Zach Beauvais

After covering the Typeroom Light beta earlier, I sent a few questions over to the makers, and they’ve sent back some interesting answers. I should have mentioned that the Typeroom I tried out was a lite version (think 3.2 lager, but without the bubbles). The pro version seems like it will have more options, many of which seemed right in line with my questions…

1. How does Typeroom Lite work with CSS and site templates?

TypeRoom Lite does not actually work with templates. TypeRoom Professional however, does.

One of our most important design considerations when creating TypeRoom Lite was that it had to be instant. We needed a way to introduce people to this concept of "remote CMS", and instead of going through the explanations, we wanted to just show the view (using their own site as the subject of demonstration).

So while TypeRoom Lite is being released as a product in and of itself (with a free and paid version of TypeRoom Lite), it also has another and possibly even more important, role as a means to preview of the technology on which we are basing our complete CMS.

2. With the premium version, will the system be able to cope with RSS, Permalinks and other essential characteristics of Blogs and syndicated content?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is that we are planning on releasing a minimal version of the professional version to start with so we can iterate with the help of the community.

Watching TV online is becoming a bit of a hobby of mine.  I don’t have a TV anywhere in the house, and it is just so much more convenient to be able to watch what I want, when I do, without  having to play around with channels or digital interfaces which seem built to be slow (i.e. digital TV). Early efforts to watch online were riddled with frustration. I trialled Joost along with however many millions of others who signed up for a Beta invite, but found the system clunky and without real appeal in the frankly poor content. Also, it was a memory hog and froze my then-ageing Dell. There was also the problem with pirates and ‘linked TV’ Not only is there the conscience to console, but one popular link site, tv-links.co.uk, actually landed its founder in prison. YouTube only provides short clips, or pirated episodes which are quickly removed by moderators.

So, where does that leave the casual TV-watcher? With all the early difficulty of installing software, finding Betas, or perusing content which either didn’t work or you didn’t want to play, it seemed that watching tv-quality content online has always been a struggle. With new improvements, though, can you actually watch TV online easily and relatively free from frustration? I think it’s getting there.

UK TV Online

First, I’d like to note that I will be avoiding Hulu and any discussion of it aside from mentioning that it doesn’t work in the UK. Both of the services reviewed below, to be fair to US readers, currently only work in the UK.