Finished dinner a bit ago. The wife bought some stuff at the store and just told me to do what I wanted with it. It was pretty obvious that she wanted pasta… with cream sauce. So that’s what I made but I put a bit of a twist on it. I threw some left-over squash (カボチャ) into the food processor, along with the cream and a tiny bit of red pepper (パプリカ) and made a squash-cream sauce that turned out great. I added eggplant, green and red peppers and mushrooms and for the final touch I cut up some asparagus and toasted in the oven-toaster with a bit of salt and butter (margarine). I gotta say that the asparagus was my favorite part but it was all pretty good:
Right now I’m drinking a bottle of Leffe Blonde and here’s what I think: I think it’s pretty good, a very nice and mellow Belgian Pale Ale that still retains a lot of what people think a “Belgian” should be.
Leffe Blonde: Ne
Finally, what we’ve all been waiting for: App review!!!!
So this time it is the MLB At Bat 2010 app for the iPhone. First of all, it’s 1700円 in the app store (I think $15 or so in the US app store). I’ve spent nearly a week with the app and before I even begin I should say that I am totally conflicted already about whether I should recommend it or not. This review is really for people like me, living in Japan. If you are in the US or Canada and you like baseball, BUY IT! $15 is well worth it. The apps biggest problem is that fact that it doesn’t archive audio for games and for some people I imagine that would be a deal breaker. I don’t blame you but think about it, 1700円 is about the same price you’d pay to go to one movie or one real baseball game here. I know you’re busy but you’ll still have one or two days off a week to listen to a live game (probably).
So with the app you can listen live to every game every day, only live. You also get to watch one live game a day but it’s pretty random and for us in Japan, that game could be at 4am. You never know. Oh well, I prefer the audio anyway (back to all that soon). You also get highlights of every game and also condensed versions of every game. These are great! Except that they often don’t work… Well, not completely. I sent them an e-mail and they said they are aware and are working on it. I hope they fix it! The problem doesn’t seem to appear when using Wi-fi, only on 3G but what happens is that clips longer than 1:00 or so often have screen freezing issues where the audio continues but the video doesn’t. Even if you reload it and skip ahead the problem will happen again after about :10 or so. This is lame but no deal breaker, works fine on Wi-fi.
The main page of the application looks like this:
and is really easy to navigate (although I sometimes hit the audio button when trying to switch days). If you click the blue arrow button it will take you to the game page where it will load up the last thing you selected (default is videos but there is also; box score, gameday, field, and summary) At the bottom you’ll see the watch and listen buttons. If you choose watch, it will take you to the MLB.com login screen where, if you have an MLB.TV account you can watch all the games live. There is an icon above the “free game of the day” game to let you know that you can watch it for free on that day… The stream while watching on WI-fi is excellent and the 3G one is pretty good. If you choose the listen button (If you hit the “audio” button it will do the same) it will bring up a little drop-down panel like this:
Here you will be given the choice of a home or away feed and (usually) a Spanish feed as well. This is the meat of the app! if you hit the Quicktime button you can play the feed in the background which will help your battery life and allow you to use other applications (like e-mail or SMS) but not the internet. What happens is the app launches Safari and streams the audio on a web page so you can’t use Safari while listening but you can use pretty much any other app including the MLB app. While most of the live streams I’ve listened to are great (ex. SEA, COL and SF) some have been garbage (CHI, Minn). I’m not sure what causes the difference but I don’t think it’s the app itself (although I can’t say for sure). 
Although I like this app a lot and have gone to great lengths to listen to M’s games (like waking up at 4:35am to plug-in my voice recorder to the iPhone and start streaming so that I could listen to it after I really woke up (however there seems to have been a problem and stopped recording after an hour and 22 mins….)) there are some problems. Most obvious is no archiving of games. I wouldn’t have to wake up at 4am to turn on a recorder or plug-in my voice recorder at work or even bring my voice recorder to work if they had this function!!!! This is the one improvement they need to make. This one is huge for us in Japan because games can start anywhere from about 1:30am-11am for us here. Other gripes I have include: the displayed box score is often ahead of the audio so you may get unwanted previews of what’s gonna happen. Also the in app player’s cards could be a bit beefy-er.
There are some things I should praise it for as well: it usually buffers fairly well and so short elevator rides or stops at underground stations (where sometimes regular internet craps out) shouldn’t interrupt the stream. When watching the live video stream you can select some overlays like a league scoreboard etc. Also the audio (not the video) streams include the local broadcast’s commercials (the video stream just shows a message that it’s in a commercial break). This is a great feeling when you’re listening to your home town’s local broadcast man.
I gotta say that I recommend the app. It’s a bit pricey and for us in Japan not entirely great when it comes to the time difference and what not but still, with 162 games per year, I’m sure you’ll find time to get at least 1700円 worth of entertainment out of this one. Unfortunately for me it’s probably best for me not to listen as the two M’s games I’ve missed this year (first game of the season before I bought the app and today when I fell asleep in the living room and didn’t set an alarm to get up at 4am) we won! The other four games that I listened to, lost…
