Forca Blog

Those of you who are avid Pandora users have no doubt had all of your hopes and dreams crushed recently. Pandora is now forcing Pandora One down your throat heavily advertising for their paid subscription service Pandora One. While I agree it is a little more than annoying that we Pandora members, who have been listening to the site since it first started up, are now limited to 40 hours a month; however, I can understand that they have their own costs to cover.

In the past you were also able to just go to pandora and listen without an account. Now you have to register and login to listen to music so that they can track your every move limit everyone to 40 hours.

I thought I would beat the system and create another account when I initially ran out of my 40 hours, but no dice. Pandora not only limits your account but also limits each computer.

You will notice a new drop down when you first sign up for Pandora One. One of the cool features of upgrading is the slim “Pandora Mini”. Its basically just takes everything off the web page except for the center area where the music is.

As soon as you get to 30-35 hours you will begin to notice a bar at the top of the screen warning you that you are about to run out of sweet, free listening time. Once you hit 40 hours BOOM. You’re done.

If you want to continue listening you have to pay $0.99 for the next month or $36/year to upgrade to Pandora One.

With Pandora One you also get a slim yet spiffy Pandora desktop application that allows you to listen to Pandora without a need to use your browser at all. This, in and of itself, is really cool. If you have a firefox update, accidentally close your whole browser instead of that one tab or have no reason to have a browser window open you can still listen to your  music uninterrupted. Whenever the next song comes on there is a little overlay that pops up in the top right corner of your screen to let you see the Artist, Song, Album, and Album cover.

You also get high quality streaming audio. Instead of the 128Kbps default you have the option of listening to 192Kbps instead. We tested this feature out on some $10 cheap desktop speakers and also on a higher end setup and on both we could tell a quality difference when switching between the two. It obviously wasn’t as noticeable with the cheaper speakers so if you don’t have a nice audio set up this wouldn’t be a selling point for Pandora One.

When you upgrade you also have the option to apply custom skins to your in-browser Pandora. Which is cool, but again, not a selling point.

Some other perks that are worth the money–if you listen to 40hrs+ of Pandora each month–is that you have unlimited listening and no audio or visual ads. Your idle time out before it asks “are you still there?” is bumped up from 2 hours to 5 hours. As long as you skip a song, rate a song or click on anything else on the Pandora site you won’t timeout and will have uninterrupted music.

Honestly, there aren’t a ton of features available for Pandora One but if you are someone who listens to Pandora often then I say it is worth it. The desktop application is pretty slim but allows you to add new stations, select the one you want to listen to, rate, skip and adjust volume. The real selling point with Pandora One is if you run our of your 40 free hours. All of the other features are nice, but just perks to having the unlimited music and no ads.

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[UPDATE]: Users have been reporting that when using any build of Windows Mobile 6.5 they experience a time out after a few songs. No word as to what exactly is causing this–and we don’t have any other details and haven’t verified–but we have contacted Pandora support to see if they are aware and have started doing any kind of troubleshooting. This is definitely something wrong with WinMo 6.5 specifically since users who experience this problem can move back to 6.1 and the issue is resolved. It would be a smart move by Pandora to look into this and set a goal to get a work around  for their App finished around or before the unknown 6.5 release date. We will update you with any additional info.

This morning we got our invites to the Google Wave Developer Preview so that we could begin to work on some apps for Joomla and WP. Nearly boiling over with excitement I got to my computer where I could get to my email and login. I pulled up firefox and boom. There I was in the Google Wave Developer Preview. After staring at it for a minute I moved my mouse and clicked on one of the open developer waves(threads). BAM. Error, Error, Error.

What can you expect right? It is the developer preview and this early in developement. This is more than acceptable right now. I spoke with some of the other developers and was told I would have better luck in Chrome. After pulling up Wave in Chrome the experience was much more enjoyable.

Currently Wave only supports the following browsers:

You have the option of using IE if you want but our experience with Wave and IE was terrible. Personally I wouldn’t mind if it stayed that way. I have never been a fan of IE and now that Microsoft is openly trying to make advances over google with Bing and now partnering with Yahoo to “create the future of search” I think it would be just fine if Google decided to say “hey, Wave works great in our browser! If you want our users to be able to use your browser then make it work with our program.”

Now on to Wave itself. The default layout when you open Wave has your Navigation menu on the left with Inbox, Trash, By Me, Spam, etc. Below that are your contacts. In the middle area you have a list of any Google waves that you have started or have been invited to by order of most recently commented on in real time. From here you can see which ones have been commented on since you left, how many responses there have been that you haven’t looked at yet, other people that are part of the wave and even see what text people are typing in as they type.

When you clikc on a wave it will open to the right and you can scroll through all of the text that has been entered. You can even see text from everyone else that is commenting at the moment in real time.

One cool part of the interface that makes it very intuitive is the ability to minimize any and all of the windows or move them around. You can even click on the minimize button on the navigation and contact menus. Everything that you minimize will appear at the top of the window. While they are there you can click on one to see a mini view of the wave to check on the updates or you can move it back down to the main window.

Here is something else that caught our attention when we first began using our Wave mail:

With standard gMail accounts you are currently given 7352 MB–and counting! With our Google Wave email account we had 25,600 MB. This could just be a perk to being in the developer preview so don’t get too excited just yet however there probably will be a need for more space when using Wave and so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if all Wave accounts started with 25 GB of space.

We will update when we begin to develop apps.

Like I mentioned in an earlier post about the features of Firefox 3.5 some browsers–Chrome 2.0+ and Firefox 3.5+ to be exact–now have location based services available using the W3C Geolocation API.  If you are using one of these browsers and go to Google Maps you will notice a new little box with a circle inside.

This–theoretically–allows Google Maps to locate your position. Location based services like this have been more or less a fad in the past and none have really caught on save location based cell phone applications.  Only time will tell for this one.

My experience with location based Google Maps has been less than ok. When I clicked the button, told Firefox  to allow Google Maps to access my location–and remember my settings–I was told I was about 60 miles off of where I really was.

Come on location based services! You can do better than that. Its not like I am in the sticks on a poor connection either. I am in a decent sized city on a fiber internet connection and that was the best they could do.

I’m not complaining really. The less “they” can find out about us the longer we can postpone the apocalypse–which is fine by me…

Firefox 3.5 Stable is finally here. What has changed from the betas we have seen? Not much.

Coming from 3.0 to 3.5? Then you will notice considerable differences/improvements such as the ability to drag a tab from one window to the other or to the desktop to open a new window. The new private browsing feature is great as well. Now if you are at school, in the library or another public location you can go to Tools and select Start Private Browsing. You can browse normally. Cookies, etc will still be stored but as soon as you exit private browsing everything will be destroyed.

From the the Mozilla Firefox site:

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

One unmentioned(unimportant?) difference that probably no one would have noticed was the change in icon.

Notice it? The new logo has been smoothed out, the continents are less defined and fox is a little more red…. Ok yes it is a very slight change but I noticed. They tried to pull a fast one over on us. Nice try Firefox. Nice try.

But none of this really matters does it? We just like to upgrade. If every few days they released a new update that was nothing other than an update that changed the version number of the browser we were using we would still be happy wouldn’t we? It is the update that makes us happy not the bug fixes, additional languages and extra themes.

So what are you waiting for? Apply the updates or download Firefox 3.5 now!