Matjaž Finžgar

Master pintsman and all-round geek.

Why I love Spotify

Spotify was still in private beta when I heard about it. But I managed to get my hands on it. I didn't like it at that time, I thought it was over hyped. But in this years' first quarter, I gave it another try. I was not disappointed.

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Here are the reasons why I've been using Spotify daily for quite some time now. This is my personal opinion and if you have something to say, please, start a conversation on twitter or in the comments.

Love the way you play
I've tried some other music streaming apps, but to be honest, Spotify was the only one to deliver painless streaming. Every time. And this is one of the biggest advantages against other apps or services. 

Let's build a playlist
Collaborative playlists. One of the best features. The only problem with this (and the same applies to normal playlists) is, that you can add more than one instance of the same song to one playlist. I hate that. You add a track and somebody else adds the same track, again. There could be at least a warning when doing so. But overall, collaborative playlists are nice and a great way to discover new music.

Offline mode
Well, you're not online all the time, but you need to listen to some music when there are no interwebz around. Offline playlists are the solution. Create a playlist, click Available offline and you're done. Of course, you have to wait for Spotify to sync all the music to your hard drive first. Then you'll be able to listen to your music offline.

A lot of music for not-so-much money
This is the best part of Spotify (and any other music streaming service to be fair). You pay some money to the company and you get millions of songs. To be exact, you pay approx. 15€ a month. And if you're a music junkie like I am, you'll pay that price and enjoy the music.

The Humble FROZEN SYNAPSE Bundle

Here it is again: The Humble Bundle. Included in this pay-what-you-want deal is Frozen Synapse, but, if you pay above the average price (which is $4.53 now) you get the additional Frozenbyte bundle. That bundle is the previous one and includes Trine, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, Shadowgrounds, Splot and Jack Claw. The Humble Bundle team made a genius move: as you pay above the average, the average itself rises a little. But with this much downloads (it's available for a day and there are 91000 downloads) the number will raise a lot. So go on and buy this bundle! And yes, it's still on you who gets the money.

Here's a promo video for this bundle

Google Analytics Real-time - quick review

Today, Google announced real-time Analytics. You know, so you can watch who's visiting your website, in real-time. And I must say, it's pretty solid, even though it just launched.

Here's a quick review of the interface and the product.

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Review
Interface is straight-forward and you can access all the important parts of this dashboard easily. The best part of this new dashboard is, that you can measure your social media impact and campaigns. This makes it much easier to see which contents of your site are trending and from where all the visitors come from. Graphs in right top corner are slick and quick. As soon as you get a new visitor, the graphs start moving. And so does all the other charts on this dashboard. And everything is smooth. 

Competition
I assume you've at least heard of Chartbeat, a similar product, but it's available for quite some time now. At this time, I think Chartbeat is the best tool for real-time analyze, but the amount of users using Analytics will soon define the winner of this "war". Today I found out about Reinvigorate (thanks @starksimon), which also has some pretty neat stuff (ex: heat maps displaying user clicks), but as I said, I think that the userbase of those products and will determine the true winner. But I can be mistaken.

UPDATE:
Just so you know, the real-time dashboard in Analytics is just a dashboard, separated from other parts of Analytics. Your data in your reports is STILL refreshed every 24 hours. But I'm sure this will change in near future (as it's out of the beta).

Why you should log in to Facebook

Well this post has nothing to do with logging in actually, the title stands as it is because of this post by Dave Winer. This is just a post to clear things up and my thoughts on Facebook's privacy.

The first and most important thing: websites/apps are not (and won't be) able to post anything without your permission. You have to agree (with every individual app) on posting to your Timeline (as profiles are now called).

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This is how Spotify delivered the prompt to grant the required permissions. Straight forward and you can change this setting, if you change your mind. I don't see anything wrong with this kind of security.

Even if you dont grant this permission, you're still able to log in to Spotify and share individual tracks/playlists. And I think this is good. I won't grant some permissions just because I don't read the pop-up. People who do that should be concerned about their privacy. If one is too lazy to read something, then it's their fault.

PS: Sorry for my b0rken English, it's 1am here. :)

Posterous Spaces - everything's changed

I visited my Posterous blog and something jumped into my eye. And it was just a simple little text in the right top corner that said: "You own this Space." - and hell yea I do! But the text was different than usual, so I jumped to posterous.com. And I was surprised. Posterous changed. A lot. I didn't like it at first sight, but I kept on digging.

So here are my thoughts about this new look and feel. Feel free to start a debate in the comments.

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Operation: Snowbike

Last year, one day when I was bored, I decided to make something useful for the winter. I decided to make a snowbike. But something in school happened and I had to abandon this project. This year, I'm making a snowbike for real!

Frame of the bike is ready, sketches for skies and their frames are also ready. Only thing missing is production of all that and that will happen (if everything works out) next week. And because summer's end is coming fast, I can't wait for winter to come.

Moving myself to the cloud

I was thinking a lot about this particular move. Should I? Should I not? I decided to go for it. But only one thing made me do it. Google's announcement for offline Docs. I know, I can only view my docs in offline mode, but in near future I'll be able to create, edit and delete them too.

So, I moved all my docs "up there", all my pictures are in Picasa, videos on YouTube and my most important files sit tight in Dropbox. And not to mention my calendar is up there too. But one thing did not fit anywhere: my notes. I think Evernote and Simplenote are amazing products, but nothing beats pen and paper. I mean Moleskine. This is the easiest and most convenient way to take notes and they're just like in the cloud. Always with me and ready to be read/written.

I was thinking about privacy in the cloud a lot. And I mean a lot lot. But to be fair, most of the companies take a lot of time to study the privacy of their products. And if there are any issues, most of them act as soon as possible. And I'm fine with that. I don't think that any of the companies, whose products I use, will ever reveal my information and files to anyone. So right now, I'm perfectly fine with the cloud.