Spotify vs Rdio (Australian Edition) Review.
After several months of trying out both, I have settled on Spotify as my winner of the streaming apps. I have also briefly tried out MOG, which was ok but not to my liking. On the surface the scores make it look like it was a very close battle, and in reality it was… but mainly because Spotify has not been able to replicate their excellent desktop app on the mobile, making the experiance on Spotify feel second rate. This is amplified by the fact that the desktop app is FREE, while the mobile app is $12/month. I think Spotify has their priorities around the wrong way, new features and the best experience should go to those paying. In contrast, the difference between the mobile app and desktop versions on Rdio are minimal, and there are constant updates, 1-2/month meaning that any bugs are normally quickly resolved, and new features constantly added. If Spotify are able to close the gap between the desktop and mobile versions, then they will easily pull away from the competition. But as it stands, there is very little to separate the two mobile apps. It came down to better radio implementation, slightly cheaper price and more logical playlist management, which tipped the scales towards Spotify. But if you only plan on using your mobile and never the desktop, then Rdio could be the better choice.
2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 97,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Thanks to Everyone, I’ve hit +100,000 Visits !
A big thank you to everyone who has visited, commented and given helpful suggestions.
I never expected to hit 10,000 views let along 100,000 !
I have had a great time writing this blog, and I hope to continue with even more great posts next year.
So I hope you all have a merry Xmas, New Year, Holiday season etc
a
Here are a few stats about all the visitors to this site, nearly got every country in the world represented…. totally amazing !
Quartzy – New Free Lab Management Tool
With the (soon to be) death of LabLife, there was no other “FREE” online tool for managing a lab. Thankfully Quartzy has now filled that void.
I have not had a great amount of time yet to test it out, but it does look promising.
My only hope is that it does not go the way of LabLife, get bought out and turned into a (expensive) paid service, just after I spent months setting my lab up on the service.
At the moment that is the only downside that I can see to these online tools. The uncertain future does create anxiety, and its this anxiety that requires these services to be free.
Lab’s are run on shoe string budgets, where every cent counts and time is the most expensive commodity. Investing months/years into an online tool only for it to disappear can cause major issues for the survival of a lab. Asking us to also pay significant amounts each year is often to greater risk and a step to far for most lab managers to take. Lets hope that Quartzy defies the odds and sticks around.
ORCID – Distinguishing you from others with similar names
A new service called ORCID has just been launched, with the lofty goal of trying to help distinguish researchers with the same name from each other.
As a person with a fairly common name this would be fantastic, as it is often frustrating trying to wade thru PubMed trying to find my papers by author name alone.
Most of the big players in Science Publishing are already on board, so it looks like this could be a winning centralised source of info in the not to distant future.
You can register here: https://orcid.org/register
Nikon MicrocopyU – Amazing Microscope Videos and Images
Nikon MicrocopyU is an amazing source of information about all things microscopy.
And the best bit is that they have lots of great videos which you can view on line or download. Some of the best Mitotic ones can be found here [Link]
2012 Nikon Small World Winners Announced !
The winners for the 2012 Nikon Small World Competition are out, and even if your not a biologist, the images are amazingly beautiful and worth checking out [Link]
Here are a few of my Favourites
