South by Southwest, or SXSW, is a set of festivals and conferences for film, music, and technology (’interactive’) held in Austin, Texas. While the music portion is likely the most famous, SXSW Interactive (SXSWi) is also quite large, and gaining steam. Perhaps most famously, Twitter first gained traction on the web during SxSW 2007. Thousands of designers, developers, and technologists come to SXSWi.

This year, there’s an iPhone application for SXSW called my.SXSW.

To put it delicately, the app has some issues.

Schedule Filtering

When you first open the app, you’ll likely want to look at the schedule so you can mark off what you plan to attend. If you know the name of a session, you can just enter it into the search field. For instance, you may wish to see “Marketing Strategies for Social Wait Now I’m Lost”. You don’t remember the exact name though, so you type in ’strategies’:

“Oh jeez”, you realize, “it’s a first-word filter?” Indeed it is. That’s not search, and it’s not very useful.

Radio Button

While looking at an event such as “Online Advertising: Losing the Race to the Bottom”, you can indicate you’re planning to attend, so it will be added to your own customized schedule. But…how?

The initial screen, before you’ve added the session

You might stare at this for a good 30 seconds, because you thought it was still loading. Nope! That single radio button? That’s what you need to tap.

The screen after you’ve tapped ‘No’

Are you going? If yes, tap ‘No’.

Time Zones

Ok, you finally found your sessions and added them to your schedule, but when are they? You know you’re getting in Friday afternoon around 4, and the first session you want to see, Battledecks 2010, is right around then. Hey, there it is, and it doesn’t start until 4:30 – perfect, you can just make that!

Well, no, not really. You see, when you opened the application, you were in Boston and the Eastern time zone. SXSW, however, is in Austin and the Central time zone, an hour behind. So, once you get to Austin, you’ll learn that the session was actually at 3:30 PM local time.

Yes, the application shifted the times for your current time zone. This is likely an artifact of never testing outside of Central time. Nevertheless, it’s still incredibly wrong and actively harmful.

Messaging

“Hey,” you think, “I had to make some crazy account with ‘Dub’ just to use this app. I should see if I can tell folks I won’t be able to make Battledecks. I’ll just go to that messaging area”:

“Oh.”

I first saw this before the show, so I thought the issue was that I hadn’t yet checked in. After I picked up my badge, I tried again, and no dice. Apparently, messaging simply doesn’t work, period.

Conclusion

One lesson here is that a simple but well-done web app like SitBy.us can be vastly superior to a full-fledged but terrible iPhone application. SitBy.Us provides everything you need, and nothing you don’t, and it even works with your Twitter account, instead of requiring yet another account. I can only hope SitBy.Us is used at many more conferences in the future.

Another lesson is that if you’re going to make an application for thousands of designers and developers, it probably shouldn’t suck.

There are many more issues, from the fact that it can’t seem to keep a profile picture to the schedule not auto-scrolling down or hiding past events to the updates downloading every launch, but you’ve seen enough. Let’s just log out.

Of for the love o-Well, at least they understood just how emphatic the “Yes” button needs to be.

In addition to appearing in videos, we also spoke to several other sites while at Macworld.

Michael Rose from The Unofficial Apple Weblog stopped by. We talked about some of the great improvements in Radioshift 1.5, as well as what’s new with Airfoil. Adam Christianson from The MacCast also stopped by and did an interview. That interview can be heard right on The MacCast’s site.

As I did in our first post of Macworld interviews, I’ll again link to Macworld’s site for free Macworld 2011 registration. As reported by TidBITS, The Mac Observer, and many other sites, 2010 was a great show. Be at Macworld in 2011!

We’re back from Macworld 2010, and it was a resounding success! Of course, being at Macworld put us in front of plenty of media types. If you missed us at the show, you may be interested in some links. Today we’ve got several short video links.

First up, I did two interviews with MacBreak, with my friends Andy Ihnatko and Merlin Mann. Andy and I discussed Radioshift 1.5, which we were featuring at our booth. Hear all about it, then check out Radioshift. Merlin and I had a goofier overview of all Rogue Amoeba does.

I also spoke with Ryan from The Digital Lifestyle, discussing Airfoil and Radioshift, as well as the iPad and what it means for us. You can see that video here.

Finally, Chuck Joiner from MacVoices stopped by, and we too discussed Radioshift (it’s sort of been our marketing focus).

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t point you to a link for free Macworld 2011 registration. 2010 was a great show, and 2011 should grow and mature, in the post-Apple era. 2010 made it clear that Macworld still has tremendous value – you should be there in 2011.

Recently, we received a letter here at Rogue Amoeba HQ from a very satisfied customer:

Dear Paul, I have been using your Radioshift software for quite some time now, and recently purchased Fission in order to edit some of the audio I have stored in Radioshift. I wanted to write to say a heartfelt thank you for both products.

I’ve been using software packages for over two decades, but rarely have I come across anything that is so brilliantly designed and so pleasurable to use. The love and attention to detail that has gone into Radioshift in particular, is clear for anyone to see, and the speed and usability of Fission is a work of pure genius.

I use the two packages for recording the plays from BBC Radio 4. They go out in the middle of the afternoon here in the UK, which is when I’m dashing in and out of meetings, etc. Using Radioshift I can grab them when they are broadcast, and the use Fission to top-and-tail the audio, which takes less than a minute, and then sync them straight to my Blackberry via iTunes. So easy!

I just spent a week on business over in Egypt. On the flight over I caught up on several business recordings and each night I was there I enjoyed one of the radio plays I’d previously recorded. All of that was down to the brilliance of your two packages. They kept me informed and entertained.

So, please pass on my thanks and appreciation to your colleagues and tell them to keep up the great work. Sincerely, Paul Smithson

Though this was addressed to me, the whole team of course deserves credit for our work. Everyone at Rogue Amoeba contributes to our products, and we all enjoy hearing about how our customers use our products. As such, we make sure to share all manner of feedback we receive throughout the company.

We’re always looking to hear more from our customers, both praise and problems. Our contact form is geared towards support, but that’s not all you can email us about.

If you have a feature request, a problem you’re looking to solve with our software, or just want to tell us what you like and what you hate, please, let us know! We listen to everything, and that feedback helps shape our future products. So step right up, and don’t be shy!

Macworld 2010

Do it in person – come visit Rogue Amoeba at Macworld!

The recent release of Pulsar 1.5.6 added support for XM Radio’s new Canadian “XM online+” service. While Canadian XM users previously used the normal “XM Online Radio” service, XM/Canada appears to have gone out on their own and created a custom player.

When this new XM online+ first appeared, back in December, we were rather alarmed by it. Previous SIRIUS and XM players were mostly HTML/JavaScript-based, but this new service is entirely Flash-based. Concerns about iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad support aside, this meant our typical methods of web scraping would not work. We needed an entirely new approach to get it working in Pulsar.

Upon further investigation, we saw that the site was using Adobe’s RPC system known as Action Message Format (AMF) for transferring data (such as station info, track titles, and more) between the Flash client and XM’s servers. This was discouraging as well. Rather than having easy access to data in simple plain text or JSON, getting it out of AMF would entail spending weeks implementing and debugging an AMF decoder/encoder in Objective-C.

Two things came to our aide though. The first is that although Pulsar has a user interface implemented in Cocoa/Objective-C, the backend that talks to SIRIUS and XM’s servers is implemented entirely in Python. The second is a lovely little Python library called PyAMF.

As you might gather from the name, PyAMF implements full support for Action Message Format in Python, including RPC. And thus getting the necessary data from XM online+, a task we thought would take us weeks to do, was up and running in under a day. Adding complete support for XM Online+ took us under a week in total, from start to finish.

We’d like to give our thanks to the PyAMF team for making their wonderful little library available. We’ve made a small donation, of 0×100 hex bucks (that’s $256 USD) to PyAMF, and we’d like to publicize them as well. For anyone that ever runs into an AMF problem like ours, we can say look no further than PyAMF.