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....

Bugs

yuck we hate em, but if you'll help us find em, we'll snuff em out as quickly as we can. a

I'll start threads around particularly heinous bugs, but this thread will serve as a repository for breaking bug news -- both daylighting and fixit announcements.