I work in the recreational dive industry as an underwater videographer basically selling holiday videos on 6 day diving safari trips in the north of the Egyptian Red Sea. I edit on a powerbook using fcp and dsp

I was just listening to the stream of last weeks show and the conversation about the waterproof cases for the ipod.

Back last summer i was lucky enough to demo the H2O audio underwater mp3 player unit containing an iriver player and i finally cracked and bought one when i was on ski holiday in colorado back in december. It's half the price in the US than in the UK.

As someone who spends up to 3 hours a day underwater and who lives with his ipod on his waist while topside the whole idea of an underwater mp3 player appeals greatly and i probably do about a third of my dives now with music. i'd do more but i'm usually so disorganised before the dives .....

Its 3 months on now and i still havent got to grips with the user interface on the iRiver player - its horrible to be frank.

When apple launched the shuffle i thought the screenless player was a mistake but upon reflecting on how awkward the iriver controls are and how much i dislike the player - although i love having music underwater - I started to appreciate what Apple did and why.

so i guess that with the 10ft housing s for the ipod now available we will soon be seeing a proper 200ft diving housing for the shuffle. when it does i think ill be ebaying MY H2O audio iRiver unit and getting a h2o audio shuffle

Make no mistake music underwater is really cool. I have a few friends who do a lot of deep diving and have to spend up to a couple of hours making decompression stops on the way back and they love the idea because believe me hanging round just staring at your dive computer waiting to be able to surface is as boring as hell :)

As an aside I also picked up an ipod photo back in december . I didn't intend to get the photo but couldnt get my hands on the regular 40gig and the iPod Photo was cheaper in the US than the regular 40 in the uk so i went "what the heck" and plunged in.

I didnt think i'd have any use for the photo function but i have been using it to display maps of the dive sites on our big plasma screen during dive briefings

love the show - dont get to listen very often as i'm on the dive boat 6 days a week - keep up the good work

simon gardener

Admittedly, it's odd to do two products at once like this, but the truth is, TextWrangler and BBEdit complement each other well enough that there's a lot of logic looking at both of them at once.

Both products are, without a doubt, the premiere text editors on the Mac, and can hold up to any program on any platform regardless of price. While this is easy for TextWrangler 2, since it's free, BBEdit retails for $199.00USD, so for it to be able to stand with free products like Emacs and others is quite impressive. But they both do, and well.

Does this media cataloging and management solution live up to the "PRO" name?

Click here for the answer (18.5mb)

The fine folks over at Alias sent us a copy of Sketchbook Pro to check out.
Find out a bit more about it, and how it did in our review.