Category Archives: iTunes-webos

iTunes Remote – Genius!

announce-webos, converty-webos, iTunes-webos, Palm Web Os, vlc-webos

Apple changed the API in the lastest version of iTunes. That broke the ability of iTunes Remote to browse by artist, album or genre.

1.1 fixes that – and also adds new features.

You can now use the Genius button for any playing track to start a new Genius playlist.
You can also browse playlist folders (the Genius automatic mixes are the most obvious of these).

The latest update is now available through the App Catalog.

News Feed – New free app

announce-webos, converty-webos, iTunes-webos, vlc-webos

Hi Folks,

Palm just published News Feed – my latest app.

Actually, it is only partly my app. Palm wrote most of the code and I just tweaked it for release.

Nonetheless – it is a powerful and fully featured RSS news reader. It lets you download feeds and read them offline. It comes bundled with a selection of feeds, but you can easily add your own.

One user asked me in the Hobbyist forum whether I intend to charge for News Feed in future.

My plan at the moment is to keep it free and just incorporate any major changes that Palm include in the open source.

If there is lots of demand for more features, then I might decide to do more work on the app and start charging.

It’s the first time I have had to pay to publish a free app (palm charges $50 per app) – but I’m hoping that it will act as an advertisement for my other apps.

So please download News Feed, and please read the Hobbyist news feed, and try my other apps!

You can get News Feed here.

Converty

announce-webos, iTunes-webos, vlc-webos

Converty aims to let you do conversions with the absolute minimum of taps and keypresses.

Here is what other apps do: 1) select currency to convert from, 2) select currency to convert to 3) enter value 4) press go.

Converty works like this 1) enter the value in the row for the currency of your choice

Converty immediately converts the value to all your preferred currencies.

Rates are updated online whenever you like.

For Units – Converty works much the same – except it does need an extra step for you to choose the kind of measurement.

Try it out here.

Remote 0.1.9 uploaded

iTunes-webos

Hi Folks,

I just updated 0.1.9 with a few new features

1) You can tap on album art to show the art fullscreen

2) You can scroll the art to skip to the next or previous track.

I also updated the Mac Helper to handle some string display issues (album and artist).

The free version is uploaded now, and the paid version will follow as soon as Palm approves it.

Enjoy!

Rob

Getting better?

iTunes-webos

I got a bunch of fairly negative feedback for the first release of Remote (and some positive comments too!)

The criticism was mostly well deserved. Unfortunately I didn’t have an actual device until after the first version was finished – so I failed to spot a bunch of problems where the device quickly ran out of memory.

I hope this version addresses a bunch of people’s suggestions and complaints.

Here are the main changes

1) Updated windows helper which

  • Handles opening and closing of iTunes better so that it doesn’t lose the connection.
  • Is more stable
  • Allows new features
  • (to update the helper, just launch it and click on the ‘check for updates’ button)

2) Ability to browse genres, albums, artists as well as playlists

3) Ability to search by album, artist, genre and track name

4) Much less memory-hungry

5) And a bunch of smaller tweaks…

I hope this works much better for people.

I’m afraid there are probably still bugs to be found –  So I have two requests:

If you do encounter a problem, please email me at rob@hobbyistsoftware.com

I can’ t see reviews on the app store at the moment, so It’s tough for me to get feedback that way. I particularly want to hear from you if you get any crashes with the helpers or the app. That will let me figure out what is wrong and (hopefully) fix it

If you like the new version – please post a review at the store 😉

enjoy,

Rob

Why the news?

converty-webos, iTunes-webos, vlc-webos

Thanks for reading this far.

I was looking for a way to communicate with users of my apps – and this seemed to be a good approach. My hope is that it is simple enough to be unintrusive, but also obvious enough for you to read if you are interested.

I’m used to working in a community where there is a lot more direct communication between users and developers – but that is tough to manage through the app store. Hence the ‘in app news’

My intent is to use this channel to let people know about updates, new features and other apps that I’m working on. I’ll be adding tips and requests for beta testers too.

If you have any comments or suggestions, then please come and join the discussion at my PreCentral forum or let me know at rob@hobbyistsoftware.com

Thanks for using my apps!