Map application. If you like photos and Flickr, then you gonna love Flickr Wallpaper. It turns your desktop into a live slideshow of great photos from Flickr.

★ Flickr Wallpaper ★

Continuing on our series of best Mac Apps, check below for a list of 10 great apps.

★ 10 Great Mac Apps ★

The Mac App Store is officially open since Jan 6th.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, update your Mac software and the new App Store application will appear in your dock.

There’s already more than 1000 apps on the store . Among which some great games. The Best Games so far.

Good reading about designing for iOS devices. ★

The end of summer is already upon us. Time to wrap up the GSoC 2010.

As you probably know, I set out to write a XMMS2 client for mobile devices in the framework of the Google Summer of Code.

The goal was to use the latest web technologies to build a  web app with a native look-and-feel that could be used to remotely control XMMS2 media player. The application is built using the Sproutcore framework and  I’m happy to announce that I have successfully completed the project.

The new client is called Oritide and offers the following features :

• Now Playing screen
  • play/pause, previous, next command
  • volume control
  • playback position control
  • cover art support
  • now playing songs list with tap support for playing any of them
  • playlist shuffling
• Playlists screen
  • list all non-hidden playlists of the daemon
  • support for playing any song of any playlist at any time
• Media library browsing
  • library browsing by artist > album > songs
  • quick filter for easily finding artist
  • artist’s albums playback support
• Search screen
  • support for finding songs from artist, album or title queries
  • direct playback of any song
• Mobile devices
  • support for touch input
  • automatic artwork sizing
  • support for adding the app to the home screen on iOS devices
  • support for running the application fullscreen on iOS devices

Here’s a demo video of the app running on the iPhone :

Oritide is still in beta testing but is stable enough for everyday use. You can download it here.
Since it is a web application, all you need is a modern browser (with good support for HTML5 specifications) .  It has been successfully tested on iOS devices (iPhone and iPad) as well as Android handsets.

Please give it a spin and test everything you can. Help us improve Oritide to make it a top notch client for XMMS2 and report your findings on our bug tracker : http://oritide.lighthouseapp.com

You can also check out the source code using git : git://git.xmms.se/xmms2/x2web-allad.git/ or view it online at x2web-allad.git

Finally I’d like to thank my mentor, Daniel Svensson, the whole XMMS2 organisation and Google for giving me the opportunity to work on such a fun project. I really hope that through Oritide, more and more people will get to know and appreciate the awesome media player that is XMMS2.

In a previous post, I presented some components that were built from scratch and which formed the foundation of a new client for XMMS2. This client is geared toward handheld devices and is being developed as part of Google Summer of Code 2010.
After a month of hacking I was able to make good progress on the code and we now have a first version of the app ready for testing.

I made a little demo video of the app.

Oritide : XMMS2 mobile client from allad on Vimeo.

Here is quick overview of the features supported at the moment:

• Now Playing screen
  • play/pause, previous, next command
  • volume control
  • playback position control
  • cover art support
  • now playing songs list with tap support for playing any of them
  • playlist shuffling
• Playlists screen
  • list all non-hidden playlists of the daemon
  • support for playing any song of any playlist at any time
• Media library browsing
  • library browsing by artist > album > songs
  • quick filter for easily finding artist
  • artist’s albums playback support
• Search screen
  • support for finding songs from artist, album or title queries
  • direct playback of any song

The new client is called Oritide and is being developed as web application. So if you have a modern browser (with good support for HTML5 specifications) you are good to go.  The client has been successfully tested on iOS devices as well as Android handsets.

You can download the beta application here : oritide-beta

I look forward to getting your feedback.

As part of GSoC 2010 I’ve been working on a new mobile client for XMMS2. It is a web app that can be used to remotely control XMMS2 playback.

This web app consists of two parts. First, a python script which exposes an HTTP server and acts as a bridge to the XMMS2 daemon. Second, the actual web app which is gonna use the Sproutcore framework.

We’ve decided to use the Sproutcore framework to build the web UI because it gives us great flexibility. Sproutcore has a very good rendering layer which can be used to build web equivalent of virtually any widget. Plus Sproutcore, in its latest devolpment version has very good support for touch enabled devices.

Here is a mockup of what we want the interface to look like .

The goal is to use the latest web technologies to design an app with a native look-and-feel. In order to achieve that,  I’ve identified 3 core components that are needed and will be reused throughout the app:

• an iPhone-like tab control
• a iPhone-like list view
• a navigation component that offers push/pop like views management

For the past month I’ve been working on them  and we now have working and functional implementations. There’s a live demo of the tab control and navigation system at the following address : http://cherif.ycsoft.org/static/xmms/en/1b1/

Below are two captures of these components :

Tab Control and navigation bar

List view component

Please note that the list view is not present on the previous demo link. This is due to some development limitations. However you can check out the source for the components using git : git://git.xmms.se/xmms2/x2web-allad.git/ or view it online at x2web-allad.git

These components have been packaged under in a framework called Iweb. (framework is Sproutcore lingo for libraries) and will be later contributed back to the open source Sproutcore project.

Now that we have these, work has started on the actual client web application. Stay tuned for some more updates soon