Music streamers on Rdio for iOS are used to getting novel features quite often — but hey, as they say, the more the merrier, right? Keeping up with that tradition, Rdio announced earlier today it’s introducing a few new tidbits to the application with version 2.2. Most notably, the app will now allow users to quickly find friends and artists via a new feature dubbed — appropriately, no less — Find People. Building up on the search improvements, Rdio’s also added an option to easily discover a record label’s top musicians and albums, which is, in part, made possible by a number of UI enhancements (like a revamped navigation menu) that were also included in this release. All that sound good? Then you shall wait no more; the goods can be found at our source, or you could always download straight from your iOS device.
Filed under: Portable Audio/Video, Internet, Software
Source: App Store
The overall landscape of mobile apps is an interesting one, with most of the top free titles on Apple’s App Store being games or services pushed by massive companies like Twitter (Vine) or Google (Maps). Is there a place for yet another service to pick up steam before a larger network like Facebook re-creates copies its functionality? That’s the interesting future that lies ahead of Polar, the up-and-coming polling app for iOS, that is built for speedy interactions with either complete strangers, or people that you know. You can set up a poll in seconds, and you’ll start getting responses quickly, almost within seconds of submitting it. The company raised $ 1.2M in February to build out its team and expand its functionality as quickly as possible. Two months later, it has released a new version that hopes to increase discoverability of polls, thus increasing interaction. What I find really interesting about Polar is that its founder, Luke Wroblewski, is completely obsessed with data and is willing to discuss most of his learnings since the launch of the app. Not only does this give you insight into what he’s helping to build, but it gives you an idea of the landscape that I mentioned above. Polar is quickly approaching 8M total votes, which is pretty good for just having launched in November of last year. I spent some time chatting with Wroblewski about what he’s doing with his funding, how Polar stacks up against competitors, how the community actually uses the app and the latest update for iOS: TC: Tell us about how you’ve been doing since we talked last, how has the funding been used thus far? Luke Wroblewski: We launched Polar at the end of November and saw lots of growth and activity. So much that the two man team of me and my co-founder couldn’t keep up. So in January we brought on some on contracting help to get things stable. While that let us get back to making product, it also introduced a lot more expenses. So in February we raised a round from a lot of great investors. That’s when we last caught up. Since then we used March to hire a full-time team to focus on building and designing the product. We now have 5 full-time folks on the team. During that month we re-designed and re-built 3 out of the 4 major parts of
Twitter rolled out sweeping updates to all of its mobile properties this week, mostly to support the new Twitter Cards, but unfortunately, those who are using the service on Android aren’t so happy. The app has always been a bit buggy on the Android platform, but the issues that are being reported are more than just a little problematic. Users have experienced not being able to open the “Me” tab which allows you to access your DMs and switch accounts, important parts of the service. I’ve experienced this bug from the second that the update was released, and I’ve heard that Twitter is working on the issue. It’s not affecting all devices, but this tweet search shows it as being pretty widespread. You’re presented with a blank screen and a small spinner, with no information or message that says that the service is having any problems. At first, I thought that I just had a poor connection, but after using the app with Wi-Fi turned on, it became clear that this was a big ol’ bug: Since Twitter has been streamlining all of its apps, and site, it’s a glaring issue when one of the four tabs don’t work. While no timeframe is being offered, and Twitter hasn’t made an official statement on the issue, it’s safe to say that the beautiful redesign that the Android app received is overshadowed by these issues. If you’re having the same issue, you might have to revert to using the mobile version of the site, as I’ve done. Or, you could search for yourself and get to your profile that way. The nice part about Google Play is that as soon as Twitter updates the app with a new build, it will go live for everyone to grab without any submission process like Apple’s. Hurry up, Twitter, people are cheesed off about not being able to get their DMs from cute girls and stuff. [Photo credit: Flickr]
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