Last.fm is a fantastic online service that monitors (scrobbles) the music you play through iTunes, and updates your profile with the latest song information. It then builds on this data by notifying you of trends - who you listen to most, what your favourite genres are etc. and goes a step further to suggest other artists you may like.

Last.fm itself, the website, has just been redesigned and lives up to a very high standard that could draw many similarities to Facebook. The desktop app is also very well designed, keeping the interface simple, only showing what is needed and nothing more. The desktop app also ensures that what is important - the song information - is clearly and prominently displayed.

That's why when the original Last.fm iPhone App was released, it had a lot to live up to. The original was good, but not amazing, with quite a few features missing, and a less than smooth interface.

However, almost all of the faults of the original have now been eliminated with the latest release of Last.fm for iPhone:

• Major improvements to the user interface all around (tap to zoom album art)
• Ability to tag songs
• Personal tag radio
• Calendar based events view
• Common artists when viewing a user profile
• Lots of other usability and back-end updates

Tag Songs

Probably the most requested feature of the original app was the ability to tag songs. You can now tag any song with as many tags as you wish, and are greeted with an instant search that autofills with suggestions for tags. You can also start a new "station" based on any tag you wish. This is brilliant - they have taken user requests seriously, and not just delivered on them, but have exceeded expectations.

Cover Art Zoom

A nice little UI feature has been added on the "Now Playing" screen - the ability to double tap and zoom in or out of the album art. Simple but sweet.

Beautiful Startup Screen

Normally, waiting for an app to start is an arduous task. However, with Last.fm, the start screen is truly attractive - black to dark grey gradient, with Last.fm prominently displayed in the centre in crisp white. There is also a subtle loading animation - the "as" of Last.fm (and AudioScrobbler) winds around to indicate the app is working. First impressions count, and this is probably the most understated attractive loading screen of any app I have used.

Calendar View

A new view for the Events screen is Calendar View. Essentially this is the same as month view in iCal, and it makes perfect sense to put it here. You can now easily see any upcoming events of the selected artist by simply browsing over a calendar view.

I hope you enjoyed this post, and highly recommend you try out Last.fm for iPhone. Best of all, it's free, so what excuse could you possibly have!

You could also read Last.fm's official release post here.

Download Last.fm from the App Store.

Both developers and consumers on the iPhone App Store will be glad to hear some good news coming out of Cupertino today: you can't review an app until you've purchased it.

This is great, especially for apps that have a high price tag (or even any price tag) as the reviews section would often become filled with users complaining and giving low ratings for the app due to its price without ever having used the app whatsoever.

This is a small step, but it's good to see Apple adjusting to the way the app store is used.

Now, all you need to do now Apple is to help out those poor developers that spend months working on apps simply to be turned down at the last hurdle because it competes with your own plans.

The Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Expo is back in London for October 8th-10th at the London ExCel Center and boy, it's going to be one hell of a show!

Speakers include Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Kevin Rose (Digg), Blane Cook (Twitter) plus many more from the likes of Google, Salesforce, AOL, and Mahalo. Also attending (and speaking) are the guys from 280North, creators of 280Slides and Cappuccino that we wrote about a while ago.

We are very excited as we were unable to attend last year's FOWA and will be there on October 10th ready to chat, share, learn, and party!

Kevin and Alex are also going to be there shooting a live diggnation from the main stage at 7:30pm on October 10th where Google will be providing the (alcoholic) refreshments. After which, the wrap party will get started with Facebook and Digg kicking things off. (I've heard that Facebook are going to be sponsoring an open bar.)

The celebrations are going to be epic. We hope to see you all there and look forward to meeting a wealth of interesting people that are changing the web as we know it. There will ofcourse be free wifi for all (probably provided by the Cloud) so you can keep those posts coming even while you're having lunch.

Get your passes for all 3 days of the event over at Carsonified's FOWA site.

See you there!

Our first iPhone App Review is actually a web app, designed to run in Safari on the iPhone. Google Talk for the iPhone is something that everyone should have saved to their home screen, for those frequent occasions when 'MobileChat' fails to function correctly.

Delivered in a very simple, clean, quick to load interface, Google Talk allows you to send and receive instant messages in chat sessions with your contacts just like within Google Talk on the desktop. Moving between multiple open chats is very easy and status updates and contact searching have also been brought onto the iPhone for a very full featured web app.

We use it whenever we're out on the train or at an airport and need to get in touch with the team. Google may have been better off making this into a native app to speed up loading times, and to take advantage of the opportunities provided by Multi Touch. It is almost certain that a native Google Chat app will be released soon, but perhaps they are waiting for their own Android platform to show what they can do before releasing on the iPhone.

Chatting with the iPhone dictionary isn't too much of a nightmare: If you press the send button on the app (as opposed to return), then the dictionary doesn't automatically correct your 'Yo!' into 'To!'

To use Google Talk on your iPhone, just visit www.google.com/talk

We hope you enjoyed the post, and we're intending to bring more helpful reviews and posts soon.

Quite a useful update to the UI of the iPhone Capacity meter in iTunes. Before, Apps showed up as "Other".

Also, in case you hadn't heard, the iPhone 2.1 Update is out, which promises to fix all those annoying little (and large) bugs that have been driving us crazy for a while.

Do you remember earlier this year a web application called 280Slides?

Let's refresh our memory a little bit - 280Slides was a stunning piece of work both on the beautiful UI that felt like a native OS X app, right through to the core that was an entirely new framework that promised to make developing web applications just the same as building desktop ones. Well today that framework has been launched to the public (with a suitably beautiful icon) as open source, and it's called Cappuccino.

There's not much I can say about Cappuccino right now that isn't on their site, other than give my full support for this truly advanced framework. What sets it apart from other javascript frameworks such as MooTools (which we love and use extensively by the way), script.aculo.us, and jquery is that Cappuccino is built specifically for developing full blow web applications, not just sprucing up existing web pages and adding a little dynamism. Cappuccino, in fact, is so far removed from existing ways* of building web applications that they claim you won't need to know very much about web development at all:

"With Cappuccino, you don't need to know HTML. You'll never write a line of CSS. You don't ever have to interact with DOM. We only ask developers to learn one technology, Objective-J, and one set of APIs."

This is a massive step in the right direction for existing desktop application developers (especially those already developing for OS X) as they can relatively easily start building similar applications "for the cloud" and harness the power of the web to push the boundaries of their application design.

We are really looking forward to having a play around with Cappuccino, and we highly recommend you popping over to their site simply to check it out and learn more.

* Sprout Core also takes a similar view to building web applications (rather than adding AJAX to HTML pages), but it's a different framework that still requires you to learn web based languages. Sprout Core was covered extensively (around the same time as 280Slides) when Apple released MobileMe which is built using Sprout Core.

Being in London, this year we haven't been lucky enough to attend the Apple World Wide Developer Conference at Moscone West in San Francisco. We'll be following Twitter along with the rest of the world's Apple fans, but just in case Twitter goes down (not that that's ever happened before... oh wait) we'll be keeping you posted on developments throughout the day.

Follow WWDC in style, updated every 30 seconds: http://wwdc.twistori.com/#apple

Updates

Apple homepage and iPhone pages updated.

Apple Store already back online

iPhone 3G Specs from online Apple Store:

Same camera 2MegaPixels - ouch.
Same screen.
GPS - wooooo.
3G - wooooo.
Price - woooooo from $199 for 8GB.

Read the rest of this entry »

Good work Gernot Poetsch on snapping the first shots of the Moscone West building in San Francisco where the WWDC keynote will take place on Monday.

Every year, these banners leave a few hints as to what will be revealed on the big day, and this year is no exception.

As mentioned in our earlier article "Thoughts on WWDC", the focus on OS X as much as iPhone here seems to suggest we will be seeing something about the next version of Apple's desktop operating system.

Interestingly, this is the first time we have seen Apple marketing their operating system without the term "Mac". Some people have noted this down as possibly meaning OS X could become available on PCs, but I sincerely doubt that. Instead, I see it as Apple strengthening the definition of each of their brands, so that they fall into the following categories:

• Mac: The computer hardware (Desktop and Notebook)
• iPhone: The mobile hardware (Perhaps a range of iPhones, gradually replacing the iPod)
• OS X: The firmware (One operating system that developers can build for using the same tools and services, while making it even easier for consumers to move from iPod > iPhone > Mac)

It is also interesting to see Apple reviving the idea of OS X on the iPhone, as until now it had seemed Apple had been making the firmware update seem more like the "iPhone OS" as opposed to a mobile version of the desktop operating system.

Another interesting little piece of information: Mystery unmarked boxes similar size to iMac boxes overflowing at Quanta shipping facility. If we were there, we would risk having a look.

So the new iPhone is only days away, and there are tons of rumours flying around all over the place. Let's have a look at what's being said, and what could be said at WWDC...

I've been thinking about how the keynote could go, and here's a little idea of how the show could pan out:

< -- Begin thinking like Steve -- >

Intro

iPhone

* A few slides about how iPhone market share has been growing (conveniently ignoring the last few months where it's been falling).

Yes, it's true. Today, we're introducing the new iPhone. And yes, it's 3G.

New iPhone, runs iPhone 2.0 firmware from the box.

Read the rest of this entry »

I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of this guy until today, but I thought it would be important to share just how (for want of a better word) STUPID he appears in this video.

When asked on what Apple needs to do to really improve its chances in the corporate sector, Mr Krakow suggested that Apple should "Bite the bullet, and either get Blackberry or Windows Mobile on the iPhone"

His reasons for Apple doing so were very vague, and mainly focused on people "being happy" with what they currently have. How can an industry ever evolve if they're always happy with what they have?

Gary's comments on "moving to the Apple system" made him sound as if he really didn't have a clue about what he was talking about. Also, on a side note, you don't tend to hear people in the industry calling anything a system these days - it's more "platforms" and "devices". His comments were as if Apple hadn't got ANY plans to bring out a whole host of enterprise features in the coming weeks.

All I can say is, it's hard to believe this isn't a joke.