GrooveMobile, a Grooveshark client for Windows Mobile that I like

I have a small (512MB!) SD card for extra storage on my HTC Universal (running Windows Mobile 6.1). Most of that is full with applications and photos. Conclusion: I have no place to put my music collection, which wouldn’t fit in 512MB whatsoever. So, I started to think about streaming music to the phone… the best streaming service I know, that works on my country, is Grooveshark, but simultaneously I knew there was no free, official Grooveshark client for Windows Mobile.

Some Google searches after… I found GrooveFish. GrooveFish was supposed to be a free Grooveshark client for Windows Mobile, the problem was that is it discontinued and really outdated; I downloaded the installer CAB file and installed. But what could one expect, it didn’t work, just hanged when searching for songs.

After another Googling session and some link following, I discover GrooveMobile. GrooveMobile appears to be very similar to GrooveFish, and in fact it is, but the difference is, it occupies some more KBytes of space, and it actually works. By “actually works” I mean:

  • It can successfully search for songs without any hang (provided that your connection is stable and fast)
  • You press a song to the list to add it to the internal playlist of the program
  • It follows the playlist and… ladies and gentlemen, we have sound 🙂
  • Now lets do a quick test that might ruin all this: lets set the Universal to close position (screen facing keyboard) and see if the sound keeps playing…
  • …and yes, it keeps playing with the phone closed! It keeps following playlist and everything. Sweet!

Now you might be wondering, did anyone ask/pay me to write this review? Absolutely not; I found the software, it works well, and I decided to share it with my readers which might have a Windows Mobile phone. Note that the app requires Compact .NET framework 3.5, but unlike many .Net framework apps developed for Windows Mobile, this actually works and doesn’t suck – at least on my device, of course. “Use at your own risk” is another statement that applies in this case 🙂 .

I haven’t tested all the functions of the app, but will do progressively. I’ll keep this post updated. Oh, and don’t forget that this is an application that streams files from the internet, so it consumes a lot of traffic, and we all know 3G data connections aren’t cheap everywhere for everyone 🙂 . Personally, I only use GrooveMobile over WiFi.

GrooveMobile Website

Chrome Web Store

Why do I have the impression that it is starting to be kind of a website-promoting website for the web 2.0?

You see, a bare web service that wouldn’t get otherwise very well known, not very rarely gets hundreds of users once it publishes an app for that service on the Chrome Web Store. Even if the app is nothing more than a link to the website of the web service, it doesn’t matter: as long is the web service is of good quality, it’ll get popular amongst Google Chrome users in a way it would never be as a normal website showing up on Google results.

If these guys doing website optimizations to get more visits aren’t still using the Chrome Web Store as a way to promote websites, they should. At the end, nowadays calling “app” to a website acts as an huge upgrade to that website.

Distinguish between Linux and Windows users and fanbois

Those who say Windows is the best either never tried anything else than Windows or are Windows (or MS) fanbois

Those who say Linux is best for some things and Windows is better for another things have a farily good knowledge and perhaps experience on both systems and moderatedly use each when needed.

Those who say Linux is best and MS and/or Windows is everything of bad that they can invent, are Linux fanbois geeks.

Those who invent defects on Linux (or a distro) which exist no more or are now easily supressed have either never tried Linux, or tried Linux many years ago and had a bad experience.

Those who invent defects on Windows either don’t use Windows for a long time because they have been using Linux for that time.

Someone that doesn’t meet any of the follwing conditions, is a pacific user. :)

Apple and MacOS users are excluded from this post as Apple fanbois are of different matter, something to write on another post.

Now running with WordPress 3.2

This blog was just updated to the version 3.2 of the software that powers it, WordPress. The blog post form the WordPress team regarding this release is on the WordPress official blog.

To sum things up, what this means to my visitors is the end of support for Internet Explorer 6, in order to let WordPress developers and me take advantage of new web technologies.

The admin interface has been refreshed, the support for PHP 4 and older MySQL versions has been removed – nothing that affects this site as I tend to use up-to-date software on my servers.

Do you have a WordPress website? What do you think of the new version 3.2? Comment and discuss!