What is Spotify?

Spotify is a music player that allows you to play music from the Internet without any restrictions. Here’s how they describe it at spotify.com.

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.

There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organizing them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.

Essentially it’s all about playing music and to share songs and musiclists with others.

The User Interface

At first glance it looks a lot like a slimmed down iTunes. It’s a simple and functional interface but still visually compelling. I find it very intuitive and easy to use. It simply enables me to what I want to do with minimum effort.

Synchronization

If you create a new playlist on one computer it pops up in other computers that runs your account. But you can only play music on one computer at a time. If you start playing at another computer the music stops at the first and a message is displayed.

Nice, unobtrusive and easy to understand!

Share music with others

One cool thing with it is that you can easily share music and playlists with others. This is something that I find very nice since it makes me discover new great music.

Speed

I’m astonished by the speed of the application. Even though it’s a Web based software it responses immediately, like if the songs were on my computer.

Price

Spotify is free to use, but then it plays a commercial every five song or so. To get rid of the commercials you can either pay 99 SEK per month (about 10 Euro) or buy a daypass for 9 SEK (about 1 euro).

Compared to iTunes

I can’t help but compare Spotify with iTunes. Even though iTunes is packed with a lot more features it’s much more intrusive and above all, slower than Spotify. Why is it that iTunes is so much slower playing and displaying music on my harddrive than Spotify, doing the same with stuff from the Internet?

This leads me to believe that the responsiveness of an application is one of the most important factors for how much we appreciate it.

Conclusion

I think the reason that I like Spotify so much is that it supports me so well in the things I want to do with music.

• I have instant access to the music I want to listen to
• I can easily find the music I want to listen to
• It’s fast
• I don’t have to worry about files or copyrights
• It let’s me explore music and helps me find new music that I might like.
• It let’s me share music with others.

I can’t see any reason that Spotify wouldn’t be a huge success. I think it’s one of the best software I have ever used and I highly recommend it.

Now I’m just waiting for a mobile version so that I can use it on the go as well.

Learn more at www.spotify.com.

Enhanced address bar

The address bar is much more intuitive than before. You can now filter the web sites you’ve visited or bookmarked by just typing relevant words. Like for example when I type the word “Web standards” I get these results:

This is a really great improvement which I instantly fell in love with. It makes the address bar a lot more useful and saves a lot of time finding the right link.

Bookmarks

By clicking at the star in the address bar, you easily bookmark the current page. By clicking the star again you can edit and organize the bookmark. You can also tag the bookmark, making it easier to find. When you, for example, type the tag in the address bar, the bookmark appears in the list.

The Library

The library is a collection of bookmarks and your browsing history. It let’s you organize and search for links. You can also store the result of your search in a Smart Bookmark Folder, which updates automatically as more links get added. This might be an useful feature if you have lots of bookmarks and have a hard time finding the right ones. Personally I think that I will use the smart address bar most of the time. It’s more easily accessed and a lot faster to use and will probably suffice in most cases.

New text zoom

The new text zoom is zooming the whole page rather than just the text, much like IE7 does. Personally I prefer the old way where only the text changes size. I don’t know why they choose to implement it this way, but in my mind I think it’s a mistake. I just don’t see the advantage of blurred and pixelated images and forcing the user to scroll sideways.

Update [2008-06-27]: I’ve now noticed that it’s possible to choose which zoom style you prefer. The default is zoom of the entire page, but if you choose “Zoom” in the “View” menu, you can check the option “Zoom Text Only” and revert back to the old Text Zoom mode. (See image)

Password manager

The password manager have been changed from a modal dialog to a non-modal bar that appears at the top of the page not blocking the new page to display. This might seem like a small change, but I think that it’s one that makes the browsing experience more fluid.

Integrated add-ons manager

It’s now possible to find new add-ons without having to go to a separate page. When I tried it, I didn’t find the add-ons I was looking for. So I ended up having to click the link: “See all results” which leads to the add-on page at Mozilla. This just forces me take unnecessary steps on my way to find the right add-ons. My impression is that this is a feature that will need some more tweaking before it becomes really useful.

Added support for standards

Firefox 3 also have improved CSS support, native support for microformats, Javascript 1.8 support and much more. Although exciting stuff, I have to look deeper into these before writing anything about it.

Summary

Overall Firefox 3 have some really good new features, especially when it comes to managing bookmarks and finding the right links. The features I described here is of course just a few of many. To see them all visit Firefox features.

When it comes to performance, my first impression is that it doesn’t feel any faster even though the Firefox team claim to have much better memory management and other improvements to speed up the browser. More use and tests will probably tell if it’s faster or not.

What is your first impressions of Firefox 3?

Related resources

• Download Firefox 3
• Firefox features
• Video showing new features in Firefox 3

For example if you want to delete songs from the mp3-player, something that you do quite often as you want to fill it with different music, you have to go through two (!) confirmation boxes.

It’s almost insulting! I mean first I try to delete the song, then I have to confirm the delete and then I have to confirm the confirm. It’s not like I’m trying to format my hard drive! This is just a way for the developers to cover their own behinds. These kinds of alerts that you frequently have to click to get something done, you soon start to ignore. You just don’t read them anymore, you just automatically click them to get on with what you are doing. So if you really deleting something by accident, you probably won’t realize it until it’s too late. Therefor a much better solution is an undo-function.

SonicStage is filled with alert boxes that pops-up every time you try to do something and it’s really annoying. There’s just no way to escape them.

Another annoying thing is that I had a hard time finding my MP3-player the first times. I had to search the application a long time before I found the right place. In the middle of the upper part of the application is a toolbar with three options of which one is named “Transfer”.

Clicking it reveals a drop-down menu with several options. Apparently the first option, “ATRAC Audio Device”, was my MP3-player. Hardly something I would call it, but I’m sure it’s the correct name of the device internally on Sony. The device on the drop-down menu also seems a little misplaced because the other options are actions like: “Create an Audio CD”, while the mp3-player is just a name of a device.

Although Sony makes a decent mp3 player they haven’t put enough effort into the whole user experience with the product. One of the companies that do think of this is Apple. They’ve managed to combine iPod, iTunes and the iTunes Store in a way so that they integrate nicely and each contribute to the entire user experience.

Do you have examples of obtrusive and annoying software that comes with your gadgets. Or maybe example of where the software actually elevates the whole experience of the product?