The latest news, in The Week Of The LaLa: the company’s long-promised iPhone app, which would bring the bizarre play-a-song-once-for-free-then-pay-10-cents model to mobile, has been submitted to Apple. And assuming they don’t abort it, this is what it’ll look like.
Say what you will about the merits of a pay-per-song streaming music service, but the ability to play just about any song instantly is pretty amazing. And in an actual improvement over the desktop service, songs are apparently cached:
Fortunately the Lala app uses caching to store hundreds of songs from your library, which it has waiting in case your connection dies. Lala wouldn’t say exactly how many songs are saved, but they say that the app uses some intelligence to determine what gets cached
That’d be a killer feature for the app, as well as exactly the kind of thing Apple might throw a shitfit over: it’s two music libraries, see! In any case, prepare for two outcomes here: either this app is coming out in a week or so, or you’re going to be reading a fresh wave of necessary, if totally predictable, App Store approval outrage posts. See you then! [Techcrunch]
Apple loves rejecting apps for having swear words in them, but a database of scantily clad Asian ladies? Approved! Who needs a rhyme or reason when you can be random and inscrutable? [iTunes Link via TechCrunch]
Layar has a new augmented reality app function for iPhone and Android that’s delightfully depressingly topical: It’ll let you see exactly where bailout money went, via recovery.gov, which is pretty sweet since you sort of own all that stuff!
In the words of the creators:
Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you’re trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. If you have an iPhone 3GS or Android device you can install the Layar app for free and then search for “recovery” or “sunlight” within Layar to find this layer. The layer works best near large cities where you are most likely to find recovery contracts.
I can tell you where the recovery didn’t go. It didn’t go to the bike path near my house because that shit is all torn up. Bigger bailouts, I say! [Sunlight Labs via Boing Boing Gadgets]
iPhone app tracking site AppShopper—from Arn of MacRumors—now counts over 100,000 apps approved by Apple. 101,843 apps at this moment, to be precise.
Only about 93,000 have actually hit the App Store so far, but still, it’s pretty incredible. Expect some crowing via press release when they formally hit 100,000 apps in the store. A month ago, Apple hit 2 billion downloads. And it was just about a year ago this mosaic, celebrating a mere 10,000 apps, was created. Wonder what it’s gonna look like a year from now. [App ShopperNextWeb via Twitter]
Swine flu! It’s the panic du jour, far less dangerous than eating poorly cooked chicken or getting in a car, yet apparently infinitely more scary. And now Harvard will take $2 to scare you on your iPhone.
Harvard Medical School has just released HMSMobile Swine Flu Center, a $1.99 app that offers all sorts of stuff that doesn’t quite seem worth $1.99. This includes:
-Videos on how to protect yourself (spoiler: wash your hands)
-A quiz on whether or not you have swine flu (spoiler: you don’t)
-An outbreak tracker to see if the fever has swept through your area
-Advice about survival kits, just in case shit gets really fucking serious
