I recently bumped into a nice application called spotify (www.spotify.com) , that has definitely changed the way I consume music. I am not a big iTunes fan but beacause I have an iPhone and an AppleTv , I am very locked into the Apple ecosystem.
Recently a a UK based company released a really neat music service called Spotify.It allows it’s users to stream legal music legally over the Internet with commercial advertisements every now and then but not intrusive or irritating as one would expect. The most amusing part of the service is its huge music collection and how fast and smoothly the application works. The application is available for both the mac and windows platform. Music ethusiasts like me who want to listen to music and not necessarily want to keep it will find this service very useful
Spotify screenshot
The music services comes with different subscriptions and a free account with Ads .One caveat though is that the free service is invite only at the moment, but a little googling around and you should be able to get an invitation code. Once you get an invitation, just go ahead and register your account,download the application and start listening to music. Finally something to compete with iTunes,Last.fm and whatever is out there. The application itself is so slick,and very responsive and works great. Its one the best music application I have used in ages and it needs now is a shop and device support and Apple will have something to worry about.
The music is not available yet in all countries but I am glad that here in Finland we have access to it. All this makes me wonder if this is the feature of music or digital content in general?. It does feel like music has finally moved to the cloud.I have completely diteched my iTunes because the services is so much faster than loading music from my own local network. I need to get back and start digging for some more free digital content.
Here is a lost of websites that might some invites
*
http://spotify.rejected.se
* http://invites.mashable.com/site/spotify
I hope you find something.
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So you have hacked your AppleTV and you have Boxee installed on your device.Now is the time to add that external USB drive that contains all your divx videos to the AppleTv. This blog post will cover how you can set up your AppleTv to recognize the external USB drive attached your AppleTv and also access it on your mac desktop as a local drive.
First you need to install the ATVFiles plugin via the AppleTv . Here are the steps
- From the start menu go to Software->3rd party plugins -> ATVFiles
- The next screen will present you with the possibility to install the ATVFiles plugin if you havent already installed it
- Next, shut down your AppleTv and attach the external USB drive (Formatted as HFS or FAT32 ,NTFS is not supported)
- Start the AppleTv and now you should see an entry for Files on the start menu
- Go to Files->Places and should be able to see all your drives (I guess you should be able to attach multiple drives via a USB hub)
Now is the time to mount that hard drive over the network to your desktop so that you can easily transfer files to it over the network easily like a local hard drive (This part of the post is mac specific)
- Go ahead and download
Macfuse from Google code and install it on your mac (This allows your mac to be able to mount network files systems like FTP and SSH)
- Download
Macfusion and install it. (This application is a plugin for the Macfuse application and it also provides a graphical interface for easily accessing network based drives)
- Start the macfusion application and click on the plus sign
Select SSHFS and you will be presented with the screen shown below .The Host remains appletv.local ,User Name and Password is frontrow. The path options represents the path to the drive and it is in the format of /Volumes/(name-of-your-drive) e.g (/Volumes/storage) (You can check the name of the drive on the AppleTv via the Files menu)
The next screen shows how to label the hard drive on your local machine , leave the Mount Point as default ,Volume Name should be what you want to label the drive on your local machine.
Click ok and you should have the follow screen . Click on mount the next screen and if all went well the drive you be shown as one of the drives in your Volumes on your local machine. it will look something like this 
You can now drag and drop files to and from it. The sky is the limit to what you can now do with this hack.
Enjoy your files on your movies on your appletv from boxee or xmbc. Personally I am using this set up to host my media files both music and video and other files. Its my network attached storge (NAS). Next will be to get Time Machine to back up to an extra drive attached to it.
NB : You can also just mount the AppleTv without the external drive attached to it.
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I thought I could share with the iPhoners community about an exciting app I discovered recently. I have just recently started using twitter (http://twitter.com/sayjava) and I looked around the AppStore for a couple of application that could make twittering easier. I tried the
Twitterific app (The free version). A pretty decent application for free but then the cluttered interface just turned me off (May be the paid version is better but I didnt bother to check). It feels heavy and too many features for my liking. Then I tried
TwitterFon and I have been so excited that I decided to blog about it. Here are a couple of things that I like about the application.
- Price is Free (You cant beat a free app especially in this down economy)
- The search functionality is really cool and responsive
- Location aware search (it supports location aware search too, this is just too much fun as I can see what people around me are twitting)
- Trends, for newcomers like me to twitter,trends is another cool way to join conversations on twitter and get to know people and whats popular and so on
- Updates,If you leave the application open it even does periodic updates, I guess its using some pooling methods. (Apple, where is the push notification you promised us?)
- Favourites, Though I havent used this feature but Im sure it will come in handy someday
- Location twitting and picture uploads are also very nice.
Overrall I like the application and for the FREE price tag, I guess its the best thing for twitting in the appstore for now.Check it out and see if you like it . Here are some
screenshots of the app. Opinions about other good twitter apps? . I will soon write about my most frequently used apps on the iPhone. iPhoners are well known for ditching their downloaded apps after a short period of time and I am no different . Best twitter apps?
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I have been thinking of blogging about this for a while now. It feels like I seem to be the only person who is terribly dissapointed by the map application included in the iPhone. iPhoners have long complained about the lack of turn-by-turn direction in the bundled maps in the iPhone but most of us could live with that but when it comes to finding your direction with the device , the map even suck the more.
Down in this screen shot of the map application, you cant even tell if you are heading north,south,east or west on the map. You will have to walk a little and check the direction in which the “gorgeous” blue dot is moving to determin if you are on the right part or not. I seriously hope Apple is planning to fix this problem . A replacement for the blue dot will be appreciated, something that can point user in the right direction with some arrow head,something we have come to know and love in other GPS devices. Up here in the north, holding up the phone in the freezing weather is not very comfortable.
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March 9th, 2009 in
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I have been programming both in java and flash (actionscript 3.0) mainly for games development but recently I have been thinking of learning a new language for desktop games programming. Making the decision for a language /platfrom to learn has become somewhat challenging because of their different strengths and weakness. I am a casual game developer and I am not thinking or releasing any tripple A title in the future, so I am thinking of a something mild to suit my needs.
My research so far for a new language/platform so far is here below.
C++/Game Engines(Torgue e.t.c)
Pros
- Potentially cross platform development
- Multipurpose language (Can develop desktop applications with QT and other UI packages)
- Mobile game development for Iphone.
- Plenty of resources and open source game engines
- Faster in terms of speed than competitors e.g Java games
Cons
- Steep learning curve compared to other game engines
- Relatively complicated to start with
- Game distribution channel problems incase of indie development
C# (XNA)
Pros
- Relatively easy to learn
- Windows and Xbox 360 ready deployment
- possibly cross platform application development with mono (open source port of C#)
- Web development with Microsoft ASP.NET (Not sure if I want to go in that direction)
- Possible iPhone development using Unity3d (http://www.unity3d.com) (not open source)
Cons
- XNA is locked to the windows platform
- Decent materials are still very scarce for the XNA platform
Python
Pros
- Relatively easy to learn
- Plenty of materials
- Cross platform development
- Usable for application development both for the web and desktop
- Used as a scripting language in other gaming platform
- General purpose scripting language.
Cons
- Fewer game engines (Even lesser documented engines)
- Could be slower than C++ or C#
- Distribution channel for indie game development is lacking
- Virtually no support mobile game development
These are my thoughts so far concerning the platforms, I have deliberately left out Java because I do not personally think Java is a platform to consider for desktop game development. I am still on this journey of figuring out which platform to go with.Currently I am learning C#(XNA) for game development, but then I wanted to share my thoughts with the web community and see what you think.
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