Archive for the 'News' Category

Update: Despite how things looked, and what the iPlayer help pages said, RealPlayer has had a stay of execution from Auntie – for national stations, at least. Local and regional stations are not available any more as RealPlayer streams. Most have been replaced by a “Sorry, no longer available” audio message, but one or two are missing completely, and it’s these which can cause the undismissable dialogs and beachballs with RealPlayer plugin. I strongly recommend that everyone upgrades to the latest version, as Flash is now used by default. (RealPlayer is still available for some stations, but you have to choose to use it by option-clicking the widget’s “i” button.)

The original post remains below, unaltered.

The BBC  have removed RealPlayer streaming as an option for listening to their radio stations online. This has major ramifications for the widget.

In a nutshell: using RealPlayer streaming – the default mode – with BBC Radio Widget 4.03 may cause your computer to become unresponsive.

There’s an easy fix. Switch to Flash streaming, right now. Option-click the “i” button, and choose Flash. This will only work for national stations, though, and therefore you should avoid using regional and local stations on v4.03.

There’s good news too, though… Flash streaming now works internationally, so you can ignore the UK-only warning on the widget. Also, v4.1 of the Unofficial BBC Radio Widget is due for release within days, restoring streaming for all stations – as well as bringing improvements in Flash streaming reliability, schedule fetching, and many, many bug fixes. You can help test it, too, if you get in touch.

It’s been weeks in the making, it’s taken so much hard work (most of that in bludgeoning IE6 into giving me a vaguely-working site) — but Phantom Gorilla finally relaunched this evening! It’s been hard, but I’m really, really pleased to have cut away so much of the crap in my old template (and to see the last of one awful stopgap-become-permanent solution in particular). It feels good to have the convenience of my own code for pages, too, instead of forcing WordPress to manage my whole site — clearly something it’s not supposed to do.

I’ve used lots of shiny new CSS toys, so you’ll get the best experience in Safari 4 or 3, closely followed by Firefox 3.5 or 3; but it’s been designed to degrade gracefully as far down as IE6. Not that I get much IE traffic, of course.

The other exciting news is the release of BBC Radio Widget 4.0 today, after a seriously lengthy beta period. It just kept collecting features — a RealPlayer workaround, Flash streaming, near-universal schedules — and turned from a 0.0x update into an X.0. Hopefully you’ll agree it’s worth the wait!

Update: It occurs to me that due to the site rearrangement, and my new permalink structure, some links and feeds may need updating. And I swear I’m a better writer when I’ve had more than six hours’ sleep in the last 72…