Ready, Aye, Ready

Link: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/iphone/

I really wanted to like this. I've been waiting for someone to come up with a decent application that I could use to spool audio from my Mac to my iPhone while at home. It would be -- so to speak -- "Radio Adam: The Next Generation".

I thought this was it. Alas, no.

There are a couple of problems with the software. The first is that it's a push, not pull, approach. You need to start the application on the iTouch/iPhone and then tell the desktop app to connect to it; you can't just have the desktop side up and start the iPhone app when you need it. So that's rather cumbersome.

The second is that when it's up, it's purely a receiving stream. If you're playing audio via iTunes and want to skip the song, you need to exit the app (which stops it playing), start up the Apple Remote app, change the song there, then go back to the Airfoil Speaker app and find that you now need to go back to the desktop -- wherever that happens to be -- to restart the communication. It is, in a word, clunky; clunky to the point of being unusable.

Too bad really; Rogue Amoeba have put out some sterling applications in the past -- I really love Radioshift Touch -- but this one isn't worth the effort.