Right then. We've just about recovered from the last iteration, got all of our other jobs back in order, seen the wives and girlfriends for a few days, and now we're back on it.

A couple of things...

First up, much of the feedback that we've received is around the speed that Sleevenotez updates related to when the track you're listening to changes. This is a (very sensible) artefact of the Audioscrobbler protocol (which you can read here if you're that way inclined). The main point in there is that tracks are only scrobbled when they are 50% of the way through, or at 4 minutes, whichever is the sooner. That means that for a 3 minute track it can easily be 2 minutes before Sleevenotez notices that the track has changed, giving the feeling that it is always one track behind.

Luckily version 1.2 of the submissions protocol is in draft right now, and includes provision for a 'currently playing' scrobble at 10 seconds in, which hopefully will sort out the lag once and for all. I can't say how pleased we were to be pointed to this by Paul at SnappRadio - it fair made our week!

Second up, we have finished the iteration planning for iteration 3. This one is all about users interacting more with the application. This iteration of Sleevenotez makes the most of the data collection features of Zythe (the platform Sleevenotez is built on), by providing lots of things to poke at and fiddle with while using the site. This is in reaction to one of the other main pieces of feedback; that, if you were listening to an album by a single artist (rather than radio, compilations or your collection on shuffle) the site became quite static. One of the things we're aiming at is an application that supports the wonderful notion of "Partial Continuous Attention" - hopefully this iteration will take us one step closer.

As always, please keep the feedback coming in. With your help we've found a fair few things that we'd never noticed or thought of (and we love it when you're nice!)

Posted by Andy Theyers at 04:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We've had a quick bug sprint and stabilised a lot of the code, now that we've seen it running in the wild with a few users. Hopefully you'll see less incomplete pages now and a more stable service in general.

Also, a couple of people have reported not receiving their confirmation codes. Amazon's EC2 servers seem to be listed in pretty much every spammer database out there (something we hadn't really thought of) and so many of the early sign ups won't have received their confirmation mails. If that's you, try typing your email address into the forgotten password box on the homepage and you should get sent your code again, through less spam friendly servers. If that still doesn't work mail us at help@sleevenotez.com and we'll try and sort you out.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Woot, or should I say \nn/. Iteration 2 has gone live, and seems to have stayed up all night too. As Andy Baker pointed out we have been remiss in not providing a contact address. We fully intended to do a blog post, but went to the pub instead in celebration. Yes indeed, we know how to live.

Anyhow, for Andy and anyone else who needs help with anything, email help@sleevenotez.com and we’ll get back to you pronto. Andy: I’m looking into your confirmation email issue right now.

Posted by Doug Winter at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We pretty much completed iteration 2 yesterday on schedule. I’ve been working on another project for 2.5 days a week, so we extended this iteration. We could have chosen to scale down our expected stories for the iteration, but I’ve been doing all of registration which is quite a big chunk that needs a whole suite of stories to make a sensible iteration.

All of registration is done now, apart from some low priority admin stuff we are punting to the next iteration. Andy has been working on a number of new data sources too, which look really good. We’ve also fixed a whole load of defects, so the system is much more reliable.

There’s a bunch of UI work to do to polish off the new features ready for a release, which we’ll be doing on Monday, and then we’ll release what we’ve got so far. As Mark said, we’re taking the password protection off again, now that various annoying things have been resolved.

Posted by Doug Winter at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)