Tuesday 11 January 2011
Saturday 16 October 2010
Spotify iPad review
I posted a Tweet earlier, describing my surprise at the poor quality of the Spotify app on iPad.
It should be noted that these comments relate particularly to the iPad version (in comparison with the Android version); I haven't used the iPhone version, although I assume that they're the same.
- Firstly, and this is no fault of Spotify, the app is unable to run in background mode, which means you have to keep it active otherwise it stops playing. Hopefully matters will improve if Apple releases an update to the iPad's iOS to allow background tasks. It seems to me that this is more of an issue on the iPad than the iPhone because the former is primarily a media consumption device. Its easy to imagine a scenario in which a user would like to listen to music on Spotify while reading an ebook for example.
- Secondly, a specific iPad version is not available. Spotify could make excellent use of the larger screen real-estate of the iPad to create a much more involving experience (more like the desktop version).
- In comparison with the Android version, the text seems rather large and cumbersome, giving the app a slightly childish feel - and reducing the amount of information on the screen.
- On the iPhone version the designers have gone for a vertical scroll for all of the information (along with horizontal scrolling of individual sections). To my mind, the tabbed arrangement of the Android version makes for a more intuitive experience.
- The settings on the Android version seem to be more comprehensive.
All in all, upon reflection, this hardly adds up to the tale of woe my tweet implied but I feel much happier with the Android experience. Perhaps I expected the Android version to be the poor cousin on the version for the Apple platform (as is so often the case) but I was left feeling that the boot is on the other foot. The iPad is crying out for a specific version of the Spotify client which makes use of its larger screen - any hopefully runs in the background (if Steve J lets them).
Sunday 23 May 2010
Saturday 15 May 2010
Thursday 13 May 2010
Friday 1 January 2010
The rise of unit testing in open source software
We've always known we should unit test, but not many of us have done it wholeheartedly.
Only now are we starting to see the advantages.
With the rise of distributed version control, sites like github and improved merge tools, we're starting to see the real power of open-source software - but it comes at a price. We seem to have entered a phase of software development where, for some projects, the philosophy is "let 1000 branches bloom". The only way to allow this explosion of user generated functionality, while preserving quality, is via automated regression tests.
As a Python guy, I'm thinking of projects like Django and Twisted, but that could apply equally to projects in C, like redis, or any other language for that matter. Perhaps this means that languages with easy access to unit testing functionality will really start to prosper in this new era.
Within a large open-source project, no individual contributor can hope to be a master of all of the functionality - therefore the only way to ensure that people can contribute new functionality without having an adverse effect on the bulk of the legacy code is via automated regression tests. In this day and age, its not realistic to develop a system with a large number of contributors without having a means to allow those contributors to add to the codebase in confidence that they're not going to break a piece of critical functionality.
Unit testing is "a good thing", and we're starting to see the real benefits.
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