To download it, uninstall the Facebook App and redownload from the AppStore, whatever it says, it will download the new version.

Here is the first.

So you copied keynote then?

Congrats.

So, while I use Spotify a lot, up until last week I still had purchase any music I wanted to travel with me on my iPhone. Enter Spot – the iPhone Spotify Client.

Spot is a Jailbroken-only iPhone application available through Cydia from the modmyi repo. It allows you to access Spotify music on-the-go on the iPhone and iPod touch and it actually works pretty well; providing you have a spotify premium account.

Once you’ve installed Spot and fire it up you’ll see the login screen:

Spotify Login Screen

Spot lacks the preset playlists and recommendations of it’s big brother and presents it’s primary method of finding music as a search bar. This works pretty effectively, results are ordered by relevance as in Spotify.

Spotify Search Screen

Spot - Lady Gaga

Drilling down, you get Album Art previews and can go down through Albums, Singles and Songs. Having selected a song you get a Now Playing Panel somewhat reminiscent of the iPod interface.

Spotify Now Playing

It begins to play almost immediately on Wifi, 3G is usable but will pause and buffer occasionally. Edge is a no-go. Switching tracks is smooth and overall, the experience is usable. Tracks stop playing when you close the application with no apparent built-in background playing support (although I’m sure backgrounder could be used).

It works, it’s usable and it’s an answer to the prayers of many. However there are some quite serious points that need to be addressed moving forward.

• The UI waits for data-downloading. Clicking on an Artist will cause the UI to become unresponsive until the necessary data is downloaded and the next screen can be rendered. An approach of switching to the new view and dynamically populating it while showing a loading spinner would be a lot more pleasant, and save time and data; ordered by relevance, one of the first hits will likely be the one you want so you can click it before the others are loaded. This makes it very slow to use on 3G and Edge and jerky on Wifi.
• The client seems to be unaware of regional restrictions; playing a track that is unavailable in your region causes the appliaction to buffer the track perpetually. This is not a huge issue as you can press the next button, but is annoying if you’re playing a list of tracks etc..
• The UI is (technically) awful. It actually looks okay in most cases, but it’s consistency and ease of access to many features is poor. Also, once you browse away from the search you began a playlist from, accessing the ‘Now Playing’ screen becomes (from what I can tell) impossible which seems odd!
• The Playlist feature doesn’t work. I have a bunch of spotify playlists on my account, none of them show up.

For a 1.0 product, it works acceptably and adds a great feature to the iPhone and Spotify – it made me buy a Spotify premium account! There are a lot of issues, but seeing as it’s the only option, they’re not show-stoppers but if the developer sits around too long a more polished alternative is bound to appear!

Better still; the source code is open at http://github.com/nevyn/spot/tree/master for anybody to browse so I’m hoping to see all of the above improve rapidly!!

Great Job Joachim – you’ve made a lot of people very happy.

Chris

Spot – Available on Cydia through modmyi repo (apt.modmyi.com)

“If you lose or misplace the phone, you can login to MobileMe on any browser and it will show you where the phone is”

MEANS….

“We have a backdoor allowing remote invokation and transmission of the GPS co-ordinates of your iPhone. Sleep well”

Lets hope MS follows suit on 7.

I am writing this 30 seconds before another engagement; something I would never have done before with the old model.

I like it, I’m going to modify the theme to alter a few things (include comments in the ‘replies’ threading being top of the list!). But… I like it. A lot.

Blogging, how blogging should be. Try it out; http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2

The Wolfram Alpha has gone public, and you can get a view of the inside of their ‘control centre’ over at http://www.justin.tv/clip/2dd6b9f07e7f8a4e. It’s a little gimmicky.. but the charts on the screen are pretty cool! Now… what does everyone think of the product??

iTunes 8.1 did however bring a new (and in my opinion brilliant) feature to it’s repertoire; iTunes DJ.

iTunes DJ is designed to be used for parties where pretty much everybody (perhaps unrealistically) has an iPod Touch or iPhone. The system works as follows:

• You set up iTunes DJ with the (subset of) the library that you want your guests to be able to select from
• Set up the speakers you want it to play through (e.g. pushing to an Apple TV or Airport Express aswell)
• Start an iTunes DJ session and set it to allow any user to connect and make recommendations.

Now that the iTunes DJ session is set up, guests can connect just by starting the ‘Remote’ application on an iPod Touch / iPhone. As long as you didn’t select a password for the iTunes DJ and you have an open wifi network it should be simple and guests will be presented with this:

Selecting to ‘Request a song’ presents you with the ordinary iPod style music browser.

The song now appears in the playlist at the highest place it can with 1 vote (in this case, above anything that was randomly selected). We can also vote to raise songs up the queue by touching the heart.

This seems like a really fun idea for a theme party; the only problem being that there’s an abundant need of iPhones / iPod Touches. For £165 a hit, I suppose if you’re running a big budget party it’s conceivable of buying 4 or 5 and leaving them lying around; how many are left the morning after would be an interesting investigation into human nature. I suppose you could auto-start one of the unlocked applications for publishing an iPhone’s location using GPS / internet to a web page with the iPhone and leave it running with ‘Backgrounder’ so that if it does go missing you can always track it down. (Interesting idea actually, but requires unlocking all of them installing this custom solution etc…).

So, the more realistic option is hope that enough people have iPhones to make it work but this seems a little unfair on people who don’t so whether this will work for you probably will depend largely on the ‘crowd’ you hang around with. I have groups of friends that I think this would work very well as almost everyone has an iPhone, also crowds where I would be sat on my own controlling the music.

I’m going to try this out sometime soon so I’ll be sure to publish something about it; not sure what the hardware approach will be, probably a mix; hope for the best but leave 2 or 3 around perhaps? Donations welcome…

Chris

So, while it’s not a new major version, do you think that there is any chance they may finally fix that buggy, slow mis-fit of a UI with something that may accidentally follow one Aero UI guideline?

Chris