ABC Now

Before tomorrow's show, I've had a play with ABC Now. It's a useful little tool for bringing together all the ABC media streams.

You can download files and podcasts the old way.

It's important to choose the right media player. Personally I prefer Real Player, but it can be a pain with all the pop ups and advertising.

It's easy to change preferences later as the options settings are nice and clean

It worked nicely on my middle of the road test machine.

One warning is that if you are like me you may have a habit of clicking on the heart which adds the item to your favourites list rather than opening it.

It's good to have a TV guide to ABC and ABC2, one improvement there would be to put the details of the programs.

On the radio tab, quite a bit of local programming is missing. One notable exception is Tony Delroy's podcasts.

We also see a lot variations between the stations and programs. For instance, Sydney 702 has nowhere near the variety that Melbourne 774.

A future improvement may be to cross index content between the local ABC stations. For instance, the 774 finance segment would probably be as interesting to listeners of Perth 720.

The predictable criticism is going to be the lack of Mac and Linux support. The Mac version is on its way and the Linux version will be here as soon as possible.

Linux is proving a bit harder, as Nicola the manager of ABC Interactive says,

So Linux dudes, mess with Nicola's developers at your own risk.

All up, it's a fast nicely presented and simple tool that brings together a lot of the favourite streams of ABC tragics.