this screenshot from my iPhone…

Yelp on iPhone

I was at Quizno’s near the house the other day, and this was simply way cool.

I’ve just refreshed the theme of the blog for the first time in ~2 years. We’d been using the lovely i3theme for a long time, but as the show evolves and brings in new listeners (and as I’ve been curating and progressively improving / upgrading the site) it was time for an update.

The Publicizer theme we’re now using describes itself as having more of a “Web 2.0 look-and-feel” and I definitely like the rounded corners. I’ve made a few small changes to it to make the switch less jarring – I changed the header fonts from Times / serif to Trebuchet / sans-serif, and tweaked the spacing a bit. The essentials are all still here – we’re blue-and-white, we’re all logo’ed up, and the feeds and links are all still right there in the sidebar. The nice prominent search box, clean look and larger text should make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

The look is less Mac-ish, too, and although we talk Apple a lot, the show is definitely not supposed to be all about Macs or iPhones – we love our Windows, Linux, BeOS and DOS-using listeners, too A small annoyance is that you have to click through to an individual post to leave a comment, but I may change that.

All of that is just my opinion, of course, and I am but a humble web monkey. What do you think? As usual, we’re keen to hear your views – leave us a comment, or tweet us

Update: added social network links at the top right, and threaded comments!