Month: July 2010

Spotify is really popular in Europe, offering a huge library of music to listen to on demand from computers and smart phones. I’ve said before that I’m not a huge fan, and MP3tunes addresses on of my complaints: that Spotify doesn’t have everything I want to listen to.

I have everything I want to listen to, though, and MP3tunes allows me to upload my music to their service, and then stream it from any browser, or my iPhone (there’s even an Android app, if you have one of those). The browser service best, but the iPhone app seems to be unstable. This may be due to iOS4, so hopefully they’ll fix it soon.

The uploading app is available for Windows and Mac, and works fine although to be honest it’s not the most polished program I’ve ever seen.

MP3tunes is an interesting service, but I’m still not a big streaming fan. I will stream things, but I don’t see it as the ultimate solution. I’ll keep storing things locally, as it saves energy and bandwidth on my phone. For me, the best things about the web and music are the sharing possibilities. Spotify’s playlists are an excellent example, and SoundCloud, which allows you to upload music and share it, is a great place to discover new music.

Last week I told you about Nokia’s new Ovi App Wizard, which allows anyone to create their own Symbian applications. Today, Google has launched something similar in the shape of App Inventor, which allows budding developers to make Android apps without any technical knowledge.

App Inventor features a graphical user interface that lets you design and build applications by dragging and dropping elements onto the screen. Google has literally gone back to school with App Inventor, working with junior and high school kids to help ensure the editor is as easy to use as possible. In fact, it promises that making programs with App Inventor won’t require a single line of coding.

I’m still waiting on my invite for App Inventor and will be curious to see what the scope of this development tool is. On the face of it, App Inventor certainly looks more advanced than the Ovi App Wizard, which essentially just serves web feeds. My fear though, after watching the promotional video, is that the Android Market is about to become the biggest repository of crap apps on the planet.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ADwPLSFeY8[/youtube]

BlackBerry: Sid Meier’s Civilization is an all-time classic strategy game in which you must build an empire by battling it out with rival armies. The fourth incarnation in the series now hits the BlackBerry, in the shape of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: War of Two Cities. The aim of the game is to take command of rival cities by wiping out their soldiers, destroying their buildings and pillaging their resources

Windows: The Windows Registry is a core component of your system, so you better keep it in perfect shape! With Glary Registry Repair you can easily scan more than a dozen areas in the Registry and repair any problems you may find right on the spot. It’s easy to use, really fast and saves a backup copy of the Registry before changing anything.

Mac: WireTap Studio is a serious solution to record anything from your Mac. What used to be called WireTap Pro is still as reliable as ever, all in a small interface that lets you record, edit and save your audio in any format. WireTap Studio can capture both software and hardware sounds so long as you select the input source. There are two available in the interface. Just press the recording button to get started.

Who didn’t want to be an astronaut once upon a time? Rockets, weightlessness and walking on the moon looked really cool. NASA are trying to bring our dreams crashing into harsh reality, with their free educational game Moonbase Alpha.

It could be fantastic – multiplayer missions on the Moon to save the base after a destructive meteor shower. It features a moon-buggy and robots! Unfortunately, Moonbase Alpha doesn’t feature Bruce Willis, and is designed with team-building and realism in mind.

In my first half an hour, I walked and jumped gracefully, but really slowly around the moonbase. I picked up a welder, drifted towards electrical units that were broken, and fixed them slowly. I then drifted back to the toolshed, to grab a wrench. Did you know astronauts can’t carry more than one object at a time? Using the moon-buggy speeds things up, as you can load items onto it, one by one, and move a lot faster. But it’s still hardly exciting.

You can play multiplayer online, which would be much more interesting, but it’s currently very difficult to find servers and active games. Moonbase Alpha is available for Windows via Steam, and it’s totally free, so you can easily find out if you have what it takes to live on the Moon – do you have that much patience? The Moon would be much more fun if it was being invaded my aliens, in my opinion…

Readers, I’m in love. After years in a safe but boring relationship with a Nokia so old that people used to ask me if it had a color screen, I am head over heels for a sleek HTC Legend. I knew that once I made the jump from cellphone prehistory to the modern world, there were only two options – a HTC with Android or an iPhone. In the end, I decided on a HTC. Why? Put simply, the HTC is just cooler! iPhones have their charm and, as Jon has evangelized before, they may even beat the Android on certain technical levels, but I had fallen for the HTC, and fallen hard. Who’s going to argue with true love?!

The initial set up was easy as pie – in fact, my biggest problem was waiting to charge the phone before I could use it! Before actually getting an Android, I didn’t have much experience. I had played around with other people’s iPhones and investigated a HTC or two, but I was no expert. Even so, my first few hours with the new phone couldn’t have been easier. Android is very user-friendly. Obviously, if you make the jump, you’ll have your own opinions about which Android apps are the most important, but here’s how I’ve played it so far: Continue reading “Android – my first week”