I have had some queries via e-mail and Twitter about the iPhone app currently under development, i thought i would provide some further information to keep you guys updated.
The application will officially be called iFestApp (Festival App) and will be on sale for 59p in the iTunes app store when complete. The app will provide information on artists playing at V Festival, the stages they play on and links to their Twitter/Facebook/Websites, it will also provide the latest news and rumours about V Festival along with Twitter updates split into 3 categories, Official V Festival tweets, Artist Tweets and your tweets.
The application is being worked on and development updates can be found on Twitter at @iFestApp and you can signup for updates via e-mail on the iFestApp website.
Well as you may have read from my last blog post, i created my first iPhone app which was a rejigging of content from this website, in an iPhone app, for free. Well that got rejected because it was useless, i quite agree, so i gave it another shot.
I decided this time it was better to go with something a little more "native" so i decided to read some articles on creating iPhone apps and they were very helpful in teaching me the basics allowing me to create something useful.
I have always been a fan of the iPhone and have always made it a goal of mine to one day develop an iPhone application. Well today i can announce that i have completed my very first iPhone application and it has been submitted to the iPhone App Store for review and will hopefully appear soon.
It has been suggested for quite some time that i shouldn't jump into full-on iPhone development because i do not know Objective C, in the slightest, so a web app has been my starting goal.
As many of you may see i like to write about music on this website, without music the world would be pretty boring and i love to share my musical taste with random members of the public, kind of like how i stand on street corners shouting band names and songs at passing cars.
In this post i'm going to review a website which is quite new to me called TunesPro, it's like iTunes but much cheaper, in fact much much cheaper, like more than 50% cheaper than iTunes, it may as well be free it's just that cheap.
So TunesPro sell music through their website, the music you download is 100% DRM free which means you can put it on your iPod, Zune (Pfft) or other MP3 player and it will work a treat. The site has over 5.5 million tracks to download from all of your favourite artists from past and present.
I wouldn't say i was the only person on the internet who has a problem and tweets about it in the hope that venting the anger will speed up the resolution, it never does. This type of action is something i find interesting because lately tweeting about your problems can help resolve them quickly.
This article is about how Twitter can be the tool that saves your brand as a company, it is also an article about how Twitter can help you solve problems faster, and lastly it's a post about the damage Twitter can have on your brand.
The inspiration for this article comes from my experience with companies on Twitter and personally the majority of companies i have had contact with have been very helpful and their help has restored hope in their brand, for others it has not been quite a picnic.
I was introduced to we7 earlier this year and has since become one of my frequently visited websites because it offers free streaming music from its website with no need for additional software.
Since using we7 I have seen little change in the way of features and some of the features we7 doesn't have annoys me a little, however it is a great service so who could stay mad for long.
we7 is very similar to Spotify in that it offers free streaming music supported by advertisements, the difference is that we7 works through your browser and Spotify requires a download in order to work, this is why we7 is better because you can be anywhere and listen to your music, including work or college.
With over 1 million tracks to stream for free including some unreleased albums we7 is massive and just last week we7 was the most visited music website on the internet according to official statistics of internet usage, a rather big milestone for legal free streaming websites.
I thought it would be a great idea to post some of my ideas for improving we7 in the hope that someone over at we7 would see the post and hopefully work on some of the features, features that i think would really improve the service for everyone.
A new application has been brought to my attention for the iPhone and i think it is quite brilliant, not because of its many features, but because its sole feature and sole purpose of free iPhone to iPhone communication.
The application is called "Ping" and it allows free "text messaging" between iPhones using the push notification feature in iPhone 3.0, so if you sent massive amounts of text messages and want to save some of your allowance for non-iPhone users then this application is perfect.
Recently i made a post about the features that Apple could implement into the next iTunes to make listening and purchasing music a more social experience. I talked about social networking features and public features that would allow your music tastes to be shared with the world or just your friends, i did not however talk about iTunes features that would affect you in the physical world.
In this article i will discuss some features that i believe would make iTunes a more enjoyable feature in a real world social environment. Once again this are only a suggestion and ideas and are not features that have in anyway been rumoured or created already.
iTunes is a massive product and has millions of users and the iTunes experience is quite enjoyable for home users, but once you leave the home you leave behind your library and your taste in music. So if you go out to a bar, club, party or restaurant you listen to what the DJ wants to play, which is not always what you enjoy.
In this post i discuss the new Google product Wave and share some ideas for how i think Google Wave will change the internet as we know it.
Google is clearly the king of the internet and i think it is safe to say that no matter where you go online you cannot hide from the empire of Google. They have their fingers so many pies like statistics, blogs, advertising, publishing and then they have a full hand in the search pie.
As Google have grown by sticking their fingers in more and more pies they are trying new things and most notably lately is their move into the conversation tool, called Google Wave.
I have been considering a review of my current hosting package for quite some time because i find that their service is often highly reliable but with some problems i have been having lately i didn't want my opinion to be skewed.
It has been a few month since then and i have decided that it is probably better for me to review them so that the same people don't get stung by the same problems that i did, time and time again.
When iTunes 8.0 was released last year (September 2008) i wrote a blog post about the future of iTunes and how iTunes would incorporate social networking features into its software to help people discover new music which would inevitably increase iTunes sales.
Since then iTunes 9.0 has been released and it didn't really implement anything new into the software, the software is still the same old iTunes with a nicer interface and couple of new features and i honestly don't believe these small changes deserve a full new version release, instead it should have been called iTunes 8.5 at the most.
Web Designers of world i have decided to make a post about great Firefox tools to help speed up your work flow. These are add-ons and plugins that typically help me with designing and coding so i thought i would share them with the world.
The tools i have suggested are tools to speed up debugging, general designing and then uploading.
Recently Lily Allen made a splash in the online media when she started a blog where she posted a letter regarding music piracy and how it affected smaller artists, she then went on to post replies she got from other artists.
The letter raised some interesting points from the perspective of the artists which is a new perspective because normally you only hear from the ISPs and record labels. The main point the letter makes is that piracy is not alright (probably why the blog got its name) and it only damages the music industry making it hard for smaller artists to make it big.
With any blog successful blog it is all about finding your audience and keeping them on board, however one problem a lot of blogs have is that the audience simply doesn't find them.
This is a problem i have had previously with this blog and it is what forced me into taking serious action to increase the readability of my posts, the feedback and lastly increase traffic to the blog.
Incase you didn't know already i'm a web designer (and developer) and something all web designers come across at least once during the design of a website is cross-browser compatibility and i'm sure you can ask any website designer what they think of IE6 (Internet Explorer 6 - keep up with the acronyms) and they would throw so many obscenities at you that you would most likely cry.
It's no lie that web designers hates Internet Explorer especially Internet Explorer 6, simply because it has trouble rendering the simplest of things and when it does it normally renders them incorrectly. Below is my breakdown of common problems i face with the 3 versions of IE.
In the last couple of months Microsoft launched a new campaign to try and tempt Internet Explorer users to upgrade to the latest version of the browser, when you did Microsoft would give 8 meals to hungry americans and if you upgraded from Internet Explorer 6 they would double that to 16 meals.
This obviously is a good cause because I certainly don't want any fat american to have their body start consuming the large amounts of food stores around the body, so I immediately i jumped onto the cause and used it as a good way to get people to upgrade from the dreaded Internet Explorer 6 browser, a web designers worse nightmare.
As some of you may remember back in October of 2008 my beloved iPhone went into be fixed, this was done by Carphone Warehouse under the 12 month warranty because the screen went all weird and the accelerometer went all funny. Some of you may also remember i wrote several posts about how Carphone Warehouse sucked balls, today i follow that post with more Carphone warehouse failings.
So apparently something quite common with White iPhone 3Gs is cracking, these are small little hairline cracks in the areas where plastic is thin, typically around the speakers or headphone jack. My iPhone began to develop them around 4 months ago and it wasn't really a massive problem for me, however on Friday one of the cracks go worse, up to the point where the iPhone was almost in half.
I recently wrote a forum post on the ekmCommunity forum, a forum for ekmPowershop customers, about the positives of Twitter in the e-commerce sector, a post which was inspired by a blog post i drafted about 4 months ago. The post is on a private forum which means it benefits no one other than the people inside that group, so i have decided to rewrite the blog post and adapt it to my new Twitter findings here.
This post is about how you can utilise a fast growing community of internet users to hopefully increase your businesses profit. This is based around my research and knowledge of Twitter and obviously ecommerce and will hopefully provide information to help ecommerce website owners drive traffic to their site and increase sales.
I love iTunes because it's easily the best media player on the Mac when combined with QuickTime and iTunes is always running on my iMac because it is simple, has create playlist abilities and is super smooth. I'm also a massive fan of how music players incorporate social features, these music players are not mainstream enough like iTunes is and iTunes has the infrastructure for these features to easily be incorporated.
In this blog post I talk about what iTunes is missing in terms of social features, these are only ideas and one can only hope that these features would be implemented in the near future, it would clearly make sense for these features to be incorporated because they would boost revenue via the iTunes store and boost iTunes' user-base massively.
Well it's been almost 1 week since i posted my disgust at The Carphone Warehouse for their poor customer service and repair package. Since then i have learnt new facts which only add to my annoyance.
First let me start by saying I have my iPhone back and it works like a treat but apart from that i'm disappointed at The Carphone Warehouse for their piss-poor customer service.
Sunday 2nd November 2008 - I gave them a call asking where my iPhone was and when i would have it back and they told me Wednesday which was 3 days overdue from the 14 days they promised me. Wednesday came along and i had heard nothing, but i waited for the length of the day to see if i got a text or phone as promised by the sales rep i called. No call ever came.
Let me set the scene. Sunday 19th October 2008, i spent the prior Friday in Burnley on one of my regular night outs taking various pictures with the piss-poor 2Mpixel camera on the iPhone 3G. Saturday i awake with a somewhat bad hangover (not the worst hangover), i come to marvel at the pictures i took the night before. I find myself looking shocked as my iPhone flips the photos around in any direction. The cause. A broken accelerometer inside the iPhone meaning that it didn't know what direction it was facing.
I have been waiting far to long for white iPhones to come in stock in the UK and finally i get word from Carphone Warehouse that they are indeed expecting a "large" shipment on Monday ready for selling on Tuesday. I asked the sales guy whether they would get them in store by that time and he was unable to comment but simply said "not likely" but i'm assuming this is because of the bank holiday. The guy (who was very helpful) agreed to give me a call on Monday or Tuesday (whenever they are ready for selling) so i could buy one.
Well this week has been the second most expensive week of the last year (the first expensive was the £1,200 i spent on the iMAC). Yesterday i got the impulse to buy a new mobile phone, this time none other than the magical iPhone, maybe i'm dumb, maybe i have more money than sense, others may say im a fan boy, to these people i say f**k you, f**k you and your fat f**king fingers. Still got a few stupid problems like not being able to receive voicemail and also my case is messing around with the touch screen, all will be fixed soon. Anyway that's my update, i bet you're glad you subscribed to the RSS feed now huh.