5 Several months ago I started using the RealPlayer stream from Livestation to view Al Jazeera English. As American broadcast news has become increasingly insular, parochial and sensationalist, I really appreciate this service. Yesterday I downloaded and installed the Livestation viewer. I have mixed feeling about using this viewer. Some of these issues have been addressed elsewhere in the forums, but I thought I would put my objections together in one post. As I have a recent Mac running Leopard with lots of RAM and two cores and have a good broadband connection, the player installed and functions well with no problem. I appreciate that the install is a simple drag and drop, not a pkg bundle to run, and that the dmg contains both an alias to the Applications folder and a ReadMe. These are good OS X conventions to follow. I'm using a 13 inch MacBook Pro so space on the menubar is at a premium. The player really needs a preference option for turning off the menubar icon. I understand there are issues with pausing a live TV stream. However, the RealPlayer stream handles that just fine. If I run into something else I want to view, such as an interesting YouTube video, I can pause the RealPlayer stream and then just start it back up when I'm done. With the Livestation player, I have to close the window, then re-open it and wait for it to reconnect. Very clumsy. On top of that there is no keyboard shortcut for re-opening the player window, forcing me to pull down a menu. The convention on OS X is that an application with only one primary window uses 'Command-1' as a keyboard shortcut to open the window. Sleep. Many times in the course of a day I will close my laptop and let it sleep, coming back to my work later. If I'm streaming something through iTunes, I have to start the stream again manually (simply hitting the space bar once does it). If I'm streaming Al Jazeera through the Livestation web-based RealPlayer stream, the stream just starts back up by itself (a behavior I actually prefer to the iTunes behavior). On the other hand, the Livestation player plays out for a few seconds (I assume it is emptying its buffer) and then stops. This is the worst of both worlds: make noise but don't actually start playing again. I find it highly unacceptable when an OS X application doesn't handle sleep gracefully. The is no menu option to check for player updates manually and no option in the preferences to check for updates automatically For the time being, I think I will be going back and forth between the web-based RealPlayer stream and the Livestation player, depending on my workflow. Good luck with version 3! 2009-10-24T17:51:06Z 0 4 0 5490 97.123.209.7 0 false 27 8 5490 0 false 2009-11-21T18:10:49Z 1123088 392 Rich, thanks so much for the great feedback. If only more users were like you! I'll pass it to our dev team as you made some very good suggestions. All the best 2009-10-24T21:41:13Z 1 4 0 5492 78.86.28.222 2 false 15 5490 3 5490 0 false 2009-10-24T21:41:31Z 15 0 You're welcome. Good to see the CEO reads the forums. I'm not the first one to point out that many companies treat even well meant criticism with disdain or hostility and thus give up useful, free information about their products. I'm glad to see a different attitude here. Apple makes it easy to provide feedback and they often use it to make their designs and documentation better. I hope your business model works out well for you. 2009-10-25T00:03:34Z 1 4 0 5493 97.123.209.7 6 false 27 5490 7 5490 0 false 2009-10-26T08:13:10Z 1123088 0