A Michael Jackson spoof featuring iPhone and iPad rival gangs who fight over Twitter and different devices?
Oh boy. I don’t know what bothers me the most, the fact that these people spent hours filming this or that I actually enjoyed the video below. Read more
Chocomoko has released version 2.0 of their SweetFM Mac application. SweetFM is a Last.fm client and player for Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4.
Version 2.0 has a completely redesigned UI that is more user-friendly and uses native Mac OS technologies. It also comes with Safari and Chrome browser extensions for Last.fm station control and can open the iTunes store pages from the current track. Other features: supports Media Keys, has an EQ, tagging and social network sharing, device scrobbling, multiple user accounts, hot keys and playlist management. Read more
If you care about your digital music library and you care about quality, I guess you know what the FLAC format is all about. The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an advanced (free and open source) audio compression codec that allows decompression into a perfect copy of the original audio data. Basically, it’s a high-quality compression method that generates state-of-the-art rips and (here’s the downside) huge data files. If you lose a CD you care about but have a FLAC digital copy, you have an exact duplicate.
To give you an example, a standard 13-tracks album can go up to 450MB in size. Now think about encoding that Beatles collection you have in FLAC and you get the idea.
FLAC is great, but isn’t as supported by hardware makers as other standards such as MP3 are. Luckily enough for iPhone owners, there’s an for that (sorry Apple, I know it’s a trademark now). FLAC Player for iPhone (and iPad, it’s a universal app) is a simple way to import your lossless albums and songs on your iDevice and listen to them. Read more
Apple wants to make Ping work. The music-based social network is struggling to gain traction, and Steve Jobs needs to figure out a way to let people engage with the system and share data with their contacts - all in order to collect more data and drive more clicks to the iTunes Store. It’s a good plan, but it’s not working as expected because Apple hasn’t got the social infrastructure Facebook has. So Steve invited Facebook’s CEO over at dinner to discuss some Ping related stuff including Facebook integration, the Los Angeles Times reports:
They are two of Silicon Valley’s most famous founders: Jobs created the world’s must-have gadgets, Zuckerberg the world’s most popular social networking service. These days they are often mentioned in the same breath. Now apparently the two also recently broke bread.
Apparently Jobs invited Zuckerberg for dinner at his house to talk about Ping two weeks ago. That’s when a tipster spotted them on a stroll in Palo Alto.
We know there are hundreds of music applications for the iPhone out there; some even managed to win an Apple Design Award earlier this year. Yet, we also know there are some people on the internet who regularly quickly diss iOS devices as “consumption-only” devices.
So take a look at the video below. Brooklyn-based band Atomic Tom performed one of their hits - “Take Me Out” - entirely on their iPhones, in the subway. At first the crowd thought they were going to bomb the train (seriously? with those hipster moustache?), but Atomic Tom eventually managed to make quite an impression on the passengers. Great video.
I love waking up to new apps from people I respect and admire. The Iconfactory guys are among these people: how couldn’t the makers of Twitterrific not be in the list? They’re great developers and experienced designers that don’t fail to surprise on each new app release.
Take Five is a new app for iPhone from The Iconafctory aimed at letting you remember about the music you paused and never turned back on. Admittedly, this is quite a common problem: not all iPhone apps support automatic resume after a phone call interruption (Spotify, for example) and so many times we simply forget to press the play button again. Take Five automatically fades your music back in after 5 minutes. Why didn’t we think of this before? Read more
The latest rumor making the rounds of the internet is the same one we’ve been hearing about for years: an iTunes subscription-based music service. Both the New York Post and CNET are reporting that Apple is considering a subscription music service; the New York Post also reports (be careful, they have a history with rumors) that the latest plan hatched in Cupertino’s black labs wants music execs to agree on a monthly service that could have a tiered pricing model ranging from $10 to $15. The report doesn’t tell us how much music would be included in each tier, and whether this subscription is meant for local content or cloud access. Read more
Sounds interesting, but my money is on iTunes in the cloud making the whole process easier, faster and, overall, better.
The Reactable is a virtual modular synthesizer that allows you to create music by interacting with a touch-based tangible tabletop. You basically touch this surface and place block on it to create music. The instrument has been used by many musicians at many conferences and festival, and especially by Icelandic musician Björk, who used one during the 2007 Volta tour. You should really go check out some videos of the Reactable in action. Read more
