Considering a Facebook application renaissance could be on its way, it’s a good time to take a look at some of the apps that managed to make and keep themselves relevant during the Dark Ages. If you’re a music lover, check out this list of 10 great options to consider for adding some more music-related interactivity to your Facebook profile.
Whether it’s expressing your love for music on your Facebook profile or even casual “I like this song” folks wanting to share the occasional tune with friends, you’ll probably find something of interest on this list. And of course, if you know of any other worthwhile music apps we missed, let us know in the comments.
10. MixPod
This app integrates with the MixPod site to let you create playlists and embed them on your Facebook (
) profile. They have a fairly large selection and you can browse by year which is a nice feature — but be sure to test out the tracks you’ve added before posting the playlist. We had trouble with a few of the songs not playing, or being unmarked covers of the originals.
You also have a number of styles to choose from for your playlist, from utilitarian to playful. You’ll have to create a MixPod account to set up, save and embed your playlists.
9. Music Video Jukebox
This is a fun little app that makes it easy to post music videos to your profile from YouTube (
) or last.fm. You can search for YouTube videos right inline from the app, or let it scan your Facebook profile’s musical favorites section to help surface videos you might like. Or, hook it in to your last.fm (
) account to pull in the videos from the most recent tracks you’ve listened to, and post them to your profile with one click.
8. Music Challenge
For the more trivia minded among you, Music Challenge is one of the more popular music trivia apps at almost 3.4 million monthly active users. It follows a typical “name that tune” format, where you have to identify the song based on the audio being played. In bonus mode, you also get points for identifying the artists.
7. Music
Dubbed simply Music, this is another twist on sharing songs through your profile. You can upload your own tracks to share in your embedded playlist — although hosting limitations constrain you to only two at a time. However, you can also add and share any music from URLs on the web, including YouTube. Grab the URL of the track or YouTube music video you want to include and paste it into the “Add Song” interface to build up your playlist.
6. Last.fm Profile
Whereas last.fm used to have its own official Facebook app, they’re interestingly deprecating it in favor of third-party community apps. The last.fm Profile app is one of the better among them, and allows you to add a handy tab to your Facebook profile with stats from your last.fm profile. Simply add the app, submit your last.fm username, and once the data is cleared you can add the last.fm profile as a new tab in your Facebook profile.
5. My Band
If you’re a music lover who is also a musician, you might want to check out My Band. It’s a promotional tool to enhance your Facebook Page with band-specific needs like gig schedules (including ticket sales), music sales, mailing lists and street teams, and analytics on who is listening and sharing your tunes.
4. imeem
This official app from the folks at imeem lets you integrate your imeem (
) profile with Facebook, but can also be useful even if you don’t spend much time on imeem itself. After adding the app you can add songs, videos, and playlists to your profile from the featured, most played this month, and top ranked leaderboards, or add any track imeem hosts by pasting its URL into the Facebook app. You can also see your Facebook friends’ imeem activity and manage your profile from within the app.
3. Pandora
If you already use Pandora (
), its official app will help you integrate your listening with Facebook. You can set up either a sidebar box with details from your Pandora listening or add it as a new tab to your Facebook profile. Show off your latest stations, favorite artists and songs to your Facebook friends, or create new custom stations right from within the app. You can also see what your Facebook friends are listening to from the Pandora app dashboard.
2. Share Song
From the folks at Grooveshark (
), the Share Song application is one of those simple yet very effective apps that simply lets you find and share music easily. Just search for the track you want to listen to or share, and if it exists in Grooveshark’s 8+ million song database you can post it to your profile or send it directly to friends.
1. iLike
Although it’s owned by rival MySpace (
) has been one of the most popular music applications on Facebook for some time. You can listen to and post songs to your profile, get music news and updates, find nearby concerts and more.
More music resources from Mashable:
- Social Music: Top 5 Sites to Build a Playlist
- 10 Ways to Share Music on Twitter
- Free Music Monday: Hip Hop Edition
- 18 of the Best Music Tumblelogs
- Social Music: Top 5 Recommendation Services
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Top 10 Facebook Applications for Music Lovers
Monday, November 9, 2009
Happy Birthday: A Look Back at Five Years of Firefox - Firefox - Lifehacker
Five years ago, an open-source browser called Firefox—one that didn't ship with your computer—was available as a 1.0 download. To say it's changed the world's web experience is understatement. Here's a look back at five years of the 'fox.
Read on for an overview of the life of Firefox, including its journey from from its Netscape ancestry to the modern browser we've come to know and love-and a quick peek at what's around the corner.
The Prelude: Netscape
- April 22, 1993: Following five months of development, version 1.0 of Mosaic, one of the very first web browsers that can display graphics next to text, is released. It was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), by a team led by future brand-name entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. Windows and Macintosh ports are released in Dec. 1993.
- April 4, 1994: Clark and Andreessen leave NCSA and found Mosaic Communications Corp., which then changes its name and flagship product to Netscape. The company gets a Godzilla-style dragon as a mascot, and the development code names their browser "Mozilla," after the creature.
- Oct. 1994-Aug. 1996: Internet providers, computer makers, and geeky friends spread Netscape Navigator's market share greatly, as the browser rolls in first-time features like cookies, frames, and JavaScript support—all with their share of initial controversy.
- Aug. 1996-March 1998: Navigator becomes just a part of the Netscape "Communicator" package with the 3.0 "Gold" release and 4.0, and also fairly crash-prone, bug-addled, and slow. Microsoft, meanwhile, has won over PC vendors with its custom-branded, deeply-embedded Internet Explorer installations, which, by the 5.0 release, is generally faster than Communicator's 4 versions.
Mozilla is born
- Jan-March 1998: Netscape announces it will release its application suite's source code, and forms the Mozilla Organization. It was initially intended as a testing grounds for new features—much like Google's open-source Chromium and end-user Chrome projects of today.
March 1998-Aug. 2001: Netscape misses a 5.0 release entirely and dedicates its engineers to a rebuild using Mozilla's code base for 6.0. Internet Explorer continues to gain market share, and Netscape 6, rushed out in pre-beta shape by corporate parent AOL, doesn't run reliably on anything but the most powerful PCs, due to its heft. IE's market share is approaching 90 percent, and the writing, as they say, is on the wall for Netscape.
- June 5, 2002: The Mozilla project releases a 1.0 version of its browser, well past original deadlines. While criticized for being overly stuffed and slow, the suite is the birthplace of things that later become Mozilla staples: the first implementation of the Gecko layout engine; versions for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Solaris; and an extensible user interface, XUL, that can be customized with add-ons and built out for other web-facing applications.
Sept. 23, 2002: Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross break off from the main Mozilla suite to develop a stand-alone browser, first appearing as Phoenix. Between versions 0.1 and 0.9, it changes names three more times (to Firebird, then Mozilla Firebird, then, finally Firefox), and gets a whole new look. That's due in large part to a branding criticism by Steven Garrity, who then heads up Mozilla's identity team.
- July 15, 2003: AOL no longer wants to manage the Mozilla Organization, so it sets up the Mozilla Foundation, a not-for-profit that gets Mozilla's intellectual property and transition support.
Just prior to Firefox 1.0 arriving, Mozilla's Scott Collins, a veteran of Netscape and evangelist for the Mozilla team, said this to Linux.Ars:
"I have hope that we will be a mainstream browser and that people will use Mozilla. That's the thing I learned to lust after as a programmer. It's not my ability to solve one problem, to plow this field, but the ability to build a plow that every farmer uses. The ability to make something that touches not ten people, not a hundred people, not a thousand people but a hundred million people. I want Mozilla to be there again. IE is a browser with no soul. I want it to be Mozilla because I think that people who care deserve a browser with a soul."
Firefox rising: 1.0 & 1.5
- Nov. 9, 2004: Firefox 1.0 is released. In about four months, WindowsITPro reports a six percent browser share. What's really new and worth noting? First off, tabbed browsing, which, at the time, was fairly unique for a mainstream browser. A password manager, extensions and a site listing approved add-ons and themes, automatic and smooth scrolling, and native support for RSS/Atom feeds. Oh, and the size: 4.5 MB.
- Jan. 22, 2005: What's that French expression about things that change? During the run-up to Lifehacker's initial launch on Jan. 31, 2005, Gina writes a little ode/how-to mashup about Firefox:
If you aren't already using Mozilla's Firefox browser, drop everything immediately and make the switch. We could start listing all the reasons why it's a superior web browser - pop-up blocking, tabs, enhanced security, the plethora of custom extensions - but then we'd melt into a heap of gushy software rapture. And that would be a little creepy. Even for us.
Then again:
Here's some tweaking you can do to make your browsing even faster ... 1.Type "about:config" into the address bar ...
There you have it. Even when we thought Firefox was a heaven-sent gift from the software heavens, we wanted you to rip it open and make it faster. This dual-threaded thought is still running, of course, this very minute.
- Nov. 14, 2005: Firefox 1.5 is released, originally intended as Firefox 1.1. It's a roadmap for how future .5 releases would arrive—with some new features, perhaps, but not as a major retooling. We make our first joke about what "Clear Private Data" might be best used for, while noting the tighter Mac look, better pop-up blocker, automatic updating, and drag-and-drop tab ordering. We didn't exactly dig the unresponsive script dialog, though, and offered our first look at making extensions work with a new version. (Original Firefox 1.5 post)
- March 2005: Somewhere around this time, developer Aaron Boodman releases the first version of the Greasemonkey add-on, allowing for custom bits of "DHTML" called user scripts that, according to CNET, allow for secure Gmail connections, remove ads, auto-insert printable New York Times links, and other neat tweaks. The makers of the Opera browser almost immediately integrate user scripts into their next builds.
- Oct. 2005: Gina details one of the little nerdy perks that makes Firefox indispensable to many serious web geeks: quick keyword searches. Adam later expands on the power of Firefox's bookmarking to jump inside structured web directories and quickly launch bookmarklets with The Art of Keyword Bookmarking.
July 2006: We take a peek at the Firefox 2.0 beta 1, and come back screaming squeeeee (okay, maybe just one of us) at built-in spell checking, an RSS preview page, and the option to re-open recently closed tabs.
Firefox 2
- Oct. 24, 2006: Firefox 2.0 officially drops, with better security, as-you-type search, and a more modern-looking browser "chrome" (or interface styling). One day later, we've already got the master list of
about:configtweaks, many of which still work in modern Firefox browsers.Oct.-Nov. 2006: Internet Explorer 7 was released less than a week before Firefox 2.0, and, in a shock heard 'round the geek world, it wasn't somehow worse than 6—in fact, it had a few notable bragging points. It handles feeds better, it's better with memory, and it's not drastically worse at fighting phishing scams. That said, it's still a web designer's worst nightmare and complied to no standards but Redmond's own.
Firefox 3, 3.5, and beyond
What are your earliest memories of Firefox? How have you worked with, switched from, or switched back to it over the years? We'd love to hear your reminiscences of the browser born from Netscape in the comments.
- Nov. 2007: Firefox releases a beta of what, at the time, seemed like a soon-to-drop 3.0, and Adam grabs it and takes some screenshots. In some ways, it's surprisingly free of revolutionary new features, but it also refines a lot of what was already great about Firefox, including its bookmarking system and extensions.
- May 2008: From the release candidate, we pull out our 10 favorite features of Firefox 3. Chief among them: "insanely improved" performance (yeah, okay, we get a little carried away at major releases).
- June 17, 2008: We honor Firefox 3's release with a history in screenshots, and a power user's guide—along with a whole lot of other coverage.
Sept. 2008: Wait, what's this now? Google is releasing its own browser? But we thought they were Firefox's go-to partner for search, and that all was well, and the heavens had opened to ... ah, well. We devised our first-ever speed tests and found it a worthy race opponent, if (at the time) not quite faster on JavaScript or better with memory. Later on, we'd suggest ways to get Chrome's best features in Firefox.
- Sept. 2008: The first murmurs of new features in "Firefox 3.1" bubble up, with a built-in Private Browsing Mode. There will be many more, but Firefox 3.5 doesn't actually arrive until ...
- June 30, 2009: Firefox 3.5 officially drops, with quite a few new features for a .5 iteration.
July 2009: Design mock-ups for Firefox 3.7 and beyond are released on the Mozilla Wiki, and Firefox fans start dreaming up all the things their browser could do for them, some day in the future.
- Oct. 2009: Firefox holds 24 percent of worldwide browser share, and (finally) surpasses Internet Explorer 6 in usage.
Send an email to Kevin Purdy, the author of this post, at kevin@lifehacker.com.
Five years ago, an open-source browser called Firefox—one that didn't ship with your computer—was available as a 1.0 download. To say it's changed the world's web experience is understatement. Here's a look back at five years of the 'fox.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive: Caricature: The Genius of Miguel Covarrubias
This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for more jaw dropping examples of classic illustration.
Miguel Covarrubias was one of the most famous artists of his day, but chances are you've never heard of him. Caricaturists know his work- Al Hirschfeld studied under Covarrubias and shared a studio with him in 1924. He spoke of Covarrubias' talent in the same breath as Daumier and Hogarth. Ethnologists and archaeologists know the name of Covarrubias as well. His analysis of pre-Columbian art and the culture of Bali led to books on the subject that have become classics. And his reputation as an anthropologist rivalled any of his peers in that field. Illustrator, caricaturist, anthropologist, author and educator... It's high time you knew about Covarrubias too!
At the age of nineteen, Miguel Covarrubias, already a renowned caricaturist in his home country of Mexico, emigrated to New York City. He was an instant sensation, and his illustrations began appearing in New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Fellow Mexican artist, Diego Rivera described his illustrations as "those caustic but implacably good-humored drawings which, fortunately for his personal safety, people have been misled into calling caricatures. In Covarrubias' art there is no vicious cruelty, it is all irony untainted with malice; a humor that is young and clean; a precise and well defined plasticity."Most of the caricatures from Vanity Fair below depict unlikely pairs of public figures. Click on the links to the Wikipedia entries on these people and see why Covarrubias put them together.
MIGUEL COVARRUBIAS CARICATURES
Jim Londos & Herbert Hoover
(Vanity Fair, August 1932)
Senator Smith W. Brookhart & Marlene Dietrich
(Vanity Fair, September 1932)
Al Capone & Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes
(Vanity Fair, October 1932)
Clark Gable & Edward, Prince of Wales
(Vanity Fair, November 1932)
Ex-King Alfonso & James J. Walker
(Vanity Fair, December 1932)
Mrs. Ella Boole & Miss Texas Guinan
(Vanity Fair, January 1933)
Arthur Brisbane & The Sphinx
(Vanity Fair, May 1933)
Emily Post
(Vanity Fair, December 1933)
Admiral Richard E. Byrd
(Vanity Fair, December 1934)
Sally Rand & Martha Graham
(Vanity Fair, December 1934)
Dr. Samuel Johnson & Alexander Woolcott
(Vanity Fair, March 1935)
Auguste Piccard & William Beebe
(Vanity Fair, April 1935)
Covarrubias was much more than just an illustrator and caricaturist though. His books on Bali and Mexico revealed a careful analytical mind with an eye for detail. The following article from an arts magazine from 1948 encompasses the latter part of Covarrubias' career...MIGUEL COVARRUBIAS OF MEXICO CITY
By Henry C. Pitz (January 1948)
Many thanks to the ever-faithful supporter of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, Kent Butterworth for sharing this wonderful material from his own collection with us.If you enjoyed this post, check out... Colliers Magazine Illustrations From the Mid-1930s and the Mid-1940s and also... John Held Jr.'s Flappers, Arthur Szyk's The New Order and Artzybasheff's Neurotica, Machinalia and Diablerie.
Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation ArchiveLabels: rerun
Stumble It!
fifty-ugliest-cars-of-the-past-50-years.html: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance
provided by
More from BusinessWeek.com: • 21 Cars You Can't Drive in the U.S.
Considering how many new cars are rolled out every year, it's no surprise that a few might be just plain homely. There's a chance that certain styles might become fashionable with a dash of retro hip. (Well, maybe not from the 1970s.) But for the most part, the following cars will never be anything but design duds.
Wikimedia/IFCAR
1. Chevrolet El Camino
Introduced: 1959
The front end of a car and the back end of a pickup—convenient but unsightly. The El Camino went through several redesigns, each worse than the one before. This 1982 model seemed to be wearing dental braces, and the chrome accents over its wheel housing only draw the eye to mystifying hub caps.
Wikimedia/MartinHansV2. Citroën Ami
Introduced: 1961
Design: Flaminio BertoniThis car has fenders that drop below the tire line and a top that extends from the back like a porch roof. Add some oddly shaped windows and dot-sized brake lights for a uniquely strange-looking vehicle.
Wikimedia/Peripitus3. Lightburn Zeta
Introduced: 1963
This Australian car was designed by a maker of cement mixers and washing machines, but that might be obvious. There are two grilles, both in a fence-like pattern, with protruding headlights on either side.
Wikimedia/Krokodyl4. Wartburg 353
Introduced: 1965
Can you find one thing you like about this East German car?
Wikimedia/Sven Storbeck5. Volkswagen Thing
Introduced: 1969
This is the design philosophy of the Thing: Take the basics of the Beetle—an engine, powertrain, and seats—and plop them in an unfinished metal box. There's no front grille, the bumper is an afterthought, and nobody bothered to round the fenders.
Wikimedia/CZmarlin6. AMC Gremlin
Introduced: 1970
Design: Richard A. TeagueIntroduced on April Fool's Day, the Gremlin was ugly, but it's had its fans. Still, that doesn't excuse the abruptly angled back end, saucer hubcaps, and aborted rear windows. It also came in some nasty colors, like the brown-copper concoction seen here.
Wikimedia/Mikel Ortega7. Bond Bug
Introduced: 1970
Design: Ogle DesignNo, it has nothing to do with James Bond, and yes, it was legally driven on real roads. The Bug defies car design language with three wheels, a boat-like bottom, and zip windows.
8. Ford Pinto
Introduced: 1970
Design: Robert EidschunThe Pinto doesn't seem so bad—that is, until you remember how sexy Fords from the 1960s were. The design devolved into hexagonal headlight housings, a grille that's only a few inches tall yet wide enough to become the car's focal point, and a rear end that apparently melted from the roof.
Wikimedia/Bull-Doser9. Ford Mustang II
Introduced: 1973
Somehow, Ford transformed the classic first-generation Mustang into this. Gone are the sleek lines, side intakes, and close-to-the-road profile. Instead, the Mustang II looks like many cars of the '70s: bloated, heavy, bland, and forgettable.
Wikimedia/Thomas Doerfer10. Bricklin SV1
Introduced: 1974
This ride has a well-earned reputation for being a complete mechanical clunker—and it looked like one, too. The front end is squared like an awful dress shoe, is wider than the driver's cabin, and rises high before sloping down dramatically, giving it a front-heavy, unstable appearance.
Click here to see the full list of Fifty Ugliest Cars of the Past 50 Years
Monday, November 2, 2009
Adobe engages Apple in passive aggressive warfare with iPhone's Flash message
Adobe engages Apple in passive aggressive warfare with iPhone's Flash message
posted Nov 2nd 2009 at 2:58PM
Adobe's seemingly tried everything in its fight to get Apple to tear down enough development barriers to get Flash ported to the iPhone, culminating in a native compilation option in CS5 that... well, really doesn't solve much of anything. So far, nothing's worked. What's next? Get the masses fired up with some old-fashioned propaganda and let 'em riot down at One Infinite Loop, of course! Visiting Adobe's Flash download page from an iPhone now shows a pretty tersely-worded message informing the user that they're getting short-changed simply by Apple's refusal to budge, so yeah, if you hear an occasional cry of "this is outrageous, I'm writing Apple immediately!" while sitting at an airport gate or a coffee shop, you can safely guess what just happened.[Via Gear Diary]
