Last.fm Scrobbling

First of all we added support for Last.fm Scrobbling. With Last.fm you can share your music taste with others and find out about great music you may also like. Setting it up is pretty easy. All you have to do is enable Scrobbling in the Settings and enter your Last.fm username and password. And that’s it. Snowtape will start scrobbling the music you are currently listening to immediately. And if you find a song especially great, shake your iPhone or iPod and hit the “Add” button when Snowtape asks you if you love this song and like to add it to your list of Loved Tracks. Last.fm will create a list of songs you like most. And if you like to share you’re music habits with other Snowtape users, you are always invited to become a member of the “Snowtape Scrobblers” Last.fm group. In this group you can connect with Snowtape pros and beginners and share your thoughts and opinions.

Task Manager Playback Controls

In version 1.2 we added support for the iOS4 task manager playback controls for track playback. This version also adds support for pause and resume of currently running radio streams.

Support for the iPod Sleep Timer

The iPhone app “Clock” has a built-in function to stop iPod playback after a certain period of time. In version 1.3 we added support to Snowtape for that feature. So if you just need a little bit of radio music before you can go to sleep, just create a timer and select “Sleep iPod” in the “When Timer Ends” options.

Snowtape 1.3 is a free update and cost $1.99 to buy. Follow us on Twitter, because we send out promo codes from time to time and always provide you with instant news.

We get a lot of emails from our customers that they really love the application and that they desperately want to see more greeting cards. I am pleased to announce that we came up with 30 new cards – each of them really gorgeous. Our designer, Marcelo is working hard on new card ideas and he is doing a great job, we think. But we‘ve had a better idea to provide an ongoing stream of card templates for you to choose from. We're teaming up with more designers. Each designer we can get on board is making 12 templates which will be available as In App Purchase, each for $0.99. To kick it off we could get „Fernando Albuquerque“ and Caroline and Micah from „A Good Company LLC“ on board. They‘ve been designing incredible artwork for Jubilee. We think you‘re gonna love it! New cards will be added as new designers join the project. Contact us folks!

Additionally we improved the overall performance of the app especially when you‘re dealing with a large contact database. Plus we fixed some minor user interface flaws.

We think that Jubilee is coming together really great and that the new cards will get you a lot of virtual if not real friends as long as you send them birthday greetings!

Jubilee 1.1 is a free update and is $3.99 to buy.

In addition to the higher resolution interface we also doubled the resolution of cover artwork throughout the app. If you don't have an iPhone 4 you can't really begin to image how crisp this new interface looks like on the new display. It's really awesome!

The update to Snowtape Phone 1.3 will be available next week with some additional features, which I don't want to disclose just yet. Stay tuned for more info and now let us stare on the screen posters!

Get iOS 4 and an iPhone 3GS or an iPhone 4

The first thing I like to point out is that to actually use the new multitasking features you need to update your device to iOS 4.0. Also multitasking is not available on older devices. You need to have an iPhone 3GS, a new iPhone 4 or an iPod Touch 3rd generation. The iPhone 3G can have the new iOS 4 as well, but you won’t be able to use the new multitasking features due to memory and performance constraints. We actually tested iOS 4 on an iPhone 3G and can not even advise to update since is awfully slow.

Listening to Radio in the Background

If you meet all the requirements above you should be able to get multitasking running smoothly. Start listening to radio and hit the Home button. Music will continue playing and Snowtape will even continue recording. Hit the Home button twice and you can fast-switch between apps. Do what ever you like to do and come back to Snowtape later to check what songs have been recorded and save them for permanent storage. If a phone call comes in Snowtape will automatically pause radio. If you then like to continue listening you need to switch to Snowtape and hit the continue button on the dialog that has been popped up. Same happens when you hit the remote control of the Fast-App-Switcher or on your iPhone head phones to start iPod playback.

Remote control Playback of Recordings

As you may know, Snowtape lets you define folders with your favorite recordings which can then be played back in a playlist. This now also works in the background. Play back your favorite music while you’re doing Twitter or playing your favorite game. In addition to background playback, Snowtape also let’s you remote control it with the Fast-App-Switcher remote control or with the buttons on you iPhone headset. It works just like the iPod app. You can even pause playback from within the lock screen.

We think that this new version of Snowtape will blow you away and finally makes listening to radio on your iPhone a no-brainer. Snowtape 1.2 is a free update and cost $1.99 to buy.

Follow us on Twitter. We'll send out promo codes over the next days.

01.06.2010: @timdeville
02.06.2010: @applehockey
03.06.2010: @clmdvd
04.06.2010: @The_Swiftman
05.06.2010: @ksc1
06.06.2010: @CJMEDIAKC
07.06.2010: @jfm429
08.06.2010: @soonwai
09.06.2010: @maasmeier
10.06.2010: @land_apfel

Concrats!

I had that idea 2 years ago when the iPhone was still fresh and everybody was constantly looking for new ways to use his/her iPhone. Me, I wanted a simple and elegant way to not constantly forget birthdays of my family and friends. I don’t know why, but I just can’t remember those things. I quickly realized that this kind of app can not be done by one developer alone. You need a very good designer to pull this of. Most of the apps in this category are not very well thought through and the quality of the artwork does not always meet high standards. I didn’t want to create an app with mediocre visual quality, so I abandoned the project and put my code into the archives.

To my surprise my dear friend Marcelo Marfil approached me 2 month ago with his idea of an iPad app for managing birthdays. It took me about 10 minutes to say yes because I instantly realized that this was the opportunity I was looking for. So we started to work on few ideas and quickly had a feature set together that we felt was suitable for a good start.

Jubilee is a cute and fun application to manage birthdays of your contacts and send them lovely designed greeting cards. You can choose among 12 templates, write your best wishes and add your personal signature. And if you’ll like me you’ll love being reminded with Push Notifications.

The app is in English and localized to German, French and Japanese.

I think you’ll gonna love it as much as we do.
Check it out on jubileeapp.com.

More than 2300 Radio Stations

A lot of our customers wanted to listen to their local radio station. Obviously this was a demand we weren‘t able to foresee when we released version 1.0. So we limited the initial version to the most compatible and best radio stations we knew. However we now know that local radio stations are very important when it comes to listening radio at all. So we added all radio stations we currently have in our directory that use MP3 or AAC as their streaming format. Windows Media streams are not available at this time, but we are working on it.

Pimped Radio Directory

In addition to adding more and more radio stations, it was also necessary to give you more flexibility to browse the online directory to better find what you are looking for. So we added country lists, our Top 100 station list and a text search. Of cause not all radio stations are submitting title information, which is needed to automatically cut the recordings. Therefore we had to add an option to manually split a recording. You can do this by tapping on the small scissors icon in the right lower corner. And if you don‘t want to record at all, you can even disable it alltogether.

Manage your Favorites

Also a much requested feature was to mark a radio station as favorite. You can do this by tapping the star icon in the lower right corner of the radio view when listening to a radio station. Favorite radio stations are stored in a category called „Favorite stations“. You can also add your own radio station (assuming it‘s compatible with Snowtape) as a favorite by entering a URL to a stream or to a playlist file.

Update now and please give us a little hug in the App Store review section! More info on the new features here.

In the meantime we are shifting our focus again to the Mac version and releasing a public beta version today. We improved Windows Media playback and the overall responsiveness of the app. If you like to try, you need to enable beta releases inside the app. Here is how.

Please send us feedback about bugs and problems.

Note: SnowRemote 1.0.6 is not compatible anymore. You need to update to version 1.0.7 which is currently in App Store review.

Note: Make sure you backup your database and your original app before trying a beta release. Use at your own risk.