The Future of Television

The internet is all abuzz with talk about the lastest software platform for your television, Ubuntu TV. With its flashy interface inspired by Ubuntu’s Unity interface their video demo sure looks amazing. But it promises more than it can hope to offer.

At home I use the following:

Apple TV Plex Boxee Amazon Video Netflix (through Plex, Apple TV and iOS)

Non of these services offer what I want out of the box. Apple TV probably comes the closest especially since their Netflix integration. To be fair the best experience I have had is the following (fairly illegal) setup:

Sickbeard (with NZBMatrix for searching) SABnzbd Plex Drobo

This provides roughly what Ubuntu is showing off in their TV setup. Access to all the TV shows and movies you want right from your TV.

Why can’t I get this from one of the many existing services? Because the content providers still don’t trust the software companies to get it right. Amazon, Netflix and Apple are the only companies who have had any success in getting the kinds of contracts that will lead to this kind of service.

The first truly successful internet TV service won’t be created by developers, it will be created by lawyers.

Source: ubuntu.com

Bad Third Party Libraries

On multiple occasions I have had to deal with an issue where I cannot share an iOS archive. It usually manifests itself by the following message:

The error is “No packager exists for the type of archive” and “This kind of archive cannot be signed”.

Not very useful.

The trick here is that often a third party library was not set up correctly (or I checked out a new version of the library and forgot to change it).

If you right click, show in Finder, right click again, Show Package Contents and expand it out you should normally just see an application but in this case we see a library:

This is due to a flag called “Skip Install” not being checked when building a subproject.

In this case digging into the Facebook project and setting Skip Install to Yes fixes it: