To be honest, I couldn’t quite decide what to make of it all, and I got the feeling neither did the rest of the audience. On one hand, you had a really interesting concept, well executed, with creativity (seemingly) harnessed as it’s core philosophy. But on the other hand, you had alot of competitors producing work that reflected the rushed, pressurized approach - by being, frankly, crap.

For me it felt a little like the the person with the most efficient production skills won the day, rather than the best designer on both a conceptual and visual level. Unfortunately, that for me, wasn’t what I was really interested, but then I’m not sure what I was really going to get.

Moral of the story is: don’t design stuff in 15 minutes, unless you really can. Nonetheless I recommend any designer or geek to attend a Cut & Paste session, just for the level of mutual geeky design enjoyment.

6 weeks has now passed, and not only has my opinion of the service changed, I’ve found it’s completely replaced iTunes and, to some degree, my iPod. I now spend my days listening to tracks from Spotify, irrelevant whether have them locally. I’ve found it not only gives me easier access to greater artist collections than I ever had but also as a great resource to other, related artists collections. Consequently I’ve found my musical tastes extending further than before, listening to artists that I may never have bothered with, as, quite simply, I would have had to splash out my hard cash for the CD, that I may, or may not, have liked.

Looking back, I think my initial reluctance was the idea of essentially denouncing my ownership of my music. To release that association with the physical copy, that somehow, for me at least, verifies and validates my interest in that artist. That somehow, moving to an online collection, invalidated my previous music collection. Once that barrier had started to crumble, I found myself more and more accepting of the service.

I now even use it instead of my iPod at home. From what was previously my library of music, something I took everywhere. It’s now been reduced to a secondary back-up for when I don’t have a Wi-Fi connection to plug the laptop into.

The next steps for me will be when Spotify break to service away from the desktop app. When they deliver music directly to your iPhone (like LastFm does at the moment), or introduce a channel for WiFi radios, to play you playlist music straight from the library, remotes for music centres that allow remote searching from the hardware (or some crazy idea like that).

Spotify no doubt raises many serious questions about the future of the music industry, in it’s current state. But, I don’t believe it means extinction, just an evolution in the current model to something, potentially, infinitely more beneficial and accommodating to artists.

http://open.spotify.com/user/pauljamescampbell/playlist/0N5UhPUuBFx3MblsauOiEn

Food for thought at least!

The solution however isn’t without it’s own problems - scrollbars often appear on the wrapping DIVs. Particularly if you’re tightly wrapping a selection of links. I.e. a menu bar. A fix came about when a work compadré, Sam Loomes, recently made a brilliantly simple observation, that maybe the fix would work by setting overflow to hidden. God damn, it worked, scrollbars are banished and the clearing still occurs!

So here it is, CSS overflow fix in all it’s, um, glory. With no semantic or layout implications. Enjoy.

.wrapper {
    overflow: hidden;
}

As with pretty much every other major public API, you’ll need to get an access key before you can query against the API. But once you’ve got that all you need to do to get some data back, is make a request against http://api.guardianapis.com/content/search?q={keywords}.

Appears you can request it to return XML, JSON or ATOM formats, so it’s pretty damn flexible too! I look forward to the stream of new apps that’ll be leaping to utilize this. Maybe even a Twitter/Guardian comparative mashup.

Via Ian Tait’s Crackunit