The average iPhone owner for example, spends £80 in Apple’s App Store. When I recently switched to a Google Nexus One, I lost use of all £80 worth of my apps. That money is now wasted, those apps have absolutley no use to me anymore, because I cannot install them on my new phone.

Online stores are become more and more popular with handheld devices. I’m not talking about your ebuyer or bestbuy, I’m talking about your App Store or Market Place. The problem is, they’re all locked-down to some extent.

Fair enough, if I buy another android phone I can install all the apps I’ve bought on my Google Nexus One, as I did when I moved from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS. The same is probably true for Kindle to Kindle 2.

But what happens when Apple stop selling the iPhone, or someone releases a better eBook reader than the Kindle, or if Google end the Android project? All of your purchased applications, books, mp3s become useless.

We need to make things transferable!

This is the exact reason I used to rip my mp3s (before the magnificence that is Spotify), instead of paying for a service like Napster or Yahoo Music. Most of those services were DRM based. There were just too many restrictions on what you can or cannot do with the music you purchase.

So before you splash out on the iPad, Kindle or any other eBook reader – and before you upgrade to an iPhone, Nexus One or other smartphone – remember, the money you spend on books/apps/music for that device, may well be thrown away with the device.

Why should you have to hack your Kindle in order to read eBooks you obtained from somewhere other than Amazon (see: over-priced)? Why should you have to jailbreak your iPhone to use apps that Apple doesn’t want to ‘approve’? If you ask me, you shouldn’t,

I’m paying for Premium, and it just doesn’t work. The desktop app constantly gives me an error “There is a problem with the connection to Spotify. Please try again shortly” whenever I try and play a high-bitrate track. I’ve followed all the instructions and keep checking back on the Spotify status page. Obviously I don’t want to be paying for premium and listening to songs in a low bitrate, that kind of defeats the purpose.

I’ve also had some trouble with the iPhone app too. See the attached image. I have only ever used the Spotify app on my iPhone 3GS, so I have no idea what this error is about, but either way it erased all my downloaded tracks.

Therefore I have now un-subscribed from Spotify Premium. Back to the advertisements for me.

iPhone app. Simples.

Today I purchased a Spotify Premium Membership, for the sole purpose of using the iPhone app. It’s great! I’ll write a review after giving it more time.

It’s just a shame there’s no alternative to the £10 monthly fee. The yearly package is the exact same price – but I hear this is out of Spotify’s hands. The music labels won’t allow them to give any discounts. Annoying, but that’s business sometimes I suppose.

I really like Spotify. I recommend it to everyone, I use it all the time, yet I won’t pay for it. This makes me feel rotten, just a little bit, so I’m going to justify myself.

This has nothing to do with liking the product, or even about affordabilty, this is purely to do with justifying the cost.

I think the PS3 Slim looks nice, I want one, but I have an Xbox360 and an over-powered PC for gamer, so although I can afford one, I can’t actually justify the purchase to myself. This is the exact problem I have with Spotify. I never used to pay for music, so now that I stream my music I’m not saving any money and although I am loyal to the product, the pricing is too high for me to put my hand in my pocket.

Now if the £100 bought me a lifetime license I might consider it. Of course I’d be worried about the service shutting down, as we’ve seen in the past with pay-and-go music download services – similar business model, where you rent DRMd music instead of straming it. In these cases customers were left with no music when the system shut down, which would of course be the same result with Spotify.

£100 a year is just too much to pay for music, especially for the Napster generation. Not only do we want everything now, and everything for free – but we’re accustomed to it.

Again, don’t get me wrong, I will pay for products. I buy iPhone apps all the time. I even bought a Spotify day pass for 99p when I was ‘DJing’ at my friend’s BBQ.

So how can Spotify encourage more of us to purchase their packages? Drop the prices. A 50% drop in prices would bring Spotify to the level of most other web apps. £35 – £50 a year is an amount that people see comfortable to shell out for a web application. £100 isn’t. Simples.

SQL

I don’t really need to discuss this, I mean who uses MS SQL?

Azure

I can see where/when Azure would be useful, but again, just go Open Source for more control and more options.

Silverlight

Silverlight 3 is actually looking quite cool and is set to release by the end of July (shh ). Silverlight currently works on Windows Mobile, when they’ve tested it – but it just hasn’t been implemented yet. Expect to see this in Windows Mobile 7.
MS brag about the cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility of Silverlight, but at the same time they offer no support to Novell with the Moonlight project (to get Silverlight compatibility in Linux).

IE8

There were few IE6 jokes of course, but that’s to be expected. At least MS can laugh at themselves – because the rest of us already are – IE8 offers some interesting features, I just don’t know how useful they are;

Slices allow the user to save a section of the site, like a bookmark but not-quite. It’s almost RSS replacement, but it’s something that I can’t really see taking off on a large-scale. The biggest down-fall of this feature is that it needs hard-coding in the HTML to be able to work, so a user can’t ‘Slice’ any content, only content that has been tagged in the source code.

Accelerators are more interesting, this is the tool that cuts down Copy&Paste steps in the browser. Simply right-click on selected text and you have the option to search that text in Google, Bing *groan* (yes it’s good, but I don’t have to keep admitting it!), Amazon and all other site that you’d expect with this feature. You can also e-mail the text, useful stuff like that. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Firefox already provides a much better plugin (more feature complete. Accelerators doesn’t even have an eBay search).

Deep Zoom

Apart from the goofy name, this software was actually pretty cool. Huge image rendering through Silverlight. Visit the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia page and hit the magic ‘v’ button, then just keep zooming out – you’ll see a nice demonstration.

ASP.NET

People still use ASP? All jokes aside, .NET is a good idea. One development environment for all your applications, whether they are web or desktop. With Mono, it’s almost Open Source friendly too. But ASP? Really? … Just go Java.

–

So I went into this meeting thinking ‘Apache + Java > IIS + .NET’, and I came out with ‘FF > IE8′. The Microsoft guys were really friendly, we had a good chat. I didn’t rebel too much, although I was the only one in the room with a MacBook Pro and iPhone, and I may have been the only one asking Open Source questions – but that’s not rebellious, that’s just tech-savvy. MS offer no innovation, they are a bore to the market. People moan that Apple provided no Copy&Paste, it could be said that Microsoft give us too much Copy&Paste.

Quote of the Day: “We’d never try to make our tools the only tools you could use”

So iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 5 is out … but before you go and upgrade, you may want to read on. MMS and Tethering are built into the current betas of OS 3.0, and we have discovered how to access them.Sporkings, May 2009

Checkout the whole article.

I loved it, so I downloaded it and converted it into an m4r format file, ready for my iPhone 3G.

Here they are, in case anyone else wants a copy;

If you’ve Jailbreaked your iPhone, you can ssh/sftp the full length version straight to Library/Ringtones: hippie-glen-netflix-long

If however, you’re running a vanilla straight-from-the-box iPhone, you’ll need the 30 second clip, to import and sync via iTunes: hippie-glen-netflix-short

Thanks d0n1, nice work.