Category Archives: Software

Thoughts on Spotify

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I was lucky enough to get an early invite to Spotify last week thanks to my high Klout score (I honestly think anyone with a pulse got an invite) and I’ve been playing around with it for a few days. Here’s my thoughts on the service thus far.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m using Spotify for listening to stuff that I don’t already have in my library. This is sort of weird because I recently switched to an SSD and none of my music is actually in my library. Yet I use Spotify for listening to stuff that’s not on my external hard drive (which I almost never have plugged in). I think this behavior might be due to the fact that Spotify is making me a fat kid in a candy store (but for music). I want to keep searching to test Spotify’s limits and see how much music it really has. So far it’s been doing really well.

Specifically, I have been using Spotify mostly to listen to music that was popular when I was in middle school (this was like, 14 years ago). This music is stuff that I’m either too embarrassed to have on my hard drive, or I simply never had. Yet it’s totally great for nostalgia’s sake. I’ve been listening to No Doubt, Toni Braxton, Weezer, Mariah Carey, etc. Stuff that brings me back to that era. It’s pretty cool.

One workflow that Spotify has replaced for me is the awkward one of going to YouTube and looking for a video of a song I want to hear. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to go to YouTube and searched for something like “Head Over Heels” by Tears For Fears just to listen to a song (it’s just a static image of the album cover). It’s much, much quicker just to search in Spotify and get super instant gratification.

Comparisons to the new hot startup, Turntable, are pretty much impossible to avoid. Turntable is really fun for interacting with people (and music discovery), but sometimes you just want to listen to what you want to listen to (and not wait for other DJs before your song comes on). I think the two services have very different use cases, and each works well for its intended use.

One thing Spotify could work on is music discovery. It’s kind of ridiculous the only music it pushes are the top albums, artists and songs. All the stuff on this list are top 20 bullshit that I really have no interest in listening to (just ignore the top 20 “bullshit” from the 90′s that I just admitted to listening to). In this day and age, it’s ridiculous for a music service to not include some kind of recommendation engine or radio feature. Browsing music on the service by genre, year or anything besides search is impossible. In terms of features, Spotify is actually kind of disappointing.

Despite the obvious shortcomings, I have a lot of high hopes for Spotify. It’s a really nice example of how consumers can enjoy getting stuff from “the cloud” without making it too complicated. I hope that it continues to improve, especially in the music discovery and browsing categories.

♥s Threadless for iPad Release!

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About a week ago I thought about working some more on ♥s Threadless, my fan made iPhone app. I originally designed it for the small iOS devices like the iPhone and iPod touch, and figured I would do the proper iPad version later. I got the itch, so I got to work figuring out what an app on the bigger screen would look like.

I knew that I wanted a grid-y layout as opposed to the list-y one of the iPhone/iPod, which was partly the reason why I hadn’t done the iPad version yet. Lists on iOS are easy because they’re given to you for free. Grids are a whole other beast. Luckily, I ran into a framework (AQGridView) on GitHub that does grid layouts in a tableview-y sort of paradigm. The framework was still a little beta (or alpha) as I had to go in and change a few things that were crashing, but it did succeed in making my job a lot easier overall. I’d like to try contributing to that code to improve it, but I guess that’s another post altogether.

After getting the grid stuff working, I decided to use a modal pop up view to display the images and sharing options all in one view. Since the iPad has much more screen real estate, it’s easy to design things without running into space issues. You don’t, however, want to just stick a billion buttons in because you can. I think this design does a good job of showing enough stuff to the user, but not too much stuff too soon.

I still have some bugs to fix, mainly with memory management due to the grid view stuff. If you have any suggestions, feel free to comment on this blog!

Hopefully the iPad app continues the mission of the iPhone app, which is to provide a really easy and fun way to browse and share awesome Threadless designs! I may have been an early iPad doubter, but I really believe that it’s a great device for consuming content. Even on my iPad 1, the designs and colors just pop on the app. At least I think so. But you don’t have to take my word for it!

Get the app if you don’t have it already!

Automatic Checkins in Google Latitude

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It looks like Google has updated their Latitude app with checkins, including automatic notifications and checkins (and checkouts).

When I developed Checkmate, there wasn’t really a standard design for the auto-checkin behavior. Some users have mentioned that the app might work better by sending notification to check in, more like reminders. I’ve leaned towards fully automated checkins, myself.

Google seems to be taking a hybrid approach, which is pretty interesting. You get a notification the first time you arrive somewhere (probably only for places you’ve checked into before), and then an option to automatically check in after that.

I might end up building some kind of hybrid (or a simple option in settings) system in Checkmate to see if that works better in general. I wonder how Google is mitigating the cost of GPS usage in its Latitude app. I always figured that the thing keeping auto-checkin out of official apps is the fact that they run the battery down pretty hard.

Instascriber: Automagically Add Content to Instapaper

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I just “announced” a little web app that I’ve been developing off and on called “Instascriber.” It’s basically a tool to help you populate your Instapaper reading list with stuff using an RSS Feed subscription model. If you use Instapaper a lot and use it to keep track of your reading list, you might want to automatically add new items, say from the New York Times Book section, into your Instapaper reading list. If you already know you’d like to read the content on Instapaper, it’s a pain to manually add each thing you want to read.

With Instascriber, you can just set the feed you’d like to subscribe to. Instascriber will periodically check the feed for new items and add it to your Instapaper reading list automatically in the background. That’s it. Boom!

For now, I’m considering the web app to be in beta. So let me know if you find bugs or anything.

U of M 2010 Mobile Apps Competition – FTW!

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Continuing in my tradition of winning contests that I entered with very little expectation of actually winning, I got an email a week or two back about the University of Michigan 2010 Mobile Apps Competition that I entered in November. The competition is open to students, faculty and staff at the university. Since I’m working on a part time basis at the university, I figured I would enter a few of my apps. I chose Checkmate and ♥s Threadless, and made some awkward demo videos of each (warning, don’t play these simultaneously or your head might explode from too much Hung voice):

Checkmate ended up winning third place out of many many competitive entries (leaders and the best!), so I’m super happy about that. Here’s a story in the University Record about it. The HiJack project that’s been getting a lot of press was the grand prize winner. Props to those guys!

Winning a prize in this contest was a really nice way to start my year. It’s really encouraging me to continue doing mobile apps and exploring what’s possible.