Apple started shipping their new iPad mini this week. We received ours at the Filter Squad HQ yesterday, and we love it! The iPad mini is a magnificent device. The small form factor is perfect for using Discovr wherever you are, while benefiting from advanced software on the iPad. Explore huge maps of artists to
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Discovr on the iPad mini
How to use the queue in Discovr Music
When you have a map full of new artists to check out in Discovr Music, using the queue is a great way to sample their songs. Here are some hints to help you get the most out of it. While viewing an artists Profile Page, you can preview their music from the iTunes Store. Just
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A note for all creators
Creating is like uncovering something that normal people can’t see. It’s our task to uncover it, to make it real. It’s our task to sweat, and to dream. It’s our task to uncover what we know is there beneath the stone. The people around you — they can’t see it. They’ll shout. They’ll disbelieve. But
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Discovr iOS 6 Adoption Tops 77%, iPhone 5 is 6%
With the release of iOS 6 and iPhone 5 we took the step of dropping iOS 4 support. So far we have had one complaint. Although keeping iOS 4 support wouldn’t have required that much work the main burden was with testing on that range of OS versions and having enough devices to cover all
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Unchain Your Developers
Development is a creative process. Projects can be long and draining, we can hit roadblocks and become run down. As a technical founder of a startup, and having been in many far from ideal jobs in the past, I believe it is my job to make sure developers are looked after. I’ve seen many situations
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How going off the grid will help you get more done.
I’m one of the founders at Filter Squad where we make Discovr for iPhone and iPad. We’ve been lucky enough to get some decent traction so far with around 3 million users. Like everyone else, I often feel overwhelmed with too much information — emails, notifications, blog posts, & more. Some of this information is
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Wellbeing Hacks: 13 tips for being more awesome
What does being more awesome mean in the context of your life? Producing more volume? Producing higher quality output? Retaining more information? Shipping on time? Maybe it’s being generally happy and satisfied with life? Giving more to those around you? Whatever your definition, the universal elixir for more awesome is wellbeing. We talk about wellbeing
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Discovr artist series: Split Seconds on discovering new music
Our new music series asks artists, bands and industry folk a question common to music fans across the ages: how do you discover new music? A few years back, I stumbled upon the Split Seconds playing one of the side stages at Western Australia’s Southbound festival. Drawn in by the super catchy indie-pop beats “Bed
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Now playing: this week’s beats
Here’s a few tunes getting decent rotation with our team at Discovr HQ this week: This is the original composition of Trem das Onze. It’s typical of the ‘samba paulista’ style - a form of samba that came out of the city of São Paulo in Brasil. I first heard this song when I was living in Brasil.
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5 observations about building products vs. consulting
Being the newest member of the Filter Squad team has given me the fantastic opportunity to experience building products after an extended period working in software consultancies. After a couple of months I’ve made a few observations as a product builder in each scenario. Every Hour is Valuable Whether you’re a consultancy or a startup,
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Stubborn code: know when to let go
Stubborn code is a problem most developers are familiar with. It’s the code you write and become stuck with for some reason or another. Code either too painful too remove, or–as funny as it sounds–code you’ve become attached to in some way or another. I want to talk about why it’s important to recognise the
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Every little bit of Apple love helps… a lot!
Having your app featured by Apple is the Holy Grail for app developers. We have been very lucky to have been featured a number of times by Apple, from App Of The Week to a small feature. I’ve been asked a number of times what the impact on sales features have. This week we were
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15 tips for tackling ‘Coders Block’ and being more productive
It’s pretty well documented that coding is a creative endeavour, and like anyone creative, we have times when it flows and other times when we sit staring blankly at the screen. I believe one of the keys to becoming a productive developer is to recognise this and deal with accordingly. These tips are what works
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Apps of our lives: vjay
For some the iPad is a casual consumption device, but for an increasing amount of people it is becoming a serious professional tool. Last year, we got pretty excited about Algoriddim’s innovative audio mixing app, djay, which claimed honours as the 2011 iPad App of the Year in many App Stores around the world. Algorridim
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How we track our app reviews, and why you should too
Reviews and ratings in the AppStore are really important. It’s one way people will judge the quality of your app before they download it, and it’s also a good indication of the average user’s feeling towards your app. We are lucky enough to get some amazing reviews Some not so amazing reviews Some just plain
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How does Music Recommendation work?
Ever heard of Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Last.fm or The Echo Nest? All of these great music companies use recommendation systems to help you find music that might like. If you’re interested in how music recommendations actually work, I’ve started a list of some recent research papers and blog posts about music recommender systems. This is
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Discovr on tour: 3 reasons why we skipped town
What happens on tour, stays on tour. Isn’t that what they say? Not so for Discovr bandcamp! Forget cold showers and roughing it tent style. We had all the coffee, code and cookies that can be legally acquired in the fine state of Western Australia and we’re not afraid who knows it! Last week our
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Apps of our lives: Pocket
Hi readers, my name is Ben West. I manage the database for Discovr Apps and every morning, I get to come to work and spend time scanning through the iOS App Store. With well over 550,000 apps, the iOS App Store is an absolute giant, and I get given the time to try out and
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Why streaming music is important for Australia.
Photo: Lara604 Today is a great day for Australian music. We now have the two best streaming music services live in Australia: Rdio launched back January 2012, and today we have Spotify. I’m a big fan of streaming music and I really believe that this is the future of music listening. Here’s why streaming is
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Music Hacker’s Hall of Fame – Paul Lamere
We’ve just finished Music Hack Day Sydney, and as part of the event we wanted to send a big shout out to those people who really make up the music hacking community. In particular, we wanted to highlight one person that has had a huge impact on the music hacking scene – someone who pushes
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On APIs and versioning
Due to the nature of our products they are very heavily API-based in both producing and consuming data. In the process of working on them I’ve not only gotten the chance to deal with consuming a very large amount of external APIs, of very varying quality and enjoyability, but I’ve also had the chance to
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Triple j unveil API for Music Hack Day Sydney
With thanks to our awesome sponsor, Triple J, competitors at Music Hack Day Sydney will have a unique opportunity access to a huge amount of data around the channel and apis that are presently unseen by the public. This is a BIG DEAL people! Hackers will have one-time access to a range of exclusive data,
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Introducing: Discovr Discovr – discover new discovrs
Due to popular demand we are super excited to announce the launch of our latest app: “Discovr Discovr”. Do you have one of the Discovr apps and want to find another? We have you covered: Double tap a node and, you guessed it, find our more about one of the Discovr apps. We hope you
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Introducing: Discovr People – discover new people on Twitter
We are really excited to announce the latest Discovr app, and this time it’s a little different. There are a lot of great Twitter client apps available, but there aren’t a lot of great ways to find interesting people on Twitter. Our previous apps (Music, Apps & Movies) have all recommended similar things, this time
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Discovr updated for the new iPad, and Apple Store fun
We’re excited to say that we have released updates for all the Discovr apps to make the most of the new iPad’s super–amazing retina display. If you’re anything like us, you spent much of the past weekend holed up with your new retina iPad, lovingly installing, updating and generally marveling at how good everything looks
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5 iOS development influencers to follow on Twitter
As an iPhone and iPad developer who is also a big fan of Twitter I find a lot of very valuable information comes from a few users. Here’s who I recommend you follow: Michael Jurewitz @jury Mac and iOS Application Frameworks, Developer Tools and Performance Evangelist. Follow @jury Matt Gemmell @mattgemmell A Cocoa developer from
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International Women’s Day
It’s International Women’s Day and given we have muchos respect for all our women friends worldwide, wanted to give a shout out in their collective honour. We had a group chat and threw around some names of awesome women that we’ve noticed are doing darn cool stuff in their relevant fields. Check it… Hannah Donovan
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Announcing RocketPants: a tool for developing APIs with Rails
After keeping it as our own internal tool for a while, we’re now releasing a new Ruby Library, RocketPants. RocketPants is a tool to make building APIs faster inside Rails applications. It’s built on top of ActionController so you get most of the tools you’re used to using for free. Out of the box, RocketPants
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Discovr Apps 2.0!
We are excited to have just released Discovr Apps version 2. So what’s new? * Video reviews of apps * Tweets from app developers * Links to developer websites * iOS5 Twitter integration * Twitter handles shared if available * Full screen screenshots (pinch, zoom, pan on iPhone) * Tap and hold on nodes for
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Sydney hackers gon’ hack
We’re seriously excited to announce… Music Hack Day is coming to Australia for 30 hours of unbridled hacking power: Music + Software + Mobile + Hardware + Art + The Interwebs! Music Hack Day (MHD) hits Sydney April 2012 and will be an epic weekend of fun where hackers invent, build and show-off their hacks, just for
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Discovr Music in the top 500 World’s Best Apps (Sunday Times UK)
The Sunday Times (UK) has released their annual two-part guide to the best smartphone, tablet and Mac apps worldwide and we are super pumped to report Discovr Music was among those on the list! Described as “one of the most intriguing ways of finding new music”, Discovr Music helps you find music that you might
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8 monsters attack Discovr in the first 12 months. [Infographic]
It’s our birthday and we’re one year old so here’s a little behind the scenes look at what’s happened over the last 12 months. It’s been quite a busy year – of particular note we’ve had 8 monsters visit Filter Squad HQ. You can see a full size version here.
10 tips for developing native apps for both iOS and OS X
After releasing Discovr Music for OSX a few weeks ago we were pretty impressed with how it went. So for the first time with Discovr Movies we developed the iOS and OS X versions simultaneously. Here are few tips and tricks we picked up along the way. 1. Use Open Source There are heaps of
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Discovr Music for Mac tip – Alfred integration
At Discovr HQ we are all big fans of using Alfred on our Macs: They describe it as: “Alfred is a keyboard-driven productivity application for Mac OS X, helping you launch apps and search your local computer as well as the web with great speed.” So we thought that a neat feature for Discovr Music
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Discovr Music featured by Apple in App Store Rewind 2011!
Discovr Music is featured by Apple as one of the best music apps in their App Store Rewind 2011 feature. We’re really happy to be sitting alongside some of our favorite music apps like Tunein Radio, Djay, Songkick, and Songify. More info here.
Want to use Discovr Music with Spotify or Rdio? Now you can.
We love streaming music services like Rdio and Spotify, and one of the new features in Discovr Music is basic integration with several of the streaming apps like Spotify, Rdio, Mog, and Rhapsody. Note: This doesn’t let you play full length songs inside Discovr. Instead it lets you find music you like in Discovr and
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UX design experiments for a Number 1 mobile app.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we tackle UI & UX design problems in Discovr. One issue that’s been especially tricky to solve is how to explain different gestures and actions in the app. We’ve tried using several different ways of displaying ‘help’ information to solve this problem. Here are our experiments: 1. Static Help
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Discovr Music gets a big update for iOS and Mac OSX.
Discovr Music has just had a big update. We’ve added a heap of new features, improved the performance a lot, and reworked the interface to give you a better experience throughout the whole app. This release also brings the feature set for the iOS and Mac OSX versions into sync. You can grab the app
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Discovr is one of the 10 Top Music Startups of 2011 (Billboard Magazine)
Wooohoo! We’ve just found out that we’ve been included in Billboard Magazine’s list of the 10 Top Music Startups of 2011. The cover story for this week’s Billboard Magazine is the 10 Top Music Startups of 2011, and we’re very honoured to have made the list. Antony Bruno and Glenn Peoples from Billboard have put
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9 books that helped us reach a million downloads.
Some of our favorite startup books. There are very few things that I love more than the chance to learn, and right now we live at an incredible time – there is more knowledge around us than ever before. Learning in itself is great, but more importantly, it provides an environment that is fertile for
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Announcing Discovr Music for Mac OSX
We are excited to announce Discovr Music (the #1 music app for iPhone and iPad) is now available for Mac OSX! Here is a quick video to demonstrate some of the functionality: Check out some screenshots below: Stay tuned for some really big updates coming to Discovr Music very soon.
Launching your iPhone & iPad App With Amazon Web Services
When I wrote about our Amazon rails setup we had a lot of people asking for more info. You asked for it, so here it is, all the answers that I wish I’d known about before we launched. Server Configuration Load Balancer : Elastic Load Balancing Rails App Servers : 4 x EC2 High-CPU Medium
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Marketing Hacks for iOS: How we got 250k downloads in 4 days.
**Important: There is a new updated version of this post. We’ve now had more than 3 million downloads of Discovr and the updated version includes all the extra things that we’ve learned along the way. Read the updated version here** — Old post below: We’ve been incredibly lucky to have such a great run of
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250k downloads of Discovr Apps in the last 4 days.
Just over a month ago we launched our new app Discovr Apps to help you find apps for your iPhone and iPad. Things have gone pretty well and we’re very excited to announce some of our most recent stats: * In the last 4 days alone, Discovr Apps has had more than a quarter of
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Discovr Apps 1.3 Gets A Huge Update
Since Discovr Apps was launched a few weeks ago we’ve had an amazing amount of feedback from our users. People really seem to love it, but there were a few extra things they wanted to see. We’ve listened to what everyone has had to say and we’ve just released a big update with the most
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Discovr gets a new website
What better to do on a Sunday morning than muck around with a little CSS and create a new web design for Discovr? Well, here it is – the new website, (with a little tribute to OSX Lion). If you look really close you might even spot some of the new features coming in Discovr
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Scaling a Rails webservice on AWS/EC2 for a #1 iPhone iPad App
When we were building Discovr Apps we were confident it would do ok, but we had no idea how much traffic it would generate. **Update: we did 250k downloads in 4 days**. We are also a really small development team (1 fulltime, 1 part time), so we needed a system that was: Low maintenance Easy
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Announcing Discovr Apps – discover new iOS apps
There are 400,000 apps are currently available in the App Store, with that many apps in the store, how do you ever find what you want? The answer is that many users find it too hard and simply give up. To solve this problem we are excited to introduce our latest app Discovr Apps. Here
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How long does Apple’s app review process take?
We get asked a lot of questions about Apple’s app review process. One of the most common questions we get is “How long does it take for an app to be reviewed?”. Our answer: “Not as long as you think”. When we first submitted Discovr to Apple for review, we had no idea how long
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Look what’s new in Discovr Music 1.5
We just submitted Discovr Music 1.5 to the App Store with a few great new features, so we thought we’d give you a sneak peak. First off we have a new menu bar at the top of the map screen: From here you can easily share a screenshot of your current music map to Facebook
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Why I like being a part of early stage startups
I spent way too many years of my early career working for mid-size and government organisations. While these jobs offered stable and well paying opportunities, I was never content, I knew there had to be something better. I didn’t want to be someone who was responsible for a small part of a large system, I
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How we got 150k users In 3 days
We have been amazed at the reaction to Discovr, a music discovery app for iPhone and iPad, since it launched earlier this year. We have experimented with lots of different pricing levels and timings but there was still one we hadn’t tried, free. So on May 3rd we set it free for a three day
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