beaTunes News

Friday, March 5, 2010

Do you blog with beaTunes?

beaTunes2 logoWhile thinking about beaTunes 3, I started to wonder about some features of the app that seem to be less popular than others. Like blogging.

Originally this seemed like a straight forward idea - people who deeply care about music and their collections probably want to talk about it. Being able to generate playlists for your blog seemed like the logical next step. And that's why beaTunes has this feature. But the blogging feature seems to be fairly unpopular. Most people like beaTunes for either its inspection or analysis features. But blogging? Who blogs with beaTunes?

This means that I have make a choice:

  • Remove the blogging support or
  • Improve the blogging support

What do you think? Do you use the blogging feature? Please comment in the forum.

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posted at 03:17 2 comments

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Happy New Year! (with beaTunes 1.2.7)

beaTunes LogoWe hope you all made it safely into the new year and wish you all the best for 2008. Fresh from the bits'n'bytes press we just uploaded a new release of beaTunes to our servers. It addresses some minor usability issues, problems with empty blog labels/terms and problems with private blogger.com blogs. It also finally provides Windows folks - who don't have Windows Scripting Host (WSH) installed - with a better error message.

Enjoy!

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posted at 07:33 0 comments

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

beaTunes 1.1.5 is out

beaTunes LogoWe have just released beaTunes 1.1.5. The newest version of the top iTunes library management tool features several bugfixes and enhancements:

  • We adapted the blogging code to recent changes in blogger.com.
  • The characters &<>!@, are now automatically dropped from labels/tags sent to blogger.com, since blogger does not support them.
  • To improve inspection, we added natural language single digit expansion to albumtypo-inspector and artisttypo-inspector. This means, that beaTunes will now recognize, that e.g. "four" and "4" mean the same thing. Note that this feature is limited to the numbers 0 to 9 of most major languages.
  • Other minor usability improvements.

Enjoy!

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posted at 07:22 0 comments

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Nike+ Blogging

The other day we came across a nice example of combing the beaTunes blogging feature with Nike+iPod, in particular Rush Frisby's Nike+iPod website widget:

justagirl.com/nike/

Check it out at justagirl.com/nike/

What a neat way of keeping track of your workouts!

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posted at 15:01 0 comments

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The New Blogging Support

beaTunes blogging editorWe've mentioned it before: Blogging will be almost completely new in beaTunes 1.1.

These are the main improvements:
  • Support for Atom 1.0, which is the most widely accepted API for publishing blog entries
  • Playlist columns can now be re-ordered and turned on or off
  • Playlists are linked to a CSS stylesheet, allowing for sophisticated designs
  • Tagging of blog entries

Atom 1.0

Atom 1.0 is supported by most public blogs. We paid special attention to blogger.com's implementation for the standard. This means that beaTunes does not only support the standard blogger, but also the version of blogger that is currently in beta.

Playlist Columns

Just like in iTunes, you can now simply drag columns in beaTunes' blog editor to change their order. You can also right/command-click on the column header and turn columns on or off. This allows you to completely customize the layout of your playlist table.

Stylesheets

To go one step further, with beaTunes 1.1 you will also be able to choose a stylesheet that will be linked directly into your blog entry. This CSS stylesheet can define the looks (color, font, etc.) of your playlist. beaTunes offers a couple of pre-made styles, but also allows you to add your own. You will just need to create the CSS file, put it on your server and tell beaTunes about it (in the blog preferences).
To check what your blog entry will look like, beaTunes now offers a Preview. Just hit the button (circled in the screenshot) and your blog entry will be rendered in your standard browser without having been posted to your blog.

Tags

Many blogs now offer labels or tags to keep your entries organized. Since beaTunes already supports tags for individual songs, it's only natural to also support blog tags. For each blog entry beaTunes will pre-populate the new tag area right below the title. The tags are drawn from the artists' names, genres, songs tags etc. - in fact, this is configurable in the blogging preferences. Plus, you can add whatever other tag you think makes sense and remove the ones that don't.

To summarize: Blogging about your favorite playlists just got a whole lot easier!

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posted at 17:04 0 comments