Sounds fun right? I thought I would start a series about iPhone apps and if I find them useful or not. I’ll review things like the interface and the ease of use as well as the functionality of the app.

Function

Shazam, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a music tagging app. You hold it up to a speaker, it listens and then returns what the song is. It works like magic but isn’t.

Interface

Here’s some screen captures of the interface:

When you first fire up Shazam you get to the Recent Tags screen:

Pretty straight forward. Tap on a tag and get tag details:

From here it’ll search Youtube and iTunes to see if a video or download is available. Tapping on the approate link will launch the corresponding app. You can also do a couple of other things from here: Email/share the tag or attach a photo to the tag. Sharing the tag can be handy.

Tap on the “Tag Now” button and it’ll start listening via the iPhone mic:

After its done listening it’ll show the details or the not found message:

You can also change the listening time:

The longer the listening time supposedly helps with figuring out what song it is. I have mine set to the longest (15 seconds), though I haven’t noticed a difference one way or the other.

Over all the interface is pretty clean and clear to use.

Accuracy

Shazam does a pretty good job of figuring out what song its listening to. Though I’ve tried to get it to recognize some obscure Jazz that I have from the 20’s and 30’s and it couldn’t figure it out. It could figure out some of the more popular music from that era. It also figured out some local bands here from Denver. So they must update themselves pretty quickly. It even is able to pick up low music in crowed bars/restaurants, though not all the time. Of course this all happens within a few seconds. How they manage to do that I beyond me. I had found a PDF from MIT (I think) that described how it could be done in micro-seconds. But alas I can’t seems to find it anymore.

Summary

Overall it’s a great little app. It’s free, which is an added bonus to the functionality it offers. Though I would gladly pay for it. So if you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch go download it. Shazam is a must have!

Update:
I found the PDF I was thinking of yesterday. Its on An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm [PDF]. And it is by someone that works at Shazam Inc. It’s also not from MIT but hosted on Columbia University’s servers.

Some photos around downtown before and after I moved.

I even managed to get out swing dancing.

Since I’ve been here I’ve done a few things. The first thing was checking out the DNC. I didn’t take a lot of photos but I did get a video of this awesome NOLA brass band.

Shortly after I was done at the DNC I noticed someone had tweeted near me that I met at AEA Seattle 2007. His name: Jeremy Sanchez. He and his wife moved here from Oklahoma, just two weeks before I did.

I managed to make it up to the mountains one weekend in September. I got some great photos around Berthoud Pass.

Barack Obama came to town quite a few times. He had a rally down the street from my apartment so I thought I would go out and see what there was to see.

Just yesterday on my walk to the bus stop the sun was setting and I got some great photos. If only I had my real camera…

I’m going to take a look at this from the stance of building and designing websites for people (rather then robots), since that is what Google has always said.

So before I ramble on…

1. Create unique, accurate page titles

   No problem here. It only makes sense to have unique, accurate page titles. Would you want a page title to say “Fish Market” when the page was really about coffee? I didn’t think so. As for the uniqueness of a title make sure you don’t have two pages with the same title. With the page title you are telling your users where they are with a quick glance.

2. Make use of the “description” meta tag

   Well fancy that. Google telling us to use one of the meta tags. I know some people that are going to be a little upset about this one. Google makes it pretty clear how this helps users. They (sometimes) take the description meta tag and use it in the search results. Helpful? Maybe… Though it is another place to give a little bit more information about the page/site.

3. Improve the structure of your URLs

   Google says to make your URLs make sense. That is to make your URLs have human readable words in them so that people can understand where they are. Not much to say here…

4. Make your site easier to navigate

   Hrmm they suggest adding sitemaps and Sitemaps to your site to make it easy. That is one way of doing it, though having a good navigation on all your pages would seem like a better choice for your users. They do start to talk about that a little bit seem to rely on Sitemaps a little too much I think.

5. Offer quality content and services

   Well Duh… “Users know good content when they see it…” I beg to differ. There are some places that users would not know good content if it walked up and slapped them in the face. But they did hit this one right on the head. Good content/services will bring users back.

6. Write better anchor text

   Yup. No more “click here“. But alas people still do it.

7. Use heading tags appropriately

   I think this section should really be about writing good markup. It would go far if Google started saying that good clean HTML meant something to them. Using markup how it was meant to be used should always be done.

8. Optimize your use of images

   Ahh Google I love you. You used “alt” attribute and not “alt” tag. Good for you. Remember kids use your attributes wisely. Not only will they help people who can’t see images figure out what is they but they will also save lives!

9. Make effective use of robots.txt

   Robots.txt is for robots and not users. There’s no other way to put it. Though in a round about way users use Google to to find your site and if you have a directory hidden then the users won’t see it in the search results. Err umm… yea I say we start a standard called humans.txt for use by humans… yea… that’s it.

10. Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links

    Again rel=”nofollow” is for robots. Unless you want to look at the source code of a site most people won’t even know its there. Also in this section they mention using CAPTCHAs for spam… NO! Damnit Google I thought you were better then that. W3C has been saying since 2005 (or longer) that CAPTCHAs are in-accessible. Bad Google bad bad bad…

11. Promote your website in the right ways

    Not much to say here other then: Google can you give us examples of the wrong ways to promote our sites? I mean are there any?

12. Make use of free webmaster tools, Take advantage of web analytics services, Helpful resources for webmasters

    “Oh hey there, I’m Google, I hope you enjoyed this guide of mine. I’m going to sell my products to you under the guise of an SEO guide. I make a lot of products that you should use. So I’m going to put ALL my links at the end of this SEO Guide so that you’ll click on them. YAY!” said Google over enthusiastically.

Well kids that’s pretty much it. I hoped you enjoyed my “review” of Google’s SEO Guide.

Some that relate to web and design:

• istwitterdown.com
• isgraphicdesignart.com
• dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com
• ismakingwebsiteseasy.com
• makemylogobiggercream.com
• totaleclipseofthecroft.info
• isgmaildown.com

Special Characters? Yup. They are so damn special they get their own websites.

• www.raquo.net
• www.laquo.net
• www.rsaquo.net
• www.lsaquo.net

Then we have our political ones:

• isbarackobamamuslim.com
• isbarackobamamuslin.com
• ismccainpresident.com
• ispalinpresident.com
• isobamapresident.com

And strange ones:

• www.thingsididlastnight.com

Helpful ones?

• yesnomaybe.info

For some reason I was inspired to post today. Though the only thing that people have been talking about is the elections.

In some ways it reminds me of this bash.org quote.

I’m also using a fancy new font I found called London Between.

That is all.

Dear Media Temple,

You’re trendy. You’re sleak and sometimes even sexy. And on the rare occasion your support is actually helpful. However for the past 2 weeks your support has sucked ass. Now I don’t mean just a little here and there. I mean big time. I even posted on Get Satisfaction because I wasn’t getting satisfaction with the service I was PAYING for, service that you claim is “Unrivaled”. You want “Unrivaled” support? Go check out USAA or Zappos.com. USAA has gotten some great awards under it’s belt. While Zappos has a rabid fan base of loyal customers. And when I say rabid I really mean it.

Sadly keeping your customers informed or even replying to support requests doesn’t seem to be on the top of your list. You claim that “In many ways you could say our main product is customer support. It’s what we work on the hardest. 90% of our staff is in some way dedicated to this process.” (source) I find this rather hard to believe as I have had a support ticket open since the Oct 15. It is now the 19th. And mind you this isn’t the first incident. I had another ticket open on Oct. 8th and wasn’t closed until the 13th. Quick turn around time there guys.

I’ve hosted with you for over a year now. I always thought you guys were pretty cool. Hosting the An Event Apart after parties. Being pretty cool to hang out with. But really taking 5 days to button up a ticket? That’s just shit. Before I even got a decent reply I had to post on Get Satisfaction. Way to take a pro-active approach to fixing client issues before I had no where else but to the public. I know how PR works. It seems you guys do also, because you were quick to give me 3 months credit on my account. But you pushed me a bit too far and gave me no recourse.

After that was settled, TWO DAYS later I once again had an issue. I hoped that I would get a quick reply seeing as how I was told my experience “is not the norm”. But alas… It appears that shitty service is the norm at Media Temple.

It really makes me wonder what other problems Media Temple has, since their “main product is customer support”.

I’m done with you. I’ve already moved my websites over to a server at Dreamhost.com. It was a pain in my ass to do that. I feel like billing you guys the 20 hours it took to complete. But I’d be happy just to get my money back.

I will never suggest, to anyone who asks about web hosting, that you guys are the way to go. I would though suggest if you want to feel like crap and get crappy customer support, that you guys are the best!

I feel dirty dealing with you,

Andrew Jaswa

Tweet! TWEET! Yes, I’ve gotten myself into twitter way too much lately. And with that I think I’m ready to release my twitter bot.

It’s under the GPL. So feel free to use it for things.

Here it is: Twitter Bot.
And a copy of the GPL v3.

With the help of some friends I’ve compiled a count of words by letter. (Of course this is for US English)
s : 31675 10.856%
c : 25994 8.909%
p : 23936 8.204%
a : 17704 6.068%
m : 17330 5.940%
d : 16463 5.643%
b : 16076 5.510%
r : 15406 5.280%
t : 15127 5.185%
e : 11457 3.927%
h : 11510 3.945%
f : 10441 3.579%
i : 10346 3.546%
g : 9899 3.393%
u : 9272 3.178%
l : 9263 3.175%
o : 9092 3.116%
n : 7445 2.552%
w : 6584 2.257%
v : 4747 1.627%
k : 4484 1.537%
j : 3041 1.042%
z : 1464 0.502%
q : 1446 0.496%
y : 1206 0.413%
x : 355 0.122%


I think what I find interesting is the 3% range. It makes sense when you think about it, but actually seeing it is something else.

I started out with an alphabet much like this:
$alphabet = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";
But after reworking based on the above data I’ve come up with this:
$alphabet = "SSSSSCCCCCPPPPPAAAAAMMMM DDDDBBBBRRRRTTTTEEEHHHFFFIIIGG GUUULLLOOONNWWVVKKJJZQYX";

I started at the bottom and worked my way up from X to S. Each group level got one vote. So Q only gets one letter in my modified alphabet due to the lack of words that start with it. Now T gets four because it has more. I did group every thing above 6% together because I didn’t want S to come up a lot even though there are more words for it.

I tend not to have any thing political or non-techy here. But a friend of mine and designer Jason Wilson made some fun bumper stickers or other stuff. Well he’s got them up for sale over at Cafe Press, go check them out.

My start page for Firefox happens to be iGoogle. Because it holds my gmail, rss feeds and some other fun things. Now I don’t keep myself logged in over the weekend because that’s silly. So what do you think my reaction was when I came across this before logging in?

I followed the link to the help page and Lo! Firefox 3 is NOT supported by iGoogle but Chrome is? hrrmmm Firefox 3 has been out for a bit longer then Chrome. I guess Chrome is Google’s browser but come on. No one really uses it.