Spotify is a great service, enabling you to use a desktop client to listen to the music you want to hear. Although the desktop Spotify client is basic, it’s simple to set up playlists that include every album a band’s made, or to import tracks from playlists made by friends. Depending on your musical requirements, you can use the service to trial albums prior to purchase, or to effectively create a fully personalised radio station that’s far more specific than the somewhat random tracks spat out by the likes of last.fm.

Despite the simplicity of Spotify, there are things a lot of people (including, sadly, many journos) still don’t get.

Free isn’t necessarily a good thing

Getting all the music you want for free is great. Spotify’s audio quality of roughly 160kb/s is reasonable and the majority of listeners won’t notice that it’s inferior to CDs. However, money has to come from somewhere, because Spotify must pay IP owners when tracks are played. Spotify makes money from the free desktop client via infrequent advertising that pops up every few tracks, and many ads encourage you to ‘upgrade’ to the ad-free ‘Premium’ service (which also has higher sound quality).

Rumblings from the rumour mill suggest this isn’t Spotify trying to gouge money from consumers, but that it’s increasingly an utterly essential component of its business model. With advertising being hard to come by in the current financial climate and Spotify’s payments rapidly increasing as the service becomes more popular, premium accounts will soon become vital for the company’s very survival. The problem is in convincing users to pay £9.99 per month when the free service is so compelling.

Spotify’s expansion is hugely tactical

With Spotify’s recent appearance on mobile devices, many people in the USA are questioning why the service is European-only (not realising that the service is actually only available in just six countries—not the whole of Europe). This is in part down to Americans not being used to technology moving in that direction—for example, iTunes and Amazon music download services started in the US and months later ventured into other territories.

The availability of Spotify is down to three things: the company’s origins, licensing issues and the size of the market. Spotify originated in Sweden, hence local knowledge led to it being available in a trio of Scandinavian countries. The other three countries where Spotify is available—the United Kingdom, France and Spain—were almost certainly targeted due to the size of their markets and existing interest in digital downloads. In other words, Spotify went where the money was likely to be.

There’s no doubt that the USA is the next major target. In fact, the company’s survival—or at the very least any further expansion—will likely hinge on it getting a foothold in the US, and while smaller European countries may eventually get the service, I doubt they’re a current priority (with the probable exception of Germany).

The mobile apps are carrots, not extensions of the existing service

Spotify arrived recently for iPhone/iPod touch and Android. Plenty of people are already complaining that the mobile clients work very differently to the desktop client, and are twinned with a premium account. This isn’t accidental, nor should anyone expect this to change any time soon. As already mentioned, Spotify needs revenue, and so the mobile applications are specifically there to drive more users to subscribe, not merely as a mobile extension of the existing service. (That said, Spotify would do well to provide a limited demo or ‘lite’ version, because that would almost certainly encourage more users with Apple and Android handhelds to upgrade.)

Apple didn’t care about Spotify because it’s not competition

The more I learned about Spotify’s plans in the mobile space, the less I thought Apple would reject the app during App Store review. Fundamentally, Spotify isn’t competition for iTunes. Apple’s store is based around a seriously mass-market download model, largely concentrating on impulse-oriented single-track downloads. Spotify is currently a mobile service that is hugely limited, only usable by a tiny fraction of people with Apple devices.

If Apple had rejected the application, I suspect it would have been in ‘accidental’ fashion (like Tweetie, C64 and Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery) and it would have subsequently been rush-approved via expedited review. And even if Spotify goes crazy and releases a free version to mobile (thereby screwing up its revenue model), the app is still effectively a radio (albeit a very personalised one) versus a storefront.

One of the reasons I like Mac OS X on Intel is because it provides the best of all worlds for a web designer. You use a Mac to build and test stuff, get a built-in Apache server, and you can run Windows—in a window.

However, if you want to run multiple websites and also test them in the virtual machine, you have to jump through some hoops. They’re not very difficult hoops, but if you’re not hugely technically minded, it pays to have some advice. So, here’s how I got everything up and running on my new Mac earlier today. Note that I’m using Windows XP and so your mileage may vary for other flavours of Windows.

1. Create folders within ~/Sites and bung your websites in them.
2. Install VirtualHostX. This $19 app saves faffing about with your Mac hosts file, doing the heavy lifting for you. For each site, click ‘Add Host’, type in a domain (such as reverttosaved.site) and define a local path (as in, the relevant folder within ~/Sites).
3. Click ‘Apply Changes’ and VirtualHostX will do its thing. At this point, you should be able to view multiple sites in Mac browsers, using the defined domain names.
4. Open System Preferences, click Sharing and make a note of the IP address under ‘your computer’s website’.
5. Launch VMware Fusion and ensure it uses bridged networking for your VM. (Virtual Machine > Settings > ‘Connect directly to the physical network’.)
6. Go to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and open the hosts file in Notepad.
7. For each domain, type the IP address from step 4, then a space or tab, and then the domain (e.g. 192.000.1.99 www.reverttosaved.site) on its own line. Save the hosts file.
8. Go to Start > Run, type cmd to open a command-line window. Type ipconfig /flushdns to flush the DNS resolver cache.
9. You should now be able to access your domains via browsers in your Windows VM. Note that steps 6 through 8 need repeating for any additions to VirtualHostX, so it’s worth sticking a shortcut to hosts on your Windows desktop.

All this might be obvious to you, in which case, well done, Mr Geeky Pants. For me, it was a little journey of discovery, and so I hope this quickfire tutorial might help you if you’re not used to mucking about with hosts files.

It’s just SO UNFAIR!

Earlier today, Apple took its store down for two hours to add a single product (see How to update your online store, the Apple way for more on that) and, when it returned, large, white cats were everywhere. Yes, Apple had announced that Mac OS X 10.6—Snow Leopard—will start shipping on August 28. And already, Mac users and journos are right behind the company, whining about various things, and so here are three helpful tips.

1. Calling Snow Leopard a ‘service pack’ makes you look stupid

Mac OS X 10.6 has few show-stopping features as far as end-users are concerned—there’s no Quick Look or Spotlight equivalent—but it has plenty to offer. Under the hood, huge chunks of the system have been gutted and rewritten. You’ll get several GB of hard drive space back (great for laptop users), a machine that’ll be faster (meaning this update is like getting a newer Mac for naff-all outlay), Exchange support, and great refinements, such as Dock Exposé.

This is a major upgrade, not a bug-fix, and I suspect only the fact most of the changes are transparent to end users stopped Apple charging full-whack for it.

2. Complaining about the ‘upgrade’ price makes you look stupid

Do you Tiger users really think Apple was going to let you leapfrog Leopard and update to Snow Leopard for £25/$29? If so, you really are crazy. [Update: Wired confirmed Snow Leopard will install right over Tiger, although this possibly breaches the EULA.] And for everyone whining about how Apple’s ‘forcing’ Tiger users to upgrade via a ‘hellishly expensive’ box-set that includes software they don’t need (the £129/$169 Mac Box Set bundles Snow Leopard, iLife and iWork), here’s a tip: buy Leopard instead.

Seriously—it really is that simple. Stop moaning about evil Apple, and nip over to Amazon and grab Leopard (at the time of writing, $93 in the USA and £69 in the UK) along with Snow Leopard, and you’ll be spared the horrors of the Mac Box Set, with all its iLife and iWork goodness, you poor dears.

3. Complaining that you just got a new Mac two days ago and so it’s SO UNFAIR that Apple’s releasing Snow Leopard right now and WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH makes you look stupid

Apple runs Up To Date, giving anyone who grabbed a Mac since June 8 the chance to upgrade for £7.95/$9.95, if they bother to fill in and send an order form within 90 days of buying their Mac. Moan about this and the Mac Box Set and call Snow Leopard a service pack and we hear Steve Jobs himself will come round to your house and punch you in the face—twice if you’re British and rattle on about exchange rate injustices.

This has been a Revert to Saved public service announcement. As you were.

Before this mini-rant, I should point out that I like Slide To Play. It’s one of the few iPod gaming websites that’s got things largely right, and it offers reviews that don’t make me want to claw out my own eyes with a spoon—something of a rarity online these days.

Sometimes, though, a whopper of a clanger slips through the net, and such that it is with the site’s review of Snood. “Who can resist a game filled with disembodied cartoon heads? Certainly not us,” it begins, which we rather liked and had a little chuckle about. And then it all goes horribly wrong at the start of the next paragraph: “Snood has been around for over ten years, and has been available on PC, Mac and Game Boy Advance. A game this good is always in danger of being copied, and Snood has definitely had its share of knockoffs made, including South Park Snood for Mac.” (My emphasis.)

Yes, you did read that right. In a review of Snood, a reviewer said: “A game this good is always in danger of being copied.” I’m sure the Pazuru Boburu (Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move) guys think much the same, what with Snood being a blatant and massive rip-off of Taito’s game. I can only hope the writer was being ironic, but I somehow doubt it.

What this likely shows is how short people’s memories are when it comes to videogames, and also how a younger generation of writers is seemingly unaware of anything that happened before 1995. If I had 2p for every time I’ve read about some iPod shooter being a rip-off of Chillingo’s iDracula, despite iDracula being a straight update to Eugene Jarvis’s Robotron (from 1982), I’d… well, I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d be able to nip over to the garage and buy myself a couple of Double Deckers, and let the chocolately goodness take away the pain.

So there I was at the cinema yesterday, bracing myself for a hateful YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A BABY’S RATTLE AND THEN USE THE RATTLE TO KILL A POLICEMAN AND STEAL HIS CAR AND THEN USE THAT CAR TO RAM-RAID THE TOWER OF LONDON AND STEAL THE CROWN JEWELS advert, offering a typically slimy, inaccurate representation of reality and law, trying to create an analogy with film bootlegging, when, surprisingly, it didn’t happen.

Instead, I got Martin Freeman affably thanking me for coming to the cinema and asking nicely if I’d perhaps let the staff know if someone was ‘camcordering’ the movie, because, really, that’s not a very nice thing to do, is it?

Aside from the idiot copywriter who decided that ‘camcorder’ could be used as a verb (nous camcordon, vous camcordez), this was a pretty good ad, and, in a tip to irony corner, far more persuasive than the braindead YOU WOULDN’T STEAL legalese crap cinemas have been shoving down our throats for the past few years.

So, please take this across to DVD ville, rather than that moron ironmonger, and make it skippable, and then I won’t hate you, media producers.