Web Warp Blog has been retired. For new posts please head to dmather.com.

Tuesday 29 June 2010

mflow Adding More Tracks

The music "reflowultion" mflow which was featured previously on this blog here has been hit by criticism from early adopters. We must remember, and stress, that the service is still in 'Beta' and is always being improved. Since the initial Web Warp Blog post mflow has added support for Twitter and Facebook, as well as a profile page for each mflow user. The program itself has been updated several times and a lot of tweaks and features have been added. You can now send your downloaded (or library) tracks to iTunes with one click.

Their music library may be relatively small, and can often frustrate users, but good news! The world from one of the founders, Oleg Fomenko is: mflow are working hard to add tracks:

@webwarp @punctualwaffle working overtime on the catalogue ... growing it every day ... still have more than 2M tracks awaiting ingestless than a minute ago via TweetDeck



So if you haven't joined mflow yet I recommend it. You will receive all sorts of tracks in your inbox and earn 20% back off purchases made through your recommendations! And with the library growing all the time one day you may receive flows of Muse in your inbox!

Sunday 27 June 2010

Muse at Glastonbury 2010

MUSE headlined the Saturday line up of the 2010 Glastonbury Festival with an immense set featuring a wide range of their tracks. It was broadcast on the BBC and is available to watch again on BBC iPlayer until 1:59am Sun, 4 Jul 2010. Click Here or on the iPlayer logo for Muse at Glastonbury. It is highly recommended!

Set List
Uprising
Supermassive Black Hole
New Born
Map of the Problematique
Guiding Light
Citizen Erased
Nishe
United States Of Eurasia
Feeling Good
Undisclosed Desires
Resistance
Interlude
Hysteria
Time Is Running Out
Starlight
Stockholm Syndrome

Where The Streets Have No Name (U2 cover with The Edge)
Plug In Baby
Knights of Cydonia (With Chris' extended harmonica intro)

Muse are currently on tour playing to stadiums across Europe. See www.muse.mu for more details!



The setlist can be found at www.setlist.fm.
Image: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/

Thursday 24 June 2010

Mac Mini gets miniaturised

Apple have done it again and made another product unbelievably small. The iPod/iPhone charger has got smaller and smaller from hand size to just a plug head for the iPhone 3GS charger. The Apple Mac Mini has had the same treatment.

The new Mac Mini is a single unibody construction. It looks about 50% smaller than the outgoing model. It is 2x faster so that makes it 4x more powerful per tonne to use some TopGear logic. It also features an HDMI socket so you can set up your Mac Mini on your HD TV. This save you having to buy an Apple TV (perhaps?). It's also the most energy efficient Mac to date.

Apple are selling the Mac Mini in two variants. One is a standard computer and the other is a Mac Mini with Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server installed. This server version doesn't have an optical drive. It would make an ideal home server or small business server.

Apple Mac Mini starts at £649 with a 320GB hard drive from www.apple.com/uk.


Image: Apple Inc.

iPhone 4 Available

Apple's iPhone 4 is out today. It was welcomed in with queues of expectant customers at Apple's Regent Street store in London. The demand is so high that Carphone Warehouse are unable to take orders online or on the phone:
"Due to unprecedented demand for the new Apple iPhone 4 we have extremely limited stock. We are sorry for any disappointment this may cause."
Its certainly a very impressive product and demand will be high for a few weeks yet if it follows the same pattern as the release of the iPhone 3G.

Image: Apple Inc.

Tuesday 22 June 2010

iOS 4 Available

Apple iOS 4 is now available to download from iTunes. It updates the Operating system on iPhones, iPod Touches and the iPad. The Apple website will take you through which features suit your device. As a quick review all I can say is "wow!".

I love the new features. Apple have added functionality where required, it is just a little better everywhere. It's the little things which make the difference everytime you pick up your phone. For example there is now a spellchecker inbuilt into the keyboard. And speaking of keyboards... my favourite feature has to be the support for Bluetooth keyboards!

Wednesday 16 June 2010

Hands on with an Apple iPad

So I finally got a chance to have a go on an iPad. The Apple display had it's own small crowd all gathered round to catch their first glimse of the much-hyped iPad. The 4 iPad's were showcasing games with iPad specific versions and all the standard apps. I took the iPad specific London Underground app for a whirl:



The multitouch display is incredible on the larger device. All of the UI is so obvious and familar. The speed of responses was spot on, although I hardly put the iPad through it's paces. The device seemed well made and strong. The iBooks app was impresive. The Amazon Kindle is very clever at replicating ink on a page but you can't show off photos on it with a high resolution full depth colour screen, or browse the web with such ease.

Also I've just seen an iPad in 'the wild' - very swish. All the promise of a portable computing device with glorious multitouch display all on hand at a moments notice. The lucky owner was able to use the display only seconds after removing it from their bag. They made good use of the Apple case and were happilly typing away on at a slight angle, similar to a standard keyboard.

I wonder how a netbook running Google Chrome OS will fare in a test of portable computing? Google's boot time of 7 seconds is extremely fast for a netbook, but can it compete with the 'standby' nature of the iPad (and iPhone)? With the powerful A4 chip and plently of apps for any concievable task could the iPad attack the netbook market? Unless you are doing a serious amount of typing do you really need a hardware keyboard? This blog post is being typed on an iPhone using the landscape virtual keyboard and plenty of autocorrection!



The display is plenty big enough and it's so convienienty to just pocket your computer. With iOS 4 coming soon Bluetooth keyboards will be supported by the iPhone. Any iPhone or iPad owner will soon run out of reasons to buy a netbook for mobile computing.

Monday 7 June 2010

Apple iPhone 4

Apple have announced iPhone 4 and iOS4 at Apple's WWDC event. The iPhone 4 looks incredible. It has so many feature improvements. The screen is 4x clearer than the 3G and is capable of displaying 720p HD content. The best thing to do is to check out the Apple summary Click Here for Apple.com/iPhone.

Here is a video of the new iPhone 4 case it looks incredible.

Engadget live coverage of WWDC 2010.

So Apple have done it again, the iPhone4 has blown every other phone out of the water!less than a minute ago via web



The iOS 4 software will be available to update iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G (no multitasking on the 3G) as previously reported on www.webwarpblog.co.uk: Click Here. Here is the complete list on Apple's website.

One of the new features is connecting your iPhone to a Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard such as this Apple one. The iPhone would start to rival netbooks for emailing on the go!

Friday 4 June 2010

V8 Benchmark Suite Results

Testing web browser performance with the Google Code V8 Benchmark Suite you can compare browsers and platforms.
The results are clear, Google Chrome is by far the fastest web browser (using the benchmark in question). Recent results are highlighted yellow.



Feel free to send us your browser scores using the V8 Benchmark to @webwarpblog on Follow webwarpblog on Twitter and the results will be updated.

Original tweet:

Please check your browser score: V8 benchmark http://bit.ly/clWbRX & @webwarpblog resultsless than a minute ago via web

Thursday 3 June 2010

Everything Everywhere

Everything Everywhere Ltd is a new company formed by the joining of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK. Everything Everywhere will continue to run both brands. They have approximately 30 million customers. From the press release:
"To customers, Orange and T-Mobile will continue to compete as distinct
brands in the market, each having its own shops, campaigns, propositions
and service centres."