hackr.se

Yesterday we drank some wine and did some paper mock-ups for the next version of Dogvibes. After the unofficial demonstrations we made during thoughtmade.com we decided to focus on mobile access. Design and usability is not our best trade, but we decided to draw some mock-ups to use for discussion. We hope that this will help us with some ideas and give us some basic user requirements for the client. Here are some of the stuff we came up with, we will release a digital version of the mock-ups pretty soon i hope.

android/iphone mockups for dogvibes by tilljoel

android/iphone mockups for dogvibes by tilljoel

Wallpaintings instead of android/iphone mockups by tilljoel

Some conclusions from our night of drawing were

• Try to print wire frames for iPhone/Android and use them as a base for your designs
• Untalented artists like us probably could get some help from UI Stencils
• Use a scissor and move the screens around to get a grip of your navigation
• Start with pen/paper before you try to create your digital mock-ups
• Buy good material, check out Posca pens

We also installed some development packages for Android and iPhone. Since I don’t have OS X anymore I will brush of my java skills and write the android app i guess. I guess this means I am allowed to by a new phone?

We are also looking for some good collaborative tool for mind-maps that work for both Mac and Linux, ideas?

(Updated May 12, 2010)

This blog post is a request for comments on an idea we have for a social music player based on the Dogvibes server.  Its still just an early idea and all feedback is appreciated!

About a year ago we started our social music project called Dogvibes. It all began with a simple paper design that @gyllen wrote, initiated by the release of libspotify. We did a few weeks of hacking and got a prototype running and then came the summer and we took a break to get some sun. A few month ago we took up the work and started to finish our social music server. We now have a working server and a few different clients that look really awesome! The design is very similar to spotify but we are using a webpage to render the user interface that communicates with our server. We used this approach to develop the API in the server and now we have something that handles most use cases. The screenshots below show the user intraface rendered both in a desktop browser and on an iPhone.

Now we want to improve on the social part of playing music and develop a new client optimized to select and play music for a group of people.

When hosting a party, usually you have a computer with a media player and a big playlist where you can add the tracks for the night. Depending on the people and the amount of alcohol this can fail, some things that usually happen are:

• A small part of the group tends to pick most of the songs
• People that search for music start playing their song instead of adding it to the playlist
• Some cool dude with a unique elitistic genre tries to enforce his unknown music
• Most songs only get a 30 seconds of playtime before someone changes track

Below is a description of an idea to solve this problem, discussed by the Dogvibes developers: @brissmyr, @gyllen, @swallin, @nystrom and me (@tilljoel).

SocialMusic-Idea1-Tabs by tilljoel

Everyone shares the same playlist where you can add your songs or vote on songs already added, the order of the tracks should be decided by an algorithm. It should work in a similar way as flattr works for micro payments. It means that adding, up voting, down voting tracks should cost you and if people up vote your tracks you receive(I have no clue what to call this “currency” yet). All users should regularly be given some amount of this currency, perhaps depending on number of songs in the playlist queue, user activity etc.

Search

Search for songs in a simple way, use same kind of browseability that spotify, lastfm or itunes has. The scope of the songs search could be limited in some way.

• Eighties party with 1000 preselected songs to pick from
• Normal party with all music found locally and on Spotify
• An espresso bar that only wanna play music from the genre “hiphop”

Users can add tracks from here to the toplist.

Toplist

This list contains all the tracks added and the current track playing. There are at least three different actions this view should handle:

• up vote a song
• down vote a song
• comment a song
• more?

SocialMusic-Idea1-Toplist by tilljoel

The order in the playlist should be decided from some algorithm that take into account: up votes, down votes, number of tracks added by the same person and the time since a track was added.

Social

This view should reflect all actions on the server by the users, imagine an irc-like log with information like this:

SocialMusic-Idea1-Socialtab by tilljoel

We are about to start development during the following weeks and all feedback is highly appreciated!

During the last three years, my Macbook Air has been kinda depressed. Every time i tried to install my free GNU programs using ports it has silently played this tune for me.

I am the wilderness locked in a cage
I am a growing force you kept in place
I am a tree reaching for the sun

Release me!
Release me!

I have heard this song during the last years and never really done anything about it, until today when i accidentally destroyed the Mac OS X operating system on my Macbook. When this happens, your Macbook will just boot to a white screen and display a small spinner and do nothing, yey! Mac OS X is probably the best non-free operating system out there, everything just works out of the box. I think one of the main reasons that made me feel somehow trapped inside in the Darwin world is that I could not get my terminal and Vim editor to work as smooth as on my Gentoo box. So i decided to install Linux on my Macbook :)

I downloaded the latest Gentoo build and everything booted up pretty good except that the keyboard didn’t work, my first plan was then to boot an Ubuntu CD and install Gentoo from it. When booting up the Ubuntu 10.04 CD I was in shock, since it was my first graphical installation since i changed to Gentoo many years ago. Damn it looks good now days!

Since the Ubuntu installation had me in shock I continued the installation, the process was really straightforward and easy, you can’t really compare it to a stage1 Gentoo huzzle installation. I have no clue what Ubuntu installed on my drive but I’m pretty happy have to have Linux running on my Macbook without any effort.

I come from gentoo-land and I don’t see my self changing it from my desktop computer for a while, but for my laptop i think Ubuntu is a solid pick since most peripherals just works out of the box!

Update:

• To fix the the touchpad after a sleep, reload the bcm5974 kernelmodule using the following script. Add it to /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/02touchpad and set correct permissions

    #!/bin/bash
    if [ -e '/usr/lib/pm-utils/functions' ];then
      . /usr/lib/pm-utils/functions
    fi
  
    suspend_bcm5974() { /sbin/rmmod bcm5974; }
    resume_bcm5974() { /sbin/modprobe bcm5974; }
  
    case "$1" in
      suspend|hibernate)
        suspend_bcm5974;
      ;;
      thaw|resume)
        resume_bcm5974;
      ;;
      *)
      ;;
    esac
    exit $?
  

• Direct link to the Ubuntu releases
• Before booting you macbook with the Ubuntu installation CD, read about the startup shortcuts