apple thinks a little too different

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Dang it, as of this morning Apple pulled the java 6.02 download off their dev page. Java 6 is shipping with Leopard and is necessary for installing and running WeBot and many people have been using this addition to their current OS to enjoy WeBot. Good for them but not so good for people who don't have the Leopard beta or will not choose to upgrade to Leopard when its released.. This is a crying shame, and makes WeBot unavailable for our Mac temporarily.

There is nothing we can do about this, unfortunately, but we'll try. While we look for a solution, you can still log in to WeBot on a mac and stream music and view photos that are hosted on a windows machine, but you can't actually install a bot on your mac to access the music and photos shared therein. dang, dang, dang. I realize that Apple wants as many people to buy and upgrade to Leopard, we all gots to make money, but coercing people by means of not allowing them to upgrade their current OS with a higher form of Java is just kinda mean. A lot of my long time Apple using friends are constantly berating me for using Windows (hey, i'm bi-lingual) because of supposed MS strong-arm tactics. In this case they need look no further than their front porch for an example of that kind of meme.

more changes, enhancements and fixits 9.26.07

new photo page magic and an important music page enhancement

What's new in photos:

* new photos page layout
* dropdown for number of thumbnails to display (smaller default of 50)
* photo pagination (sticky for search or folder filter)
* new slide show and controls (black background and fullscreen)
* new "filter" pod to let the user know they are looking at a filtered set of photos, filter pod has clear button to remove filter (searches and pages are within filter)
* folders moved to left panel (selected folder appears as a filter in filter panel)
* added date range search for photos (selected date range appears as a filter in filter panel)
* thumbnails streamlined a bit (white background, no title text, better loading progress text, and maybe even faster...)

music page:

pagination!!!

__________________
"Which is worse, ignorance or indifference?"

More new changes pushed out live last night

We've been working like crazed weasels this week and managed to knock out a bunch more GUI updates and general app polishing today. Enjoy.

9.22 changes pushed out to you.


Seth's mcc changes

* "Playists" instead of collections -- more bettah, eh?

* Moved playlists to left nave, parallel to main song search
returns -- this makes a heckuva lot more sense and figuring out that dropping and dragging creates a playlist is now easy as pie. I like pie

* Moved ad to right nav -- which also puts the current song info right underneath the player controls. a no brainer.

* Added randomizing and alphabetizing to lists -- main and
playlists -- you have the right to be as random as you like.

* Moved stop button on player control to be after play/pause -- another no brainer.


* Search for photos by partial word -- not all of us got an A in spelling bee class. this should make it easier for everyone to find stuff

* Drop down choice of number of songs to display on the main page
after a search. 100/250/500 -- a bunch of ya's asked for this feature and who were we to say no.


Enjoy, boyos. Plenty more coming next week. We'll rest up for a few hours and get back to it.

iPhone -- streaming your playlists

I gotta admit the coolest thing we've built so far has by far been the mobile experience between WeBot and your trusty iPhone. As long as you can get a decent connection you can stream your music or watch your photos anywhere anytime. WeBot has made the choice between a 4 gb or an 8gb phone pointless. Sheesh, i've got 140 gigs of music on my various boxes and i can get to all of it, no uploading, no syncing. This is totally schwank.

The only slight hump in the road we've run into is the Safari browser and its buffering limitations. Depending on the lengths of a playlist or album you're trying to stream, you can occasionally run up against said limits and the whole playlist may not stream. It's a hump in the road, but we'll figure it out.

happy Friday.

BT

fixits, features and more goodness 9.19.07

things added/buffed and polished for today:

• shuffled the play/pause and stop buttons to make things a bit more clear. the music industry has spent decades training your brain to look for the play button first and THEN the stop button. Who are we to argue?
  
• music collections are now properly called playlists.
  
• you can sort your song lists alphabetically
  
• iPhone photo viewing now sorts by date
  
• logging into your WeBot iPhone interface is easier and more understandabe
  
• many heinous bugs destroyed

as always a billion thanks to our beta testers for suggesions, ideas and bug reports. we couldn't do it without you. Well, we could but not nearly as well.

New fixits for a new week.

hot off the presses, new flex client front end changes for you to love:

Fixed/added:

1. - Stop button added - stops playing song and ends download of song
2. - After stopping song clicking play icon resumes currently selected song
3. - Artist/Album/Genre title & count columns sort correctly when clicked
4. - Added track number column to main music list
5. - Amazon art & buy link fixed (will always require good MP3 tags to work correctly)
6. - New cute WeBot preloader

#1 & 2 Intuitive behavior. Now if you'd rather single click/highlight a song then click play, you can do so. A bunch of y'all asked for it and here it is.
#3 Necessary for those of us with 20 gazillion albums on our various machines.
#4 Get those songs in order get way the artist and his/her producer spent countless hours agonizing over. That can be an amazingly important part of a cd presentation......
#5 This works nearly flawlessly now. The only variable is with the interaction with Amazon. if anything between your track's id3 data and Amazon's differs ya gots a no go.
#6 Seth likes cute We had to stop him from putting in a little puppy dog wagging its tail while the mcc player loads. This was a better a choice, hands down.

Enjoy and keep those suggestions coming in, we're working around the clock to keep buffing and polishing.

enhancemnts and polishing

Some major bugs have been fixed over the last week and some major (imm) and minor enhancements and tweaks have hit the ground running.

things we're working on:

• CPU usage and general resource stability. We're actively working to make WeBot's footprint on your computer's available resources lighter and more transparent. Great strides have bee made in the last few days and the latest builds are far superior to those from the olden times (like last week).
• search code has seen a ton of re-write and it's plenty faster, more accurate and efficient than ever. Partial word searching is now active so if I can't remember if it's Metheny, Methany, Metheney or Methaney when I want to listen to my favorite modern jazz gtr player, no worries. I just type in "meth" and get a slew of returns from Pat Metheny to 147 bpm techno. har.
• collections and how they are created and edited have been revamped making organizing, editing and using playlists a whole heckalot easier.

In progress and design are a major buffing and polishing of the photo viewing pages, more clarity in the accessing your stuff from your iPhone, easier upgrade process and a general more manageable guided flow down the path from first visit to streaming music and viewing your photo collections in living color.

Thanks a million to all the kind early testers and users and friends who've generously given of their time to play with this first incarnation of WeBot and pontificate on how to make it mo better. we appreciate and listen to every syllable.

We cant do it without you. Please keep those cards and letters coming.

first weekend in the public eye

...sort of, as yesterday saw WeBot dipping its toe in to the ocean via a lovely article by Om Malik on the most worthy Gigaom.com blog as well as positive pokes on Mashable and bitcurrent by Sean Aune and Alistair Croll

While we are still in private beta mode and keeping user numbers low on purpose, it was good to more than triple our userbase in a day and get some much needed input from the wild on UI/feature set/bugs/effusive praise/etc....

There are a bunch of wild bugs we're working on over the weekend and hope to have a rather effective ugrade/update by early next week -- or even sometime over the weekend if the fellahs in the white coats have a breakthrough. A billion thanks to all our beta test team folks who are communicating UI experienced and bug info to us. The work continues....