Wow, wow, wow… The Netflix for iPhone app is awesome!

Netflix released their app for iPhone and iPod Touch a little while ago. This is the app most people have been looking forward to since the announcement of iOS 4. The reason why people have been looking forward to it is because, like their app for the iPad, this allowed people to watch streaming movies and TV shows from their iPhone or iPod Touch.

3G Entertainment

Normally, though, you’d have limitations with such an amazing product. The main limitation I could see them doing is not allowing the Netflix app to work over 3G. And that would be ok, because there are plenty of situations where you’d want to have access to Netflix when you had wifi (such as visiting a friend house, at work, at a hotel, etc).

But Netflix DOES work over 3G! Woo-hoo! What magical negotiation wizard got that to pass with AT&T, we’ll never know… but bless him or her. Having Netflix over 3G is AMAZING!

I mean think about the possibilities with having access to TV and movies anytime, anywhere. And I ain’t talkin’ about buying (or stealing) movies and TV shows and transferring them to your iPhone’s media library. That all gets old and stale as soon as you watch it. Who’s gonna’ wanna’ watch the same TV show or movie over and over again?

But having access to the ENTIRE library of streaming content available through Netflix anytime, anywhere?? *drools* Yeah baby… So hot.

New Possibilities

This opens the door for a whole new world of possibilities for Netflix users (which I myself am one). I mean just like when Pandora came out with an app for the iPhone (before that, it was a virtual unknown) and allowed streaming Internet radio to be used anytime, anywhere, the same thing has now happened with streaming Internet TV and movies.

Think about the possibilities now… Just picture someone being told at their job “No, your needed for an evening budget meeting in an hour, so you won’t have time to drive home and back before the meeting. Head down to the conference room now and wait for everyone to arrive later.”. That sucks, but he / she can just load up the Netflix app and think to themselves “Haha, little do you know, but this isn’t torture, I’m gonna’ watch me some Reno 911.”.

Or how about a girlfriend or wife who’s dragged to a convention or event her man’s interested in (but she’s there because later they’ll be going out to eat or something). She didn’t even know she’d be attending, so rather than be pissed sitting there for two hours, she just pulls out her headphones and searches for something on Netflix to watch.

Ooo! Or how about standing in some godawful line somewhere, like the DMV! Or how about an amusement park line, even better. Now that’ll be some awesome ****. Everyone there will be “Ugg… so bored.”, playing on their crappy, inferior mobile phones, checking Facebook for the thirtieth time or some bull ****. While your laughing out loud to some crazy funny TV show, such as It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Everyone around looking at you with envy each time you laugh or something. Like “Your not supposed to enjoy this line…”.

Netflix In Your Car

Oh yeah, and this is the best thing… For those of us that have both iPhones and a Netflix subscription, this now means that we have a means to stream TV shows and movies in our cars!

I mean, I remember reading articles years ago about how someday we (meaning the rich) will have cars connected to the Internet were we’ll have music, TV and movies “piped wirelessly” to enjoy.

Well we have that now, but it’s not some exclusivity reserved only for the rich. It’s not a service that’s “piped” into the car directly though, it’s sent directly to a device that we already pay for mobile Internet, and from a service (Netflix) we’re also already paying for.

Being able to easily and quickly search for new titles of shows or movies while on the road is so great. And any program you watch from your computer will resume via your iPhone and visa-versa.

First Impressions

The program works great. I have an iPhone 4, which is capable of displaying high definition content. Well, Netflix appears to be in HD over both wifi and 3G. That’s amazing.

The streaming video seems to be very responsive. It loads extremely quickly considering it’s high quality too. Seeking to a new position isn’t a problem either. It’s not like the crap we experience with YouTube, waiting forever for a video to load or horrible quality over 3G.

Playback over 3G seems great considering I’m able to get it to work even when I barely have cell signal in my apartment. The screen shot below is from a video (Reno 911!) playing over a very weak signal. You can see it looks great.

The interface is fantastic. It works exactly how you’d expect. It’s so quick and easy to search for what you want and jump right into it.

Requested Feature

One feature I’d love to see is the ability to watch the video in portrait orientation.

Some of you are probably thinking “Why would you want that?”. The reason why is so that you can watch movies docked into a dock or similar device that doesn’t allow your iPhone to be in landscape orientation. Yes, I understand the video will be very small, but that’s a lot better than being sideways.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a ******’ great app. If Pandora is the best music app / service, then Netflix is the best video app / service.

Especially considering the Hulu Plus app isn’t even an option because it costs $10 a month for Hulu Plus, still shows commercials and won’t even run on 3G iPhones.

Netflix and Hulu are my two main forms of entertainment and because of not being able to do Hulu on my iPhone, this makes running Netflix on the Neocell 4 all that much better. With innovative thinking like this, is there any question as to how Netflix caused the downfall of Blockbuster?

Peace, JbB

Every once and a while, this message pops up in iBooks. “Failed to load book because the requested resource is missing.“. What’s this crap mean, and how do you fix it?

Well it means that something got screwy with iBooks. Most likely you had a book open running in the background, and iOS 4.0 needed the extra memory so it closed iBooks and then something screwed up.

The solution? It’s real simple. Load up the library, open another book, go back to the library and open the book that was refusing to open.

Problem solved.

Peace, JbB

I’ve got a new free app called Groupon. The app Groupon is an app for the web site groupon.com. I saw it because it was featured on iTunes.

What Groupon is, is a web site / service that apparently works with restaurants to offer certain promos and deals to users of the service. It’s marketing for the restaurants and savings for it’s users. It’s only available in about 50 cities, but if you live near one of the cities listed, give it a shot because a restaurant outside of one of those cities could be featured and may closer to you than you think. I happen to live in Tampa, which is listed. The app itself isn’t too remarkable, it’s just an iPhone version of their web site, so it’s the service that’s interesting, not actually the app.

Tonight I saw a deal for a restaurant I’ve never heard of called Poblano Mexican Grill and Bar. The deal was that you can buy a $25 gift card-style coupon (can only be used once) for $10. I thought, that’s a pretty good deal. Goin’ out and getting $25 worth of food and drink for only $10. Even if the selection isn’t the best, goin’ out, dinner for two for only $10, you can’t beat that. As I mentioned, I live in Tampa, fl. and this restaurant is located in Clearwater, Fl. So, even you don’t live in a city that’s listed for Groupon, it’s still worth checking out if you live near one of those cities.

The app. As far as I can tell, the Groupon web site is fully browse-able from Safari, so you don’t need the iPhone app. But the iPhone app does a good job. I was able to register and add my credit card information all from within the app, so it really was convenient using the app. I can’t give too much feedback on the Groupon service itself, as I just signed up and bought one thing tonight. But it seems pretty tight. Not to mention this is a better than than trying to surf eBay, looking for gift cards or coupons to restaurants being sold as a way to save some money, because most of the time a $25 gift card to, let’s say Applebees, sells for $22 or more, saving you less than $3. That ain’t no deal. so Groupon may be a good way to eat at some new places for cheap. (All y’all single fellas out there, this is a great way to take a chick out on a first or repeat date to somewhere nice without making yourself go broke. Little tip for ya.)

Peace, JbB

Man I’m sorta’ ticked about WordPress 2 for the iPhone. For one, it has a known problem for some users (a lot of of users!) that it doesn’t always save posts. What happens is when you have a post your working on, 25% of the time WordPress 2 won’t save what you’ve written. This was never a problem with WordPress “1″.

There’s no fix if you experience this issue. You get that? There-is-no-fix… The only way to get this issue fixed is for WordPress to update the app fixing the bug. Problem, from the release of WordPress 2 to today’s date, they’ve released app updates and none of them have fixed the bug or even addressed that it exists.

People have said online that you can hit “publish” as soon as you start your post as a workaround to this problem. That’s a stupid idea because that makes your post LIVE for people to read while your still writing it, typos and all. And also, you must be online at all times to save this way, which includes the same option of saving it as a public draft. You want to keep your posts saved as a local draft, and then publish once it’s finished. So this isn’t possible with this “saving bug”.

So now, I’m typing up my posts with the Evernote app and then copying and pasting the text into the WordPress app to post. I’ll have to switch to WordPress 1 or choose another blogging app. This sucks.

What kinda’ issues are the rest of you facing? When did this start happening and have you found any work around or… anything? If you another blogging app for WordPress, what do you think? I wanna’ hear from ya.

Peace, JbB