xlab.co.uk

Apple to announce streaming iTunes app?

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:09:51 UTC

After much speculation, Apple eventually approved the Spotify music-streaming app for the iPhone - a potential rival to it’s own iTunes music app. More than a week after the announcement, it’s yet to show up in the App Store.

Having tweeted about the delay, Jon Bradford replied with an interesting explanation -

my guess is that on Wednesday apple will announce a streaming subscription version of itunes and release spotify the day after..

An interesting theory and one that adds up. Apple has planned a music event for Wednesday when they’re expected to announce a revamped lineup of iPods, but you can imagine this also being a very apt moment to introduce the world to the new streaming version of iTunes.

It explains why, when most people expected it to get rejected, Apple would approve the Spotify app - because they knew they had something bigger and better in the pipeline.

As well as having a huge user base, the iTunes streaming app would also trump the Spotify app by being able to play audio in the background - a very useful feature on a multi-functional device like the iPhone.

So, is it true? I guess we’ll have to wait until Wednesday to find out.

Twitter Spam

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:59:34 UTC

Earlier on today I tweeted about the Apple Store being down for updates. I received a reply from @neilmcloram speculating (correctly) that it was being updated to include Snow Leopard. Nothing unusual there, but I then received 5 replies from spam accounts containing the same text as @neilmcloram’s tweet. I’ve had 18 of these so far.

It seems some devious spammers have figured out a way to grab a recent tweet from your @replies stream, then automatically send it from multiple spam accounts (if it wasn’t so damn annoying I’d be impressed by their ingenuity).

I hoping the Twitter devs are onto this and find a way to keep the scum at bay - it would seem a shame if this wonderful platform was ruined by spam.

Using PHP to avoid caching of CSS and javascript

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:20:14 UTC

Here’s a handy tip which I’ve been using recently. Often when developing sites you’ll make a change to an external CSS file, then reload the page only to find the change you made isn’t visible (or more likely, you’ve sent the link to the client who emails back saying ‘Still looks the same to me!’). Rather than having to explain caching to your client, there’s some simple PHP code you can use to get around this.

The key to the solution is the filemtime PHP function. Give it the path of a file and it’ll return a timestamp of when the file was last modified. To use in your website, you would embed the following PHP into the of your HTML :

$css_file = 'css/main.css'; if (is_file($css_file)) { ��echo ‘ '; }

This will output something like -

Each time the value of the v variable being passed to the CSS file changes (i.e. when you make a change to the CSS file), the browser will load in a fresh copy.

This method also works well when including external javascript files - you’d simply echo out a