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Ears in the Cloud

May 28th, 2011 by | No Comments »

So last night I received my invitation for Google Music (beta). In case you haven’t heard about it, Google is launching their own cloud music player that allows you to listen to your MP3 music collection from virtually anywhere you can access the web. So if you’re like me and have an extensive library of music and wish you didn’t have to copy it to every place you wanted to hear it, then you might find this a cool new service.

Google’s Music is similar to Amazon’s Cloud Player which launched a couple of months ago. In fact they’re so similar they’re nearly the same service. Amazon gives you 5GB of free space to upload your music and bumps you up to 20GB if you buy an MP3 album. Google is slightly different in that they allow you to store 20,000 songs in your account. I looked at their help site and didn’t see any news about if you could upgrade that or if they plan to charge in the future. Both services play your music through modern web browsers just fine and aside from some occasional buffer stutter, both seem to do what they promise. Neither service currently has an app for the iPhone but both do for Android users. I have to imagine that this will change in the future and it is possible (although kludgey) to play both Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player via the iPhone web browser.

I have to say I think that could computing is perfect for storing and playing music. I worry about my computer dying and my backup not being recoverable, therefore losing my pictures and music in the process. Having the cloud option is one nice way of not having to worry about losing all my tunes while at the same time being able to use them.

Of course Apple is also rumored to be nearing the debut of their cloud music service but as of this post it’s only a rumor.

So, what are the pros and cons to Google Music?

Pros:

  • Easy to use
  • Comes with some free music
  • Works in most browsers
  • Free (for now)
  • Good amount of storage space

Cons:

  • Can’t share songs
  • Occasional network stutter
  • Needs separate desktop application installed to transfer your music to the cloud
  • No iPhone app

So if you’re into storing and playing music from the cloud, sign up for an invitation to Google Music and in the meantime, use Amazon ;)

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Before/After jQuery Plugin 1.3 Released

May 22nd, 2011 by | 2 Comments »

I’m happy to announce the release of Before/After 1.3!

This new release features:

  • Several new options. You can:
    • Set the starting horizontal position of the draggable divider
    • Set the text for the before/after links
    • Set the cursor style
    • Set the speed of animation when clicking an image
    • Set the speed of animation when clicking a link
    • Set the color of the divider
    • onReady callback function
  • jQuery and jQueryUI draggable are now bundled with the plugin for those that don’t want to, or can’t use, a CDN.
  • Tighter code (6.7 Kb uncompressed, 4.5 Kb compressed).
  • Compatible with jQuery 1.6.1

Notes:

  • The CSS classes for the span tags that wrapped the text links have been changed from “bflinks” to “balinks”.
  • The requirement to have each image nested within a div tag has been removed; however the plugin will still work if you use that structure.
  • The previous version of the plugin took the images and made them background-images within div because of issues with webkit browsers and jQuery at the time. Those issues no longer exist so the original functionality of using the images as-is has been restored.

I’ve created a dedicated page for the plugin at http://www.catchmyfame.com/catchmyfame-jquery-plugins/jquery-beforeafter-plugin/. In the future this page will be updated to contain the latest information for this plugin.

Or if you just can’t wait, download version 1.3 here.

I plan on adding a post in the upcoming days about how you can add a few lines of code to enable a simple “loading, please wait” feature if you’re using the plugin with large images that may not load quickly.

Finally, while this version of the plugin doesn’t have touchscreen support for mobile devices, I do plan on adding that feature in the future. jQuery’s touch library is still in alpha and seems a bit quirky, and other libraries also have their issues. I’d prefer to avoid libraries for such a small amount of functionality so that the size can be kept down, so feel free to post suggestions on how to best accomplish this.

Enjoy!

Posted in JavaScript/jQuery, Usability | 2 Comments »

Updates for Before/After on the Way

May 19th, 2011 by | 4 Comments »

I’ve been working on updating the Before/After plugin and within a couple of days I should be posting a new version. With tighter code and more updates the new version still clocks in at 7k uncompressed. I’ll also be bundling jQuery and the jQueryUI draggable component with this release for those that would prefer to host their own copies instead of pointing to a CDN.

Posted in JavaScript/jQuery | 4 Comments »

Thank You for Using the Before/After Plugin

May 16th, 2011 by | 1 Comment »

I just wanted to thank the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, PBS, Expressen.se, Bild.de, and many more organizations for using the Before/After plugin. Your support helps continue develop of this plugin and other web applications.

Posted in JavaScript/jQuery, Usability | 1 Comment »

Play Angry Birds Online For Free

May 14th, 2011 by | No Comments »

In case  you missed the Google developer conference news this week, one cool item that came out of it was the online version of Angry Birds. Build almost entirely in HTML it’s just like the smartphone version (and free). Check it out at http://chrome.angrybirds.com. Note that it works best in Chrome but can also be played in Firefox.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

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