Bitspace: It’s Your Music, In the Cloud. Powered by HTML5.

Since I started the “It could be a Mac app” series on MacStories I discovered a lot of new web applications. Some have a cool interface but are unusable, some are ugly and useful, some are stunning in every single part. Indeed, I try to focus on this kind of apps, beautiful online services that combine a great UI with great features. Now, I’ve also been talking a lot about “the cloud”. Well, most everyone in the web community is talking about the cloud, as it’s what we call “the future”. Data is moving to the cloud, applications are moving to the cloud, we are indeed moving our workflows to the cloud.

But apparently, what is keeping people to entirely move to cloud-powered apps is the most obvious reason: the reliability and speed of internet connections. How much time would uploading a 50GB media library require? Hours, or days for many people. That’s why people are still skeptical about “the future”, because they can’t trust their means, and sometimes they don’t even trust the services they’re sending data to. But, this doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t try cloud apps now at small doses. Or, in an ideal scenario - at large doses.

Today I’d like to talk about a web application that it’s slowly changing my way of consuming music. It’s called Bitspace, and I believe it’s what iTunes will probably look like in a matter of a few years.

Read more

SublimeVideo Now Supports Firefox

Link


“SublimeVideo on Firefox has pretty much all the basic features of the WebKit (Safari/Chrome) version, however there’re some secondary features which couldn’t be implemented because of Firefox limitations.

Here are the features that are currently missing:

- Sleek Zoom-in/out transitions when entering/leaving full-window mode;

- Playback speed controls (when in full-window mode);

- Other minor fade-in/out effects to highlight the poster frame and reveal the controls when mouse-hovering over the video.”

Doux Winners Announced

Thanks everyone for the comments on the Doux theme giveaway. Also, I’d like to thank Felix for the 5 licenses he gave to MacStories.

Here are the names of the winners:

Benjamin Metzler

Kevin Stauss

Anchang

Klondike

Daz Coates

You’ll receive the theme in your inbox in a few hours.

Cheers!

Pinta, Simplified Alternative to GIMP

“Pinta is a drawing/editing program modeled after Paint.NET. It’s goal is to provide a simplified alternative to GIMP for casual users. It is currently early in development.”

Using GIMP and think it’s too complex? Now you have yet another alternative.

Still, I wonder what’s the point.

myPhotos, The Photo Collective

myPhotos is not a database. It is not a place where you store photos to. Rather, it allows you to organize the onslaught from the hundreds of pictures that have probably been dumped on your system over its lifetime.

At least, that was its intent.

Read more

Tracks: A Spotlight for iTunes

I’ve got a strange relationship with music, both in my life and on Mac OS X. Personal situations aside, my digital problem is the following: I’ve got a 100GB music library and I can’t find any real good application to manage it. iTunes is somehow slow and unresponsive sometimes (but we all know why), Vlc is too poor and outdated, I don’t like desktop controllers at all. I’ve found a good compromise in Ecoute, which is both a desktop controller and a music player itself, which is pretty great actually.

On the other hand, I could talk about a webapp that is deeply changing the way I listen to my music, but let’s leave it for later this week. So here I am today, talking about this Mac app called “Tracks” which I’ve been using for some days now.

Read more