Published on November 29, 2007
I was alerted about MobileScrobbler in a Twitter post by Wayne Sutton tonight. Ever since the day I got my iPhone, I felt like the always-on data connection could be put to some great music logging use. I’ve been using Last.fm to track my music listening habits for almost three years now, but whenever I leave the house my music goes unmonitored. I thought, could someone write an application to monitor music played on the iPhone and then report it to Last.fm with Edge or Wifi?
This is exactly what Sam Steele has done with MobileScrobbler. In my initial testing (just a few songs so far) the application reports songs instantly over both Wifi and Edge. The app will even work great for Touch users, as it currently stores 250 songs in the submission queue, so your play counts will be updated whenever you get to an open Wifi connection.
I don’t know if Last.fm tracking software exists for other media-centric phones, PalmOS, Windows Mobile, or Symbian systems. If not, I hope MobileScrobbler encourages the development of some. I love the fact that now my Last.fm profile is going to be so much more representational of what I’m listening to while away from home. Unfortunately, though, it’s another reason to leave my 60gig iPod at home and instead carry an 8gig sub-set of my music library. Audioscrobbler has the ability to log music listened to on your iPod using ‘Recently Played’, but it never works for me… must be something about how I mix computer listening and iPod listening time before syncing.
Published on November 28, 2007
AFPd has been added to the main installer.app repository from what I can tell. AFPd lets you connect to your device through the AFP file sharing protocol, meaning it will show up in your “Shared” places in Finder on a Mac. You “Connect As” the root account, so if you’re running firmware 1.1.1 and you haven’t changed it already, your password is alpine. I have only used this on the iPhone, but I’m assuming that it will work just the same on the Touch.
There was an implementation of this available as a manual install, but it seemed to require quite a bit of work to get things functional. This newly distributed version also gives you a GUI for configuring a few settings, such as whether the AFP sharing is active, and what the name of your device will show up as to other computers.
Using AFP doesn’t give you much more functionality than SSH+SFTP, but it makes it ridiculously easy to connect and move files around, since you can just use Finder. This also means you can connect with other people’s computers without installing any software, and you don’t have to worry about what your IP address actually is on your device, as long as you’re on the same local network as the computer you’re trying to connect from.
Published on November 28, 2007
This one’s a bit hard to explain, it’s best that you just watch the video real quick.
[youtube AWc-j4Xs5_w]
Using accelerometers, vibration motors, and sound, a mobile device can convey it’s contents to you through tactile and audible feedback. So if you get an e-mail, that e-mail is represented as a metalic ball in the device. Shaking the device makes the ball bounce around, producing sound and vibrations. Multiple messages cause multiple sounds, and different senders can create different tones.
It’s not completely practical as presented… I can’t imagine walking around with unread e-mails, making jingling sounds, but to me, the concept is extremely strong.
Via: Engadget Mobile
Via: NewScientistTech
Published on November 27, 2007
Google Maps now has a terrain view, showing images of 3D terrain and, if the city is big enough, buildings. New York’s Map has translucent buildings, and of course the Grand Canyon is a pretty good display of the terrain imagery. When I first read about this new feature at Download Squad I was afraid that they would be doing topographic lines or something, but the soft rendered terrain they are using is clean while still communicating quite a bit of (non-scientific) information.
Published on November 27, 2007
Just a quick note, the excellent AppFresh has been updated with some fixes for Leopard compatibility. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and completely love it. It was especially useful for making sure that the applications on my Mac OS 10.4 computers were all up to date before doing the upgrade to 10.5 Leopard. From the AppFresh website:
How do you keep track of the latest versions for all your installed applications? Apple’s built-in Software Update helps keep software like iTunes and Mac OS X updated, but what about the rest? A lot of applications on your Mac don’t include their own update checker and even if they do, they don’t work from a central place. With AppFresh, you’re in control to decide what updates get installed. Spend your time using your applications, not keeping them up to date.
Grab AppFresh from http://metaquark.de/appfresh/
