Spotify announced a new API platform for publisher a few days ago, which will give users a lot of great new applications to find and recommend new music. The new version of Spotify with the applications is yet to launch as official release, but if you want to test out the new application you can do so already.
All you need to do is select from these beta clients:
Here is a great infographic that runs through the various platforms and smartphone applications within those platforms.
The graphic is created by XCube Labs.
Most people dont know that you can develop native iOS applications for the iPhone and iPad by using Javascript. Here is a great tutorial on how to create a native looking iOS application from HTML, CSS and Javascript.
The tutorial includes how to strip away the browser; prevent viewport scrolling and scaling; respond to multi-touch and gesture events; use webkit CSS to get the iPhone OS look and feel; cache the app so it runs without internet access; get a custom icon on the home screen; and have a splash screen load at the start.
Click here to read the full tutorial.
Microsoft has just released some official Windows Phone 7 stats. The stats look very impressive and it seems they are gaining on a lot of other platforms.
Numbers:
Windows Phone 7 has shown some great growth, but the are still a long way behind iOS with 300,000 applications and Android with 100,000 applications.
“We recognize the importance of getting great apps on our platform and not artificially inflating the number of actual apps available to customer by listing “wallpapers” as a category, or perhaps allowing competitor’s apps to run on the platform to increase “tonnage.” We also don’t believe in the practice of counting “lite” apps as unique quality content. (…) Finally, we don’t double and triple count apps which are submitted in multiple languages.,” he explains in the blog post.
There have been a lot of reports that the Android platform now has over 250,000 apps. I find this a little hard to believe when the Apple App Store only has around 350,000 apps. I know the Android platform has been gaining a lot of adoption recently, but has it really grown this much?
Last month, Google former CEO Eric Schmidt (now chairman) at the Mobile World Congress revealed to the world that the Android Market had surpassed 150,000 apps as of February.
Thus, in a little over 30 days have they really added 100,000 apps!
There is a great tutorial over at &yet which talks about using Backbone.js Models on the server with Node.js and Socket.io to built real-time apps. This tutorial is amazing and runs through all the steps in a very simple form to allow anyone to understand.
Using this approach we send very small changes over an already established connection, we can very quickly synchronize state from one client to the other or the server can get updates from an external data source, modify the model on the server and those changes would immediately be sent to the connected clients. Best of all – it’s fast.
Click here for the full article.
Cameyo is offering a new and free possibility to handle your common applications, using a simple procedure you can capture a normal application installation into a portable package that can carry to use it on any other computer, without the need of installing this application again.
This capturing process is actually known as “application virtualization”; which can be found in several other technologies from Microsoft, Symantec and VMWare. All of them are paid technologies.
Here’s a video showing how Cameyo works, using a nice example of Opera + Flash + Java, all in one portable package:
Cameyo is not only free, but also offers a SDK (Software Development Kit) which developers can use to complement with Cameyo’s virtualization technology and also provides other nice features like automation features.
PortableLinuxApps.org is a large portal where we can find tons of Linux portable applications which we can use in USB drives or any other portable and we don’t need to install them.
The complete list you can find it in the home page of PortableLinuxApps.org, but here’s a quick list of the most important ones:
One of the teams supporting this portal is another big reference in the open source area: Source Forge. So we should not surprise if we find PortableLinuxApps.org growing potentially.
Google’s Operating System represents, for most of open source lovers, their main hope in a Microsoft world that is now being invaded by Mac; and seems that insiders in Google are saying that Chrome OS will include a Remote Desktop Connection that will provide running locally normal PC applications.
Remote Desktop for most power and/or IT users represents the way of accessing a remote’s computer desktop by reaching it using an IP address; but is more than that. Using Remote Desktop protocol, users can access their applications, installed on a remote computer, without actually installing them locally.
This functionality, without an official announcement by Google, appeared in a Google forum; made by software designer inside the developing of Chrome: “We’re adding new capabilities all the time,” wrote Kačmarčík. “With this functionality (unofficially named ‘chromoting’), Chrome OS will not only be [a] great platform for running modern Web apps, but will also enable you to access legacy PC applications right within the browser.”
For me, almost anything representing legacy or an interoperability support sounds like a good idea; especially in today’s market when some are thinking that by being more restrictive they will win.
What do you think?
Windows, Mac, Linux and even Firefox offer more now than ever before in terms of software pre-installed and ready to make your life easier and the experience on a computer better. While each newer version offers more, sometimes it’s not enough to really make your computer experience as smooth or fulfilling as it could be. Here’s 20 apps you probably never heard of that will help make using your computer more efficient, fun and better.
Sapiens (Mac) – Probably the most intuitive apple launcher I’ve ever used, Sapiens is accessed from either a circular motion from your mouse / touchpad or a keyboard shortcut and actually learns which programs you use the most and anticipates what you’ll need. Sadly, it’s still not working with 10.6.
SuperDuper! (Mac) – The easiest way I’ve ever cloned a hard drive, ever. Want to upgrade to a larger hard drive in your Mac, get SuperDuper, connect the new hard drive via an SATA to USB adapter, run it. Pull the existing hard drive and replace with the new one and turn the power on. Brilliant!
PixelStick (Mac) – If you do web design or web graphics, PixelStick is an amazing little app to measure distance and angles on the screen. I can’t tell you how often I use this for laying out sites, creating banner ads and doing alignments of web graphics.
Paparazzi! (Mac) - A small and unobtrusive app for taking screenshots of web pages.
XXCLONE (Windows) – The Windows version of SuperDuper! and it does an excellent job of cloning hard drives.
CutePDF (Windows) – Create PDF files from any printable document, for free!
EASEUS Partition Master (Windows) – Create partitions, resize, format and merge on nearly all Windows platforms, for free!
SpinRite (Windows) – Hard drives aren’t perfect, when you need to do maintenance on them or recover data, SpinRite can help.
PhotoRec (Windows / Mac / Linux) – If you’ve ever formatted the memory card in your digital camera by accident, PhotoRec will be worth it’s weight in gold. Best photo recovery tool ever, and it’s free!
DVD Flick (Windows) – Convert nearly any video file into a playable DVD.
Mac The Ripper (Mac) – Quickly and easily rip any DVD movie to your hard drive. This application is great if you travel a lot and need to extend the battery life between charges. Using your built in DVD slot consumes far more battery juice compared to playing a movie from your hard drive.
HandBrake (Mac / Windows / Linux) - An open source video transcoder for all platforms, you can now extract video or audio or both from any video source and convert it into nearly any other source.
Vixy (Mac / Windows) – Vixy is an online service to rip YouTube videos to your hard drive, but the site can be somewhat unstable due to high traffic. To resolve this problem they’ve released the desktop app. Still in Beta with a few quirks, the options to save as .avi, .mov or just extract the audio as .mp3 are nice.
Pidgin (Mac / Windows / Linux) – Possibly one of the best chat clients available that loads nearly all formats of chat available, from AIM to Gtalk, Facebook to Yahoo.
FireBug (Firefox) An add-on for Firefox, FireBug is essential for anyone who does web design to quickly and efficiently track down errors with web page development.
SciTE (Windows) – Based on the Scintilla text editor, SciTE has extensions built in. This is hands down one of the best text editors available, and it’s free!
Audacity (Mac) – Going further than GarageBand, Audacity gives you a level of fine tuning and editing that is second to none. This open-source project is also free!
FireFTP (Firefox) – If you need to FTP data, chances are you probably already have a web browser open, so why not do it right in Firefox? FireFTP is a small add-on that is simple to use and provide rock solid stability.
Keyfinder (Windows) – This tiny little app does one thing, sniffs out the product key of nearly any version of Windows. Very helpful when you need to reinstall the operating system but the sticker has been scratched or worn off the case.
Foxit (Windows / Linux / Firefox) – Simply the fastest PDF reader I’ve ever used, period. Uninstall Acrobat reader and install this free PDF reader, period.
