The Alpha Mac

Today we’ve released the alpha of our iTunes for Mac plug-in via email to a list of interested recipients. It still is quite early and it has a lot of warts. But we’re very excited to get it out as many of you have been asking for it.

If you have the interest–and the courage–to participate on the alpha, please let us know via the email form on our download page and we’ll email out to you the next build. We look forward to your feedback. We’ll quickly get stuff fixed and soon thereafter have something to release to the wide, wide world.

And particular thanks to the Flying Olariu for making this happen.

Les Blogs: Le Web 3

Just wanted to let you all know that i’ll be at Les Blogs next Monday and Tuesday. If you’re at the conference or in Paris and want to meet up, let me know. Also, if you’re interested in hearing more about Qloud, i’ll be giving a short presentation on it at 10:20 on Tuesday in the startup room.

Qloud’s Got New User Inteface and More!

We’ve heard you. We showed up and a number of folks mentioned that we could improve our look. So, we ran home, put on a new outfit and headed back to the party. Hope you like this one better.

If you take a look at the site you see some very noticeable changes. In particular:

• We’ve toned down the colors and graphics. We had a little too much going on before, and we’ve tried to make things simpler.
• The tabs are now below the search box. Before, if you searched on The Kooks you’d see their tracks and then to see the users who are listening to them, you’d have to go back to the top and select users under the people tab. Now, you can jump from tab to tab and see tracks by The Kooks, then users who listen, then other artists, then Channels that have The Kooks in them, and then Tags by them. All in all, this should be more intuitive.
• There are now “new” and “refine” radio buttons under the search box. Every search is defaulted to begin a new search unless you select “refine” or if you choose something from the dropdown area on the left.
• When typing an entry in the search box and we’re crawling through our database, there is now a “loading” message so you know we’re working on finding your query. Previously, it would just wait until there was a response which was confusing.
• There’s a new and cleaner interface for points page, registration page, download page, and invite page. Granted, this blog UI is still stuck with the old UI, but that’s on the books to be updated soon.

We did more than just update the old UI, we also added some new stuff, such as:

• It is now really easy for you to invite users from Facebook, MySpace, or from you mail address book (Gmail, MSN, or Yahoo). All you need to do is provide your credentials and we’ll get the email address and you can fire off invites to your buddies, pals, peeps or whoever. Click on the “invite” link or go here: www.qloud.com/invite
• When you’re looking at the tags on tracks or albums, we now have a cool Tag Photo Viewer which allows you to cruise through all the tags listed on the list. These flickr images are always fascinating and often hysterical to look at. For instance, check out the tags on Jack Johnson, Bob Dylan or Citizen Cope.
• For any track you find on our service, you can now watch the video of it. We’ve worked hard on matching our tracks with the appropriate YouTube video. If there isn’t one, you can provide it. Check it out and let us know what you think.

As always, thanks for your feedback and let us know what you like and dislike about our new latest release.