Tag Archives: media

iPhone app: Joost

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Joost a internet based TV service, which has been available for Mac and Windows for a long time now. It has now come to the iPhone, bringing a wide variety of contents from many places around the world.

The interface itself is quite nice, with the standard Joost graphic and colors. There are five different buttons on the bottom:

  • Joost picks
  • Popular
  • Browse
  • Search
  • More

Nothing strange going on here — in fact, it’s almost the same layout as the Youtube app which comes default with the iPhone. The fun begins in the Browse section, where you enter a list of categories and genres which lets you very narrowly define what you want to see at the moment.

The quality seems to be very nice, but different video streams seem to be encoded differently, so the results may vary quite a bit. This test was however done on Wifi, so the quality when using 3G is still to be determined.

The app itself seems to be fairly stable, and has only crashed once so far. I have to admit to not have used it extensively yet, but it seems quite solid. Something that needs work however, are the full-screen widgets — the ones that are shown when a video is playing. I’m not sure what they thought when designing that part.

The browse section currently contains the following items.

  • Film
    • All
    • Action
    • Animation
    • Classics
    • Clips and Trailers
    • Comedy
    • Documentary
    • Drama
    • Global
    • Horror
    • Independent
    • Science-Fiction and Fantasy
    • Shorts
  • Music
    • All
    • Classical
    • Country
    • Dance and Electronic
    • Hip hop and Rap
    • Interviews and Profiles
    • Jazz and Blues
    • Latin
    • Metal
    • Pop
    • RnB and Soul
    • Rock and Indie
    • World and Folk
  • Shows
    • All
    • Action and Sports
    • Animation
    • Comedy
    • Culture and Style
    • Drama, Docs and Reality TV
    • News and Gossip
    • Science-fiction and Horror
    • Sexy
    • Tech and Gaming

There is definitely lots to choose from, but I haven’t looked through much of it yet, so the quality remains to be seen. It seems that no live streaming is available either, but hopefully it will come in later versions. If I recall correctly, live streaming of TV was one of the corner-stones in the whole Joost project. It’s a very interesting first version though, with a potential to be something big.

Get Joost in the App Store.

Spotify — the future of music

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Spotify, now in public beta, takes a whole new approach to music. All music resides on the Spotify servers, and as a user, you stream the music using the internet.

Where it gets interesting is that you can either pay a fixed fee and listen all music you want without any interruptions. There is also a free option, where short commercial messages are inserted between songs in intervals which seem to be around half an hour.

Since the software is in public beta, you need an invite to use the service. If I happen to have an invite, I will of course share it with commenters to this post. There is another option though — paying for the service for a month. If you like the service after using it for a month, just continue paying or terminate the subscription. Your account will then become a free account, and you can continue to use Spotify, but with the ads injected.

There is a Windows and Mac client available at this moment. There have been reports that the Windows version works fine in Linux using Wine, so definitely try it out.

So how does is look like? The following view shows what is new in Spotify.

The next image shows the top list. This can be customised to only show a specific country or the whole world.

The main album view looks like the following. On the top, there are five top hits for that particular artist. It is followed by all albums available, and singles follow. The next section is devoted to albums where the current artist has one or more tracks, which are highlighted.

I have some suggestions to make Spotify even better (in no particular order):

  • Last.FM integration.
  • Music browser (browse by genre, year, artists etc.).
  • Mechanism to correct faulty tags.
  • Social part where users can share songs, playlists and watch each others listening habits.
  • iPhone application

Some of these points seem to be in progress right now, but time will have to tell what will happen in the future when the services goes mainstream, which I am sure they will, as long as they can provide a smooth service without interruptions and errors.

Google Knol — The new online source for knowledge

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Google just released a new web application called Knol. It is used to make it easy to share knowledge through article and in-depth guides. The service puts a strong emphasis on authorship, and every piece of information has one or more names behind it. From the announcement:

Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.

An article may look like the following, which is a guide on how to backpack.

How to Backpack

How to Backpack

Much like Wikipedia, it is possible to make changes or at least propose them, since it is possible to modify the permissions for the written articles.

Collaboration permissions

Collaboration permissions

Support for Adsense is also built-in, which makes it possible for authors to actually make money from the content they publish on the site. If any significant amount of money will be generated by this is another question.

It is very easy to begin writing a new Knol. The interface looks like the following and features a light-weight WYSIWYG editor.

Write a new Knol

Write a new Knol

Knol might become a competitor for Wikipedia in the future, but I see it not as a competitor, more an enhancement to the online knowledge base. Since there is a real person behind each article, the contents is consistent and could be very reliable if written by a person knswledgable in the particular field.

Zen Photo – the zen of photo albums

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Zen Photo

There are lots of great online photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Zooomr, but it is kind of nice to have the pictures on one’s own server. In the past I have been using Gallery 2, Coppermine and other types of galleries. They are all very competent but lacks one essential thing – simplicity, while being elegant at the same time. This is where Zen Photo comes in.

Zen photo is very simple, stylish and fresh, but it still has all features that one would ever need. Support for themes, comments, spam fighting, RSS feeds and other things are of course supported. There are also plugins available for integration with WordPress, which we all love.

There is one thing that needs to be done though, and that is to somehow make it easy to upload images from the mobile phone to the site. The fastest way would probably be to email everyting to an account and use a script to fetch all images and add them to the site. I will definitely look into that.

Visit my gallery at gallery.chadda.se for a real life demonstration.