Mac support please!

Started by CEH, December 14, 2005, 11:53:30 AM

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CEH

I know that IceTV feels the wireless router product provides platform-independent support and so Apple Mac support is not needed,  For some people, like me, that is NOT enough.  

For example, I want to use a Mac as media server collocated with my Topfield TF5000PVRt.  I have a wireless network, and with a Mac mini, say, as media server it provides the wireless link.  So your dedicated wireless router is redundant.  Also, it provides very limited support for general file transfer, etc.

So, what I want is to be able to run the IceTV downloader on a Mac; alternatively, to be able to use a product like MacTF-EPG to connect with your server and download the XMLTV files; can you provide information to assist that?  BTW, I do not want to have to run Virtual PC just for IceTV.

Do you have any intention of providing Mac support?  You should be aware that Macs are a growing proportion of home computers (growing at 2X the rate of PCs).

tick007

Quote from: Daniel Drysdale on August 13, 2007, 10:07:10 AM
Quote from: tick007 on August 13, 2007, 08:45:32 AM
Your original service was centered around people who had Topfield 5000s.  To this day, you cannot get automated ICE updates to a Toppy connected to a Mac (to my knowledge).  The only "solution" that comes close was Nathan Oates' alpha release of ICEGuide4Topfield, but that didn't do scheduled updates and it also doesn't support using a proxy (so it's useless on my network).

We do have a method to supply guide updates to your Topfield that you may not be aware of, we have a re-purposed wireless router we call the IceBox that plugs into a wired network or accesses a wireless network and provides guide updates to your Topfield.

This solution requires no intervention once set up and only needs a connection to the internet. We support proxies so this may work for you.

I've followed this up here as this is the more appropriate forum to continue discussing it in.  This thread is one of the more recent attempts to ask for exactly what I was asking for.  Like this poster, I share exactly the same thoughts.  I have a Mac Mini as the heart of my media centre, so using things like the IceBox is redundant.

Quote from: Daniel Drysdale on August 13, 2007, 10:07:10 AM
As far as a native solution for the Mac, I understand your frustration, we have debated this topic at length here at IceTV and unfortunately the lack of Mac support from Topfield makes it hard for us to supply a robust commercial solution as a native application.

Maybe you misunderstand what we're asking for.  We're not talking about an IceRemote solution for Mac-driven Toppies (though that would be nice!), as that obviously is not trivial.

We're talking about adding some simple USB upload code (which you already have from Nathan Oates' Mac ICEGuide4Topfield as I understand it) and cutting and pasting into into the Mac IceTV widget.  That's it!  That's all you would need to do!  The widget already does the scheduled download bit from IceTV on a Mac; if it would then be so nice as to then automatically upload that to the Toppy for us then all the Mac/Toppy users would have everything we ever wanted.

That's why we're frustrated... it's seems so simple and we've been so close for so long, but nada from IceTV on actually doing it.  I guess all you guys are using EyeTV cards in your Macs. ;)  But please spare a thought for all the other Mac based users who want to drive PVRs or anything else in the future.  That's what I meant in my original followup about consolidating your base first before launching into heaps of new features that only a subset of your users might be able to actually use.

Daniel Drysdale at IceTV

Quote from: tick007 on August 15, 2007, 06:47:06 PM
Maybe you misunderstand what we're asking for.  We're not talking about an IceRemote solution for Mac-driven Toppies (though that would be nice!), as that obviously is not trivial.

We're talking about adding some simple USB upload code (which you already have from Nathan Oates' Mac ICEGuide4Topfield as I understand it) and cutting and pasting into into the Mac IceTV widget.  That's it!  That's all you would need to do!  The widget already does the scheduled download bit from IceTV on a Mac; if it would then be so nice as to then automatically upload that to the Toppy for us then all the Mac/Toppy users would have everything we ever wanted.

That's why we're frustrated... it's seems so simple and we've been so close for so long, but nada from IceTV on actually doing it.  I guess all you guys are using EyeTV cards in your Macs. ;)  But please spare a thought for all the other Mac based users who want to drive PVRs or anything else in the future.  That's what I meant in my original followup about consolidating your base first before launching into heaps of new features that only a subset of your users might be able to actually use.

Before I go any further I want to assure you that we are not unsympathetic to the plight of the Mac owner, I switched to the Mac two and half years ago and I haven't looked back, one of the guide team is a Mac user, the major shareholder for the company has a totally Mac centric household and you're probably familar with the handywork of our Marketing and Content Manager in the form of iStatPro and iLoveLamp...

For us it all boils down to a few factors

1) Development cost - Even though it seems a simple thing to do it is a big enough job that we need to make a conscious decision to do it and allocate resources to the project. Without getting bogged down in the details, an official IceTV supported loader for the Mac would need more than a little copy/paste, it is definitely a few man-weeks to do properly.

2) Financial Risk - As I explained earlier there is no support from Topfield for the Mac platform, as such we would be compelled to use the USB code that third parties have written, I think the best code so far comes from puppy which was written by Peter Urbanec. The problem here is that if we use a reverse engineered unsupported protocol to interface with your Topfield and a bug in the underlying USB code kills your Topfield then we may be held responsible with no recourse back to Topfield. We do this in our IceBox2 product currently and it was necessary to weigh the risks versus the rewards of doing this..

So, where do we go from here??

The only route that I can guarantee for the immediate future is to open the floor to third party developers to come up with a loader, currently the code we used to develop our IceBox1, which includes an older version of puppy and the daemon that communicates with our server to download guide and TAP updates, is available for download on our website and is released under the GPL, anyone who wants to implement a loader for the Mac is welcome to download the code and put it all together, see http://www.icetv.com.au/gpl.shtml for details.

For IceTV to develop a Topfield loader for the Mac we would need to know that the potential gain in subscriptions is enough to offset the development costs and the financial risks to us, I would suggest that you organise all the Topfield/Mac owners that you know to send an email to support@icetv.com.au with a request for a native loader and if the demand is great enough I will take it up with management and see what happens...






Cheers,

Dan
Software Manager @ IceTV

injidup

Have a look at IceGuide4Topfield from Nathan Oates. In his words:
"IceGuide4Topfield is a simple Cocoa app to download ICETV EPG data and upload it to your Topfield PVR. It requires a valid ICETV subscription. Note that this is not an official application from ICETV."

He's also written a file-transfer utility for Mac to Toppy.

World of Noates

RubberChicken

Quote from: Daniel Drysdale on August 16, 2007, 01:18:35 PM

1) Development cost - ... it is definitely a few man-weeks to do properly.

2) Financial Risk - ... we would be compelled to use the USB code that third parties have written, ..... we may be held responsible...

For IceTV to develop a Topfield loader for the Mac we would need to know that the potential gain in subscriptions is enough to offset the development costs and the financial risks to us, I would suggest that you organise all the Topfield/Mac owners that you know to send an email to support@icetv.com.au with a request for a native loader and if the demand is great enough I will take it up with management and see what happens...


On the positive side you are at least no longer claiming that you have any intention of developing the loader for Mac. On the negative side I still recall being told over a year ago that it was.

Is it not just a little ironic that..

1. The Mac user base may not be worth spending the moderate development costs, but you have no problem asking those users to pay you several hundred dollars more than you ask of a Windows user, to buy your router based solution. You also have no problem asking us to pay the same fees as Windows subscribers, despite the lower level of support.

2. You don't want to risk damaging our Toppies using lethal third party code, but are content that in not offering it we will use it anyway if we don't pay extra for your router. I'm not aware of any software vendor that takes responsibility for damaging equipment, I'm very used to seeing a big waiver on the install screen and would happily admonish you of that responsibility. I've been using Nathan's solution for over a year and it has not cooked my Toppy yet. I'm sure not all of us want to sue the pants of you.

Daniel Drysdale at IceTV

Quote from: RubberChicken on October 03, 2007, 11:36:55 AM
On the positive side you are at least no longer claiming that you have any intention of developing the loader for Mac. On the negative side I still recall being told over a year ago that it was.

Businesses change their plans, in an ideal world there are any number of software projects that I would like to undertake. The reality is that we are a small company and have limited resources so we need to target areas that we think will provide the greatest benefit to us. Currently we are focussed on building up our brand with the new iwatchthis.com.au site and working on a number of projects with PVR manufacturers. We are stretched too thin to have time for a native Mac solution at this time. If a third party developer or open source project wants to take up the slack then we have provided the resources they need. We would also be willing to provide a reasonable level of technical support to anyone wishing to do the work.

Quote from: RubberChicken on October 03, 2007, 11:36:55 AM
Is it not just a little ironic that..

1. The Mac user base may not be worth spending the moderate development costs, but you have no problem asking those users to pay you several hundred dollars more than you ask of a Windows user, to buy your router based solution. You also have no problem asking us to pay the same fees as Windows subscribers, despite the lower level of support.

When you purchase an IceTV subscription you are purchasing a licence to use the guide on up to three supported devices, we don't care what mixture of devices you use and we don't charge different fees for different devices. We have no desire to limit use of the guide beyond our standard conditions and it would put an unreasonable administrative burden on us to try and provide a special "Mac using Topfield Owner" discount to offset the lack of official connectivity options.

For a subscriber to use our guide in a Topfield PVR they must be able to get the EPG data onto the Topfield. The officially sanctioned method to do this is to use a windows PC and the Topfield supplied Altair software or our own Iceguide4Topfield loader that is built using the Topfield supplied drivers. We have also chosen to provide an additional method via the IceBox as a value add for people who don't wish to leave their PC on all the time or find it more convenient to use an always on appliance to manage the guide updates, or in this case are unable to make use of the support connectivity options.

I appreciate that this solution is not to your liking but the lack of Mac support for the Topfield should really be addressed to Topfield. I am sorry that you feel we are singling out Mac using Topfield owners for some kind of "tax", but this is not the case.

As a Mac owner myself I can sympathise with your position, if I owned a Topfield I would probably use Nathan Oates' program with some AppleScript to make it run periodically or if I had the time write my own application, I know this is not possible for everyone which is why I asked people to rally all the Mac using Topfield owners to contact us so we could see if the demand was high enough to warrant writing an app for you. I don't think we have had a single request yet.

Quote from: RubberChicken on October 03, 2007, 11:36:55 AM
2. You don't want to risk damaging our Toppies using lethal third party code, but are content that in not offering it we will use it anyway if we don't pay extra for your router. I'm not aware of any software vendor that takes responsibility for damaging equipment, I'm very used to seeing a big waiver on the install screen and would happily admonish you of that responsibility. I've been using Nathan's solution for over a year and it has not cooked my Toppy yet. I'm sure not all of us want to sue the pants of you.

Unfortunately there is a big difference between acknowledging the existance of unsupported and potentially damaging programs and actually supplying a program that may brick your Toppy. I'm sure that the majority of Mac using Toppy owners aren't planning to sue us but we are not prepared to take that risk at this time.

With regards to our router, we make a very small margin on the IceBox, just enough to cover the costs of the custom firmware development, it is an enabling technology for delivering our guide not a source of income in itself.


Please end an email to support@icetv.com.au if you want a native application for the Mac OR if you are a Mac application developer email us for assistance

Cheers,

Dan
Software Manager @ IceTV

RubberChicken

Sorry Daniel, despite my grumbling I do see your side as well. I certainly did not mean to imply that you are gouging Mac subscribers or that you should introduce a tier pricing scheme. Just making an example, perhaps not very well. I like your guide and feel it is good value, or I would not have subscribed. I certainly look forward to the day when I might own a bit of equipment that can take advantage of all the great new work you are doing, in the meantime I shall continue to be grateful for Nathan's generosity, without which I would not be enjoying your guide.

Marc

RubberChicken & others: The kind of feedback you've given us in this thread is great, so no apology needed. It's good for us to have very vocal customers as it means we can improve the things that matter the most to you. If this was an easy fix then we'd definitely do it.

Rod_Hagen

Thought I'd add my own 2 Cents worth to this one.

I came across IceTv after getting an Elgato EyeTV back at the time when Ice were developing their 'widget" and before there was full integration with the Elgato. It was a bit frustrating at the time but the properly integrated end product now available works wonderfully for me. Simple, effective, one might well say "Mac like"!

I also own a Topfield 5000 "masterpiece", which I'm also very fond of. I tried for a while to get the "3rd party" hacks going to enable use of one our numerous Macs for program guide updates.   It worked, sort of, some times. I rapidly got fed up with it. The built in "official" program info got a bit better and I got tired of the hassle.  I haven't bothered using IceGuide on the Topfield for the last year or so. A pity , because the IceGuide stuff leaves the "official" material for dead. It is way easier to set up a recording on my IceGuide based Elgato hooked up to the Mac than it is using the Topfield.

Accordingly I sing the praises of IceGuide to Mac owners thinking of buying an Elgato tuner. On the other hand I've always warned Topfield purchasers with Macs not to expect too much and to think twice before they bother with IceGuide , based on my own experiences. (I'm one of the three or four Australian 'Level 4's" on the official Apple discussion boards and I get quite a few queries both on the boards and by email about such things from other Aussies.)

Well, given the Christmas "price cut" I've decided to give the IceBox2 a go, to see if it really does resolve the various IceTV issues for Mac based Topfield owners.  I hasten to add that this is not an endorsement of the IceBox2 approach (which even with the current price reduction , on the face of it, seems like a fairly expensive answer to the issue of getting a few lines of information from one device to another!). I simply don't know yet. I'll post here when I do.

One thing I do know, though, is that IceTV and Topfield are both crazy if they don't do their damndest to cater for the Mac market to the very best of their abilities. Apple are going gangbusters at present. They are also the company that has taken the digital media market bull by the horns and are leading the running on it in just about every department.  IceTV and Topfield, no doubt, can find rationalisations for failures of integration blamed on the other which seem eminently plausible, but if they really care about their stockholders then they will be doing their very best to overcome such problems and to hook properly into the Mac scene:- a rapidly growing, cashed up, segment of the IT market that simply cries out for the sort of products that they sell.

Cheers

Rod


Daniel Drysdale at IceTV

Hi Rod,

Firstly I'm pleased that you are enjoying EyeTV with integrated IceTV service, it has been a pleasure working with Elgato and we plan to continue working with them in the future...

With that out of the way we get back to the Topfield on Mac issue...
I think I've adequately explained the reasons for holding off on Mac support and rather than repeat them I'll refer you to the top of the page...

I'm well aware of the growing marketshare for the Mac, and we take the Mac community very seriously, EyeTV users are our third highest demographic and we are seeing good growth from them. Having said that, the number of Mac users that also have a Topfield appears to be quite small.

Two months ago I posted an open call for anyone who really wants native support for the Topfield to email support@icetv.com.au so that I could present a business case to management to do the loader, in the same post I pledged to support any developer who was prepared to do the job that we are not currently able to do.... In two months we have received exactly 1 email. If I went to my boss and told him that it appears that the Mac using Topfield community consists of less then half a dozen people and that I would like to commit 2-3 man weeks of time to writing a loader, well, you can imagine the response...

If you really want to see some action on this front please go back to the people that are asking you about Topfield on Mac and ask them to email us with a request for support. If you know any other current subscribers that are in the same situation then make sure they contact us and include their user id in the email. The more pressure you can bring to bear on the issue the better your chances of success.

I want to help you but I need your help to get the ball rolling from this end.

Cheers,

Dan
Software Manager @ IceTV

tick007

#10
Quote from: Daniel Drysdale on December 07, 2007, 12:46:53 PM
Two months ago I posted an open call for anyone who really wants native support for the Topfield to email support@icetv.com.au so that I could present a business case to management to do the loader, in the same post I pledged to support any developer who was prepared to do the job that we are not currently able to do.... In two months we have received exactly 1 email. If I went to my boss and told him that it appears that the Mac using Topfield community consists of less then half a dozen people and that I would like to commit 2-3 man weeks of time to writing a loader, well, you can imagine the response...

Err... was I the solitary email?  Cause I forgot whether I emailed you or not. ;)

Just remember that old business saying though, that for every complaint you actually receive, there are at least another 9 that you never hear of.  I can remember off the top of my head at least 4 or 5 users on this forum who have posted about the Mac/Toppy thing.  Expecting your market research to be done for you by your target market is a bit of an ambitious way of going about things. :)

In all seriousness, if you're not going to do your own market research on this, there probably needs to be a bit of faith-based, "if we build it they will come" mentality going on at Ice.  Otherwise I think you miss Rod's point about the growing, high-spending, tech-savvy Mac market out there.  This is complete speculation, but I see a correlation between the type of people who buy Topfields, and the type of people who are converting to Macs (primarily from a Unix backgorund, like myself.)  You have no idea of how many tens or possibly hundreds of subscriptions you've missed out on from Mac/Toppy people who did their research, found out they can't use Ice properly with their setup, and then decided they'd just keep the pain of using the free solutions out there.  After all, currently for Mac/Toppy users, the pain of using Ice is only slightly better than the pain of the free solutions.  Or they just silently grumbled and pull out an old Windows based laptop every now and then to do their updates.  Expecting these people to email you is a bit of wishful thinking - it's never going to happen.

In saying all that, I do totally agree with the main point you've made before about being an acceptable risk/reward trade off for Ice doing this (you wouldn't be a business if you didn't!)  If you're not prepared to have a slightly more optimistic view about the reward (what I, and others, have suggested above), then can you please re-assess the risk component?  The two risks you've mentioned are:

1) Time taken to code/test/document/support the Mac loader.  You've stated that it will likely be 2-3 weeks of man time to do the initial coding; however, you can probably see why to the outsider this seems a tad conservative as very little new code seemingly needs to be written, as all the hard bits already exist in other applications (as you mentioned for the IceBox.)  Instead, would Ice be willing to commit about half a man-day for someone to actually go and spec the work required properly?  I'm presuming the 2-3 weeks is just a guestimate at the moment.  Maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised that when you look at it, it really only turns out to be 1-2 days after all.  Or maybe it will turn out to be 2 months.  At least then you'll be able to give a good justification to the Mac/Toppy owners of why you're not doing it.

2) Risk of being responsible for bricked Toppies.  Seriously?  As people have mentioned before, every non-Windows Toppy owner out there (in the world, not just Ice users) is using unsanctioned software to use their Toppies.  And will happily release all responsibility from the software authors that let them do this.  Surely you can put a nice boilerplate software license around the software, as well as big blinking neon warnings on the download page that for those tech-savvy Mac/Toppy users who are willing to do this, that they are on their own?  Heck, you can even say it's officially unsupported and we can't ring you if we have trouble getting it working.  Again, the type of people who are calling for this I think will, by and large, not care (even the non-tech-savvy.)

And Daniel, thank you for patiently taking the time to keep on discussing this issue with those of us who continue to grumble about it, even if we currently seem at odds on some of the points.  It's very much appreciated, and is probably one of the main reasons we're still around here grumbling and not just given Ice up for dead.  And just imagine how pee'd off we'd be if you'd given us the cold shoulder instead!  :P

Daniel Drysdale at IceTV

Quote from: tick007 on December 12, 2007, 10:49:03 AM
Just remember that old business saying though, that for every complaint you actually receive, there are at least another 9 that you never hear of.  I can remember off the top of my head at least 4 or 5 users on this forum who have posted about the Mac/Toppy thing.  Expecting your market research to be done for you by your target market is a bit of an ambitious way of going about things. :)

Agreed, and I would make exactly that point to management to try and get this to happen, but from their point of view 10 vs 1 is still insufficient. :(

Quote from: tick007 on December 12, 2007, 10:49:03 AM
In all seriousness, if you're not going to do your own market research on this, there probably needs to be a bit of faith-based, "if we build it they will come" mentality going on at Ice.  Otherwise I think you miss Rod's point about the growing, high-spending, tech-savvy Mac market out there.  This is complete speculation, but I see a correlation between the type of people who buy Topfields, and the type of people who are converting to Macs (primarily from a Unix backgorund, like myself.)  You have no idea of how many tens or possibly hundreds of subscriptions you've missed out on from Mac/Toppy people who did their research, found out they can't use Ice properly with their setup, and then decided they'd just keep the pain of using the free solutions out there.  After all, currently for Mac/Toppy users, the pain of using Ice is only slightly better than the pain of the free solutions.  Or they just silently grumbled and pull out an old Windows based laptop every now and then to do their updates.  Expecting these people to email you is a bit of wishful thinking - it's never going to happen.

As a company our relationship with Topfield has always been "interesting" to say the least. Topfield Australia were the only company prepared to deal with us in the early days and we're grateful to them for giving us a go, BUT, we have payed an enormous price. We have spent far more engineering and marketing dollars in supporting the Topfield platform then all the other platforms combined, the subscriber numbers for Topfield are still respectable but are not showing any real growth while the MCE/Vista and EyeTV markets are growing at a much higher rate.

The existence of "Free" guide is quite a sore point with us since the API required to inject EIT entries into the Topfield only exists because we lobbied Topfield Korea to create it, in the end it enabled us to start building our business but at the same time it enabled the competition to do the same. We've had more luck with the network functions that we asked for on the TF6000, as far as I know they aren't public knowledge, of course the TF6000 seems to have been discontinued, the current distributor doesn't list it on their site.

The TF7000 has Iceguide support provided directly by Topfield but the user experience of having to load the data onto a USB stick and manually uploading it to the PVR is appalling..

I think it is little wonder that the Topfield userbase is not seeing better growth, we have seen many people who were going to buy a TF7000 instead pick up a BeyonWiz, I think the P1 is competitive with the TF7000 from a price standpoint while offering far more from a features standpoint, it supports Iceguide natively and will soon support IceTV Remote and maybe video downloads in the future.

With such a wide range of PVRs to choose from these days, an SD only model is becoming less and less attractive.

The focus for our company moving forward is more and more towards higher degrees of interactivity and connectivity, things like IceTV Remote and video content delivery are where our engineering development is currently being spent and devices like the Topfield are not even on the radar. Because of this getting approval for a native Mac Loader is really hard.

Quote from: tick007 on December 12, 2007, 10:49:03 AM
1) Time taken to code/test/document/support the Mac loader.  You've stated that it will likely be 2-3 weeks of man time to do the initial coding; however, you can probably see why to the outsider this seems a tad conservative as very little new code seemingly needs to be written, as all the hard bits already exist in other applications (as you mentioned for the IceBox.)  Instead, would Ice be willing to commit about half a man-day for someone to actually go and spec the work required properly?  I'm presuming the 2-3 weeks is just a guestimate at the moment.  Maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised that when you look at it, it really only turns out to be 1-2 days after all.  Or maybe it will turn out to be 2 months.  At least then you'll be able to give a good justification to the Mac/Toppy owners of why you're not doing it.

Yes, the 2-3 weeks figure is a guestimate, although I would probably class it as an "educated guestimate", as I would be the one doing the work and I'm also the one who wrote all the Topfield related code to date, I have a fairly good handle on the work involved. I'm sure someone could take Nathan Oates' source and the source for the iceguide_daemon from the IceBox1 (available from our site http://www.icetv.com.au/gpl.shtml) and this may only take a day, but, for IceTV to release a supported and tested native loader is considerably more work.

As you and I well know, as Mac owners, software for the Mac is not just about slapping some code together and throwing it out there. Mac owners expect a polished and intuitive UI and some sense of style, otherwise we would all use windows ;)

I'm only fairly new to coding for OS X, I've only been doing it for about 2 years although in reality the total time spent coding is probably closer to 4-6 months. I'm an old Unix guy as well and have been writing software for Unix based systems commercially for a little over 10 years now.

Quote from: tick007 on December 12, 2007, 10:49:03 AM
2) Risk of being responsible for bricked Toppies.  Seriously?  As people have mentioned before, every non-Windows Toppy owner out there (in the world, not just Ice users) is using unsanctioned software to use their Toppies.  And will happily release all responsibility from the software authors that let them do this.  Surely you can put a nice boilerplate software license around the software, as well as big blinking neon warnings on the download page that for those tech-savvy Mac/Toppy users who are willing to do this, that they are on their own?  Heck, you can even say it's officially unsupported and we can't ring you if we have trouble getting it working.  Again, the type of people who are calling for this I think will, by and large, not care (even the non-tech-savvy.)

I agree with you that the risk is not huge, but, from our point of view, one bricked Toppy costs us the retail price of five 12 month subscriptions. I'm not as optimistic as you are with regards to users "not caring" if we kill their PVR. I know this is true also for the IceBox2, but, we have sold hundreds of them and we feel that the risk in that case has been worth it for the new subscriptions and low support costs of the solution.

Quote from: tick007 on December 12, 2007, 10:49:03 AM
And Daniel, thank you for patiently taking the time to keep on discussing this issue with those of us who continue to grumble about it, even if we currently seem at odds on some of the points.  It's very much appreciated, and is probably one of the main reasons we're still around here grumbling and not just given Ice up for dead.  And just imagine how pee'd off we'd be if you'd given us the cold shoulder instead!  :P

No problem, I am in favor of open discussions in general, however, I usually avoid forums like the plague as I have been dragged into a few nasty exchanges in the past.

I really do sympathise with the Toppy on Mac issue, if it were up to me I'd do the job just for the fun of writing the software, but, at the moment my engineering staff are totally committed to other projects that the company feel are more valuable and I'm no closer to convincing them then I was back in October.

Perhaps you can point me to a few places to do my market research and get a better handle on the actual interest level for a native Mac loader for Topfield.
Cheers,

Dan
Software Manager @ IceTV

wfdonald

You are talking about something other/more than simply getting the IceTv data to the Topfield via a USB cable from the Mac  aren't you?