Stimulating Pixels

The Wordpess iPhone app is a pretty solid little piece of software. (I’m writing this very post with it.) There are a few key upgrades that would make it even more useful.

1) the ability to define the maximum photo size when uploading from in the app.

2) The ability to override the keyboard auto-rotation and select either a full time horizontal or vertical layout.

3) Spellcheck.

According to the app’s “about page” it is an open source app. Guess I’ll take a look and see if I can put in the changes myself.

I’ve only used it a little, but Amazon’s Kindle iPhone app is a much better reading experience than I thought it would be. I’ll let you know if I have the same feeling after reading an entire book, but after a few sessions, I’m pleasantly surprised with how little I consciously think about the fact that there are only a few sentences on the screen at one time and how often I have to flip pages.

One of the best User Interface elements of it is the little lock that pops up for a moment when you trun the device from vertical to horizontal or vice versa. Tapping the lock keeps tells the app to keep the display in that perspective. Without this it would be difficult to read lying down because the app would have a tendency to flip to a vertical display when turn to the side.

One key improvent I’d like to see is a dictionary lookup. In the current version, you can’t even copy a word to paste into another app. Makes a real pain when you come across a tricky word that you are unsure of.

You’ll need an Amazon account (and an iPhone or iPod Touch, of course) but the app is worth checking out. There are some titles that are offered for free. So, you can get a feel for the experince with something like Dracula without having to pay a dime.

For the past few years SXSW has been releasing music samplers with a ton of free MP3s from artists who are going to preform at the festival. I’ve found a lot of music that I like sifting through the sampler and am going to start posting some of it here.

I wanted to find a site that already had the audio clips and would let me embed them in my site. The first site I looked at was last.fm. I’ve used them a few times in the past to stream music and thought I remembered seeing a way to pull out their player and put it on other sites. When I looked again, all I could see was a way to embed it on facebook, myspace and digg. There was no code you could simply grab and embed on a personal site. Strike One.

This struck me as weird so I did a quick search and found some pages that suggested that you had to create an account before you could get code to embed. Strike Two. Don’t make me sign up to really get benefit out of your site. I was in the mood to see how it worked anyway so I created an account and added the song I wanted to the Library, hit the “Play your Library” button and got this:

What? I have to add 15 artists before I can hear any of the songs I want. Strike Three and by the way, to hell with your site. I’m gone.

Next stop: imeem.com. First thing I see is a nice search box right in front of me on the home page. I put in the artist I want to hear, and see a list of songs from that artist. Click on the one I want to hear and a nice little player pops up and starts the song for me. Check out the bottom of the player and the code for me to embed the song is sitting right there.

Sold.

The worst part for last.fm is that they actually had a song that I wanted to include that imeem didn’t already have in their list. So, they would have won even if I had to jump through some hoops. Seems like a huge miss out of them.