http://webcoding.co.uk/meridian

Find out more at: http://www.webcoding.co.uk/postcode/api.html

TwitSpot is essentially the merging of music being played on Spotify via Twitter into a custom, real time playlist which is controlled by the users of Twitter.

When you share a piece of music via Spotify and post it to Twitter, TwitSpot will pick this up and add it to the current play list.

Each and every person gets a different play list based on the time they last checked Twitter for new songs. This whole idea allows you to listen to new, interesting music that may well be out of your normal style and taste.

TwitSpot App

Give it a try - I’ve listened to some great music over the last few days.

A few tweaks here and there with some better ways of handling Spotify’s meta data API.

Enjoy: Spotify Top 40’s

I started recording the news site again from this August but this time keeping the images locally on my home machine - the disk space is not a problem unlike the co-lo box this site sits on.  As “luck” would have it I started recording the site again right when the London riots happened and you can see a summary of the headlines here for that period:

Enjoy - and as always this is part of the BBC Backstage

P.S - Here’s the C# program i wrote to make all this possible

A utility to capture web pages

So, thus far, I’ve used the entire UK Postcode set and UK Bus Stops (available via data.gov.uk) to create (what I think) are visually stunning “maps” of the UK with nothing more than point location and some “code”.

The postcodes are pretty obvious but the bus data is really quite interesting too. Remarkably, both sets of data manage to create a pretty conclusive view of the UK. Scotland, unfortunately is difficult to map given the lack of postcodes and bus routes in the upper north west side.

I also parsed some IP data from this website (it’s been collected over a long time) to create a world view of use.  The same result was seen as above however I didn’t have enough data (or visits) to create a decent world view.  Europe on the other hand wasn’t bad at all - the picture for Europe is below.

We can immediately bypass the mass of cheap android tablets such as the RockChip 2808 or the quite horrible delivery from Next (fashion retailers!). They are “tablets” but when you see them in action they suffer from all manner of bugs, poor implementations of “touch” and the rest.

There are however a few decent contenders milling around and of those I’d mention the Samsung Galaxy Tablet, ViewSonic Viewpad 7 and the forthcoming ASUS tablets. Reputable companies with solid hardware and a degree of credibility in a market saturated with poor Chinese iPad rip-offs.

So why are they going to fail? Well, first you need to look at the iPad. It’s a luxury product with a price point to match. It was essentially the first really decent tablet to market and Apple have the luxury of a custom operating system (iOS) and customised hardware. It is brilliant and would obviously be the product to which all other tablets would be compared.

So, a great tablet with well regarded software starts at £429 for a Wifi only 16GB system. It’s the benchmark – Apple charge significantly more for all it’s hardware than the average counterpart would cost (laptops, screens, desktops etc etc).

Before we look at the pricing of the Android tablets it’s important to note that Android is a mobile phone operating system and not designed for tablets. To take advantage of the “market place” (Android’s version of the AppStore) you must have a cellular (3G) connection and thus it requires a contract. This is a huge deal and means that Apple’s wifi devices are still a niche product available to people who DON’T want or need ANOTHER mobile contract. It’s nuts that this practise of data contracts per device is still happening.

If we switch to Apples 16GB Wifi + 3G device, you’re looking at £529.99 (plus contract prices) which in comparison to Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is STILL A CHEAPER price to pay?? Amazon has Samsung’s device (as sold by Samsung themselves) is retailing for £668.19 new plus contracts

It might be a valid option if the device was significantly better than Apples but that isn’t even the case – software aside the devices are similar with the exception of Apple’s screen which wins over the galaxy.

I’m of the opinion that sadly the Galaxy will fail. It looks like an awesome unit and I’d love to own it but I’d rather spend less money on another iPad. Price is always important and Samsung seems to think it worth more than Apple – sorry – no, you’re not. They are an established luxurious brand and you are not. I can buy a Samsung LE46C650 46-inch Widescreen Full HD 1080p 100Hz television for £10 more than the Galaxy tablet costs – are you kidding me?

]]> http://server-2.webcoding.co.uk/blog/?feed=rss2&p=100 http://server-2.webcoding.co.uk/blog/?p=93 http://server-2.webcoding.co.uk/blog/?p=93#comments Sat, 30 Oct 2010 02:27:56 +0000 Jim http://server-2.webcoding.co.uk/blog/?p=93 I’ve done a number of “tickers” over the years, some in Javascript, some in Java and I half finished a ticker for Windows in the past.  I’ve spent the last few days writing a brand new one which tries to gel into the BBC’s stuff providing an updated user interface with extras than the older ticker system they had in place.

This version supports any RSS feed and whilst defaulting to BBC feeds can be extended to support other sites by editing the feeds in the “preferences” option.

The system is built in C# using .NET 3.5 and is available to download from here:

http://server-2.webcoding.co.uk/bbc_ticker_2010/publish.htm

Someone asked me to update my Top 40 page so the XML version worked again. I took the opportunity to slightly extend the feed to include a bit more information and add direct links to track via Spotify’s Metadata API.

Feeds are here:

http://server-2.webcoding.co.uk/top40.xml

http://server-2.webcoding.co.uk/top40albums.xml

Example application written in C#:

http://server-2.webcoding.co.uk/spotify/

Top 40 UK Chart (Singles) - http://viper.bsg.webcoding.co.uk/top40.xml

Top 40 UK Chart (Albums) - http://viper.bsg.webcoding.co.uk/top40albums.xml

Syntax is slightly changed from before and contains new elements.

Originally made as part of BBC Backstage.