November, 2011

Google are likely to launch a new music service on November 16, with speculation that users will be able to listen to and share songs one time for free.  While the main purpose of this service will be to purchase music, it will be interesting to see what Google has in store in terms of integration with Android and Google+.

The launch is being called “These Go To Eleven“, with invitations already sent out to the press event.  Universal Music Group will be well represented at the launch, although Google has not yet worked out deals with Sony Music Entertainment or Warner Music Group.  It is unclear at this stage whether EMI will be present at the launch.


Google has been involved in negotiations with all of the “big four” music labels over the last few months, and it is fair to say that things haven’t been going particularly well.  While most people are keen for another large iTunes-like service for healthy competition, there are still many questions which need to be answered.

One of the biggest issues revolves around integration with Android and Google+, with Google wanting some way to differentiate its services between Android users and the rest of the public.  However, to many peoples surprise, even without support from the big four, Google are going ahead with this launch anyway.

The large record labels are arguing that Google needs them, and most people would have to agree.  However, both Sony and Warner have their own music services under development, and are unlikely to come to the launch party unless they manage to get things their way.

Unicodinator is an anthology of unicode characters that can be used for international projects, icons, or triforce.

Unicodinator contains the numerous alphabets that are used in the world — even ideographic ones which are huge.

As Unicodinator lacks a search engine, the closest you can come to searching, is scrolling to the very bottom (spoiler: a “you win” image appears when you reach it), and searching with ctrl+f.

Phrozn is a static site generator written in PHP.

Phrozn is a PHP alternative to many Ruby/Python static site generators. (For example, Jekyll or Hyde.)

The idea behind this library is simple: you provide content and style, but Phrozn will “freeze” it into a whole.

Phrozn is great for generating simpler pages, and, besides static websites, it can be used in applications a-la GitHub where page generation needs to be safe, fast, and effective.

iPhone 4S users around the world have been complaining about the poor battery life their iPhones are giving. There’s nothing to worry about as the problem does not lie with the hardware, there a big fat bug in iOS 5.x that’s causing this and as it turns out, Apple still hasn’t been able to permanently squash it because many people are still facing battery drain issue on their iPhone 4S, regardless of yesterday’s iOS 5.0.1 firmware update.

Yesterday Apple officially released iOS 5.0.1 firmware update for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Obvious from the changelog in the image posted above, this new firmware update was supposed to fix the bug causing battery drain issue particularly on iPhone 4S as well as for select iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad and iPod touch devices.

While iOS 5.0.1 does bring back multitasking gestures for iPad 1 and better voice recognition for Australian Users, it does not quite fix battery issues being faced by users. Some users have also indicated that their devices started having battery drainage issues after they had installed iOS 5.0.1 firmware update on their devices. It is highly unlikely for something of this sort to happen, though its not entirely impossible.

Previously, when the iPhone 4S battery drain issue got wind, Apple caught hold of it and started working with some end users for finding a fix. Usage data was collected from these users, with their permission of course, in order to find the origin of this bug. As it turns out, Apple has not quite been able to fix this problem in iOS 5.0.1 firmware update, however that does not mean that Apple will not be able to fix it at all. The company has already taken notice of this and has revealed they are working on a fix, in a statement:

The recent iOS software update addressed many of the battery issues that some customers experienced on their iOS 5 devices. We continue to investigate a few remaining issues.

So now there’s a huge possibility that iOS 5.0.2 will be released in the next few weeks because Apple would surely not keep users battling with battery drainage issues. Sources indicate that an iOS 5.0.2 release is possible in the last week of November.

Moment.js is a data parsing, manipulation and formatting library written for Node.js.

The library offers both data formatting for specific regions (fr, de, uk, etc.) as well as relative date/time formatting.

For example, Moment.js can tell the date that will be “18 days from now”.

Moment.js shines in its thought-through structure and numerous functions like leap year detection, et cetera.

validate.js is a dependency-free library for validating forms.

Validate.js is lightweight, weighing a little more than 1kb minified.

The library offers more than 12 rulesets for form validation.

Validate.js also allows customizing both validation rulesets and error/notification messages.