The 2 Best iTunes 7 features you never hear about

I’ve been enjoying iTunes 7. There are a number of things that I like a lot about this version but there are two that seem to have been over looked by the other coverage that I’ve seen.

Great feature number 1: Proper movie controls ala Quicktime. I’ve been trying to get into the whole watching-tv-on-my-laptop thing with iTunes, but it’s been annoying because there have never been any video controls in full-screen video mode. If you wanted to rewind or fast foward you had to escape from the full screen and click on the annoyingly small buttons at the top of the window. Now however, if you are in full screen mode and you move your mouse, a control area appears near the bottom of the screen that lets you do the common video control actions. Quicktime has worked like this for a while, so I’m excited that this is finally in iTunes.

Great feature number 2: Finally a download queue! I subscribe to a rediculous amount of podcasts, and managing the downloads has always been a pain. When a lot of things are queued up at the same time you ended up having to scroll up and down in the podcast screen to see what was downloading, and if you wanted to see the progress of the downloads you had to click on the rediculously small buttons at the top of the window. Now however, there is a new download screen that appears when anything is…wait for it…downloading. Is puts them all in a tidy list where you can see the progress bars of each, and if it is something you are downloading from Apple, there is even a pause button so you can resume the download later!

I can’t figure out why it took them 7 versions of the software to figure these two things out, but it’s sure making my digital life easier so far.

Annoyance: Ethnic food that is completely wrong

Today’s annoyance comes in the form of enthic food that is completely, utterly, and unapologeticly wrong.

My wife and I spent an evening at the mall in Appleton, WI (I had to pick up a fresh pair of Chucks) and we ate at the food court for dinner. After sampling the stuff that the guy with the toothpicks was handing out it came down to either the Cajun place or the Japanese place. The Cajun place had a shorter line so we went with that. It’s called Kato’s Cajun, and the food is…wait for it…not remotely Cajun at all!

What comes to mind when you think Cajun? For me it’s seafood, especially crawfish, sausage, and jumbeliah. This place had no seafood (they had one sign that said something about shrimp, but it was no where in sight), no jumbeliah, nothing with sausage, in short - nothing remotely Cajun at all. In fact, it was just a generic Chinese place with Cajun on the sign.

Guess what was on the menu? Egg rolls, which we all know Louisiana is famous for (not!), fried rice, Lo Mien (which they called “Cajun Noodles”), something called “Cajun chicken” which was indistinguishable from General Tso’s chicken, crab rangoon which I’m sure had been relabeled as well but I didn’t see what they called it, and that chicken entree that you see at every Chinese place that has chicken stir fried with onions and red and green peppers.

Sure Wisconsin is about 1100 miles from the bayou, but surely anyone who has been to a Chinese place anywhere in America will have seen this food before. I would really like to know if this is a common practice, and how far south they are brave enough to go before people laugh them out of the mall for trying to sell crap like that.

I was embarrassed for them. I really was.

Google can PWN me

Today I got into the Google beta for apps for your domian (or whatever it’s called). It’s an interesting trade-off of power. I now have the power to create gmail accouonts for users at my domain, and google now controls my MX records and an entire sub domain of big-o.org. Something tells me that they are going to get more out of it than I am, but I’m going to enjoy not having to manage email anymore. I hate sendmail.