Berlin startup Aupeo turns your iPad into a personal radio station with a beautiful, lightweight and amazingly fast new app.

For very good reasons, music streaming services have become extremely popular. While you for sure know about Spotify, last.fm and Pandora, chances are, you haven’t heard about Aupeo yet. This is despite the fact that the company’s music discovery services come preinstalled on more than 25 million devices, amongst them Sonos popular wireless home entertainment products.

Aupeo’s catalog comprises more than 900.000 titles, similar to what Pandora offers. Based on algorithms developed at the renowned Fraunhofer Institute, inventors of the MP3 format, Aupeo constantly learns about your music habits and makes discovering new tunes a fantastic experience.

For those frustrated by the limited geographical reach of apps like Pandora, Rdio and Spotify, Aupeo’s service is already available in over 40 countries across the globe.

The Aupeo iPad app truly turns your tablet into a great personal radio station. It by far is the most intuitive and easy way to discover new music on an iPad. Through an extremely smooth user interface with high quality animations everywhere, you pick your genre, fine tune via the so-called ‘mood tuner’, and Aupeo starts building your ‘music DNA’.

The app is fully integrated into the iPad’s music player controls and seamlessly continues to stream your favorite music while it’s running in the background. I soon found myself listening to it all the time, whether I was reading books with the Kindle app, surfing the web or responding to email.

So far, the issue with infinite music access à la Spotify has always been the lack of discovery. Aupeo solves it in the most elegant way we’ve yet seen on an iPad. Besides the algorithm driven compilation, users can also pick from hundreds of music stations, curated by DJs worldwide or simply pick their favorite artists.

Aupeo is a free download from the App Store, supported by ads. The company also offers a premium subscription for US$ 4.95 per month.

This will likely be the last The Week in iOS Development episode before version 5.0 of iOS, Apple’s biggest update since the release of the mobile operating system.

Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference is less than 24 hours away and we are cautious, excited and can hardly wait to see all the new stuff, that Apple has promised us to reveal.

Our own Matthew Panzarino and myself are going to live blog from the event. As of this writing, it’s still not clear, whether Apple might stream Steve’s keynote via their events site.

With everybody eagerly waiting for WWDC announcements, here’s our list of stuff, that hopefully is worth your time to take a look at:

• Sascha Konietzke’s  StorageRoom went out of beta. Claiming to be “Better Content Management for Mobile Applications”, StorageRoom has been in private beta for quite a while. In short, Sascha has created a MongoDB based, fully hosted and extensible solution that provides an out-of-the-box service for creating dynamic mobile applications. From its Web-based UI to its elegantly designed RESTful API, StorageRoom really impressed us. We are actually planning to cover it in a dedicated article later today, so stay tuned.
• Not new, but one of those must-reads for any serious iOS developers: Apple’s Technical Note TN2239. In this comprehensive guide titled “iOS Debugging Magic” Apple’s documentation team summarizes almost everything you need to know about debugging iOS programs. From secret environment variables to callable routines, this Technical Note arms yourself with a great set of tools to tackle memory related and other difficult to catch crashes.
• Marcus Zarra, the guy who brings us Cocoa is my Girlfriend and and excellent book on Cora Data, this week published a rare, personal article titled “Why So Serious?”. Triggered by his involvement during the creation of The Daily, he appeals to developers to treat each others nicely. A virtue which more and more seems to have gotten lost in our highly competitive decade. Jeff LaMarche, another highly respected developer and author of my favorite book to learn iOS programming, picked up on Marcus’ article. I couldn’t possibly have said it better than Jeff: “I think it should serve as a reminder that real people — very often our friends and colleagues — are behind the software and hardware that we express opinions on.”
• My favorite RSS app Reeder has it, the Google Mobile App and you find it in Evernote, too: A nice little status bar overlay that provides hints about the state of the application. Matthias Tretter recreated the effect and provides the fully open sourced MTStatusBarOverlay classes via GitHub. As there has been some confusion whether Apple rejects apps that mess with the status bar, make sure to read the warning at the beginning of the README file!
• Ever found your Xcode 4 becoming painfully slow over time? Here is a possible solution including an Automator workflow to simplify the necessary steps. I haven’t personally tested it, as my installation tends to run just smoothly since day 1 – so use at your own risk. Thanks Craig for the tip.
• Matt Gallagher from Cocoa with Love posted reusable classes for fetching and parsing XML and JSON data via HTTP. As Matt says: “[...] fetching data via HTTP is probably the second most common task that iOS applications perform after displaying a list of things in a table.” Agreed. And that’s why his code along with his fantastic guidance might be of help in one of your next projects.

This concludes it for week 22 in iOS Development. As always, I’d like to encourage you to join the growing and very active iOS Developers Facebook group.

I’m sure, we will have a lot to talk about next week, when WWDC lays behind and we have great new tools at our disposal.

Should you want to tip me off to stuff for next week’s installment, find me as @24z on Twitter.

Many of us are preparing our journey to San Francisco for Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference. It hopefully brings us at least a preview of iOS 5. And iCloud. And so much more.

So it comes as no surprise, that this week in iOS development has been pretty slow.

• Last week I pointed out that from my discussion with peers I learned, that many still struggle with subtle memory management details and the inner workings of at least parts of Objective-C. In iOS 4, Apple introduced a new language construct, called Blocks. Joachim Bengtsson has what I regard as the most comprehensive and clearly written introduction to Blocks. It’s a little bit hard to digest, but I highly recommend giving it a try. Thanks to @lippling for the tip.
• When Tweetie Twitter hit the iPad, the blogosphere was abuzz about its remarkably fresh user interface. Ever wondered how it’s created? Aaron Brethorst explains how to build the Twitter iPad user experience. GitHub hosted source code included!
• Nielsen Norman Group published a 116 long pages report on iPad Apps and Website Usability. The free download is based on “two rounds of usability studies with real users, reporting how they actually used a broad variety of iPad apps as well as websites accessed on the iPad”. I admit, it’s a massive read for those of us, who like to code. But if you happen to be on a plane to San Francisco next week anyway, you might really want to dive into it. Thanks to @jdandrea for this and the one before.
• If you are still with us after heaving read the Nielsen Norman Group’s report, Guy English has a fascinating article in which he revisits a five years old Ars Technica post. It deals with the history of Objective-C, its possible shortcomings and what Apple should do, to further evolve the language into a good direction. You just want his conclusion? Here we go: “I believe that UIKit and AppKit (well, mostly) are well enough abstracted that they can serve their purpose for many more years.”
• This week, one of my customers was complaining that in one of the apps I’ve created, the ringtone mute switch was also killing the media player’s audio when playing back video. Not only is this contrary to how Apple’s own YouTube app behaves, it really tends to confuse users. Unfortunately, it also is the media player’s default behavior! Turns out, the fix is pretty easy. Find my explanation here.
• Many developers use the open source ShareKit to integrate into Facebook, Twitter and other parts of the Social Web. Last week we experienced yet another breaking change in Facebook’s APIs, causing ShareKit to stop working. Apparently, a fix has been submitted to GitHub. I was not able to confirm it myself as of this writing, so if you’ve updated ShareKit and it works – or doesn’t – please let us know in the comments.

That’s it for week 21 in iOS Development.

Should you stumble upon anything great we should cover in next week’s rundown, please tip me over at Twitter (@24z).

Last but not least, for those of you attending WWDC, Mac Indie has The Definitive WWDC’11 Party & Event List.

A couple of hours ago, Facebook announced a fairly heavy breaking change to its Graph API, that has the potential to kill Facebook integration for many websites and mobile apps.

The Graph API has become the primary means for third party sites and services, to access data on Facebook. For example, if you visit http://graph.facebook.com/bomega/feed you get a nice JSON representation of everything our very own Boris has posted to his News Feed.

Under the hood, many apps and Facebook SDKs grab your data by sending these sort of requests to Facebook’s Graph API.

Starting June 3rd, the above demoed easy access will no longer work.

Instead, developers have to add an access token to the call, making it potentially more secure. However, getting an access token requires the two step authentication that you may have seen a number of times when services asked for permission to post on your behalf.

As this severely alters the current interaction flow, chances are, many apps will need an upgrade over the next couple of weeks.

Given the potential impact, it’s a little bit odd to see this as almost a one-liner buried down somewhere on Facebook’s developer site.

The last week has been rather turbulent for iOS developers with Lodsys starting to raise some serious patent questions and threatening to directly go after app developers.

With Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) only two weeks away, here is our weekly list of iOS development reading recommendations.

If we missed anything, please feel free to tell us in the comments!

• Florian Mueller has a great write up about the possible implications of the latest Lodsys activities. It’s a bit lengthy but if you’re a professional in the game, I highly recommend reading it in full. He has also written “Is Apple winning the patent game?” looking more broadly at Apple’s various patent related battlefields.
• Did you migrate to Xcode 4 recently and wondered about all the new keyboard shortcuts? Jesse Collis has posted a great talk on the subject. Together with Stewart Gleadow he ran a presentation at the Melbourne Cocoaheads meeting. Find his slides and video here.
• I don’t know about you, but even after years of Cocoa and iOS programming, I sometimes feel like I have to dig deeper into the Objective-C run-time, trying to understand its inner workings even better. During my years of monitoring various iOS communities, I found that the most frequently asked questions hint at a general lack of understanding how some aspects work behind the scene. As part of his Friday Q&A the amazing Mike Ash has dissected NSZombies. It’s a fascinating read and one, no professional iOS developer should miss.
• Keith Harrison looks into dealing with failure in Objective-C initializers. A great refresher including a hint at a possible memory leak we all might have included inside our current code.
• Ever had to deal with images and color spaces inside your iOS apps? Turns out, converting images from RGB to CYMK is almost easier to do with Cocoa, than in Photoshop. Read about it over at Ole Bergmann’s blog and find the astonishingly short code snippet.
• A little bit older but still worth bookmarking: John Muchow’s brief article about a better way to encode URLs. Apple’s method built into NSString doesn’t handle percent escapes for all characters. Core Foundation to the rescue.

Not so development related, but good in case your friends ask for an Android versus iOS discussion, Lifehacker gives you 10 ways iOS outdoes Android.

Last but not least, if you’re on Facebook and looking for a really active community, check out the iOS Developers group. I have to admit, I helped create it, but please don’t take this as a shameless plug. The currently 245 members are mostly professionals and very responsive.

Looking forward to the next week in iOS development and hope to see you all at WWDC 2011.

Two weeks ago, Sensible Cocoa released version 2.0 of what we consider to be the best third party Table View framework ever. We wanted to give it an exhaustive try before recommending it to you.

Table Views are widely used in iOS development. They are the class behind lists, grouped tables and many data entry forms in all sorts of apps. Unfortunately, building complex Table View hierarchies often turns out to be a tedious, error-prone task.

Tarek Sakr, the lead developer behind the Sensible TableView (STV) framework, set out on a mission to dramatically simplify the way we develop UITableView driven applications. What he has created is easily the most feature complete, comprehensive and well supported secret weapon I’ve seen in this space.

As an example, with STV the grouped table to the right – which is fully editable – takes only five lines of code. Compared to building it “the Apple way”, this might very well save you a couple of hours. If you happen to have more than just a single table in your iOS app, STV can save you weeks.

I hear you say: “But not doing it the Apple way isn’t good!”

Well, you are right. And here is the good thing: The key concept behind STV is to abstract away the many subtleties of Apple’s own table view classes while at the same time being fully compliant with each.

Basically, Sensible TableView handles all of the delegate and data source methods for you. All you have to take care of is a single model and the underlying data objects – with full support for Core Data.

It also comes with UI Object Binding, a concept remarkably absent in the iOS world.

What this means is that with STV you define a data object and the framework automagically derives the entire grouped table view. The only thing left for you to do is to fine-tune individual controls.

And there’s even more:

• Full support for data validation including custom rules described in code.
• Custom table cells, created with Apple’s Interface Builder, can be integrated easily.
• Sensible TableView does not replace any of Apple’s infrastructure. It is perfectly fine to mix UITableView methods with those of STV.
• You get the full source code. No static libraries.
• A great expert community over at Sensible Cocoa is always there to help. Yes, we tested it ourselves!

If you are a pro iOS developer, you should definitely check it out.

The full package is available for US$99. If you use the discount code SCSTV-TNW, you get it for ten dollars less.

Many early adopter Xoom customers are voicing issues with their tablets not offering the popular YouTube app.

Motorola’s Owner Forums and various other sources show that the issue has been reported since the Xoom launched. Today, I ran into it, too.

Watching YouTube videos via the Android 3.0 browser works even without the application.

Motorola and Google have showcased the native YouTube app many times to demo how polished and stylish their new tablet OS really is. With the app not being available, a fun part of the user experience is gone for fresh Xoom users.

Before jumping right into a non-official fix, here is what all Xoom users reporting the problem experience:

• Right after the initial setup, there is no icon for the YouTube app.
• The Google “Books” app icon shows up. Tapping it yields an “Application is not installed.” error.
• In Settings > Applications > Manage applications > All the “Books” app has a size of 0.00B and version 3.0.1-110420. It cannot be uninstalled. The “YouTube” app in the same menu reports an 8.00KB size and version 3.0.15. Uninstall is not available, either.
• Most of the users reporting the problem purchased their Xooms from Costco.

Multiple factory resets do not help, nor does reinstalling YouTube from the Android Market.

In fact, the latter makes things even worse. Turns out, the Android Market is not aware about the full new version of the YouTube app for Android tablets. It compares the version reported by the Xoom with it’s own list of known versions for smartphones and (wrongly!) offers an “update”.

Neither Motorola, nor Google have officially responded, yet.

An unofficial fix – and as always, you do this at your own risk – is as follows:

1. In Settings > Applications turn on Unknown sources.
2. Open Browser on the device and do a Google search for youtube 2.1.6 apk. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to directly link to the file, but it’s pretty easy to find anyway.
3. Download and install the file.
4. Once installed, do not run it!
5. Reboot your Xoom.
6. After reboot, you should see the YouTube icon in Apps > All.
7. A quick check in Settings > Applications > Manage applications > All > YouTube should verify, it’s really version 3.0.15 that came back.

I can confirm, this worked for me.

One more thing: Admittedly, I am a huge Apple fan, mostly using an iPad 2. My professional life forced me to check out the Xoom.

While I’m really surprised with the usability and performance of Honeycomb, it’s these kind of low-level problems, that ruin almost the entire experience for me.

Do you own the Motorola Xoom? Did you run into any of these problems? Let us know in the comments!

Earlier this week we told you about Amplify.

Today, in addition to using Amplify to clip, share and spark conversation around news, thoughts and ideas people find on the web, Amplify announces the immediate availability of its new post-by-email feature.

It complements Amplify’s solution for clipping specific parts of web pages by making it easier for people to share and spark conversation around a wider range of content from anywhere on any device.

If this rings a bell, it should. Posterous has been doing it for some time.

Here’s how it works:

Every user will be given a unique email address they can use to share things on Amplify. Like all content shared on Amplify, anything posted by email can simultaneously be auto-posted to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Tumblr, Blogger, Posterous, WordPress or any other of their many supported services.

Whatever you provide as the email’s subject will become the post’s title. Wana microblog? Simply leave the subject line blank.

The body of your email will become the post’s content. Included photos (either inline or as attachments) are recognized and added to your Amp. Support for video is already on Amplify’s roadmap.

Part of Amplify’s strength is it’s great integration into almost all social media and network service out there, thus vastly supporting viral distribution.

However, the folks at Amplify recognized, that you don’t always want to auto-post a particular post, to all of your connected places. You can simply add “autopost off” in the first line of your email to turn the feature off on a per-post basis.

Going even further, if you want to exclude just specific services, adding “autopost” followed by the specific services you wish to post to does the trick.

So, for example, if you wanted to auto-post a particular post to Twitter, Facebook and WordPress, but not any other services you’ve set up, add

autopost twitter, facebook, wordpress

as the first line of your email and Amplify will take care for the rest.

It doesn’t stop here.

Amplify even handles multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts and adds unique keys should you have set up more than one. You can then auto-post to “Facebook2″ if you want to just share something on your Facebook page as opposed to your Facebook profile.

Once your email has been published, you get an immediate confirmation via email, making sure everything worked fine.

As Amplify becomes a primary way that people spark conversation on the web, it is imperative that users are able to easily post their thoughts, ideas, photos or anything else that’s on their mind from anywhere on any device. The ability to post-by-email helps make this possible.

The feature, which will be available within the next ten minutes or so, will be available via Settings > Post by Email.

We think post-by-email is a breakthrough addition to an already great service. If you’re not yet an Amplify user, wait no more, go check it out.

Amplify might very well become my new number one service for driving conversations.

Back in August 2009, when Facebook acquired FriendFeed, the blogosphere was abuzz. Many technology geeks had been using FriendFeed as a tool to aggregate their social media sources and share with their entourage.

As far as we know, Amplify has not been covered elsewhere, yet.

The primary reason for this: The great team grouped around Amplify’s CEO Eric Goldstein has deliberately chosen to stay beyond the radar for a while and solely focus on product quality. No start-up rallies, no coolest-geek-in-silicon-valley shows.

We think the New York guys made the right decision. Here we are, roughly a year after they started working on the service and what we’ve got is pretty intriguing:

In short, Amplify let’s you clip content from anywhere on the web and start a conversation with a community interested in the topic. While many services already exist, that aggregate whatever you shared elsewhere, Amplify is not an aggregator. In fact it’s the other way around: You start a conversation on Amplify.

And the conversation is really what’s at the heart of the service.

Starting an Amp is a straight-forward experience: Ready-made bookmarklets for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer, Android Smartphones, iPhone and the iPad let you clip, share and add your take on specific parts of articles and blogs you read – as opposed to just creating non-speaking short URLs.

The service doesn’t mix in photo albums or social gaming, just because it’s currently en vogue to do so. It doesn’t limit its users to 140 characters, because an engaging dialog might require more than a few words.

I particularly like, that it doesn’t blindly grab everything I post from my Twitter or Facebook account because frankly, the majority of my tweets were never meant to spark a dialog (that’s maybe, why they’ve once been called status updates). Amplify literally puts me back into control.

Once you’ve created content inside Amplify, the service does a perfect job of distributing it out into many services, should you so wish. Amplify currently integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Ping.fm, Tumblr, Posterous, Plurk, Diigo, Friendfeed, Delicious, Clipmarks.com and just today announced additional support for WordPress and Blogger.

Your personal Newsfeed consolidates all conversations going on within your community. And yes, Amplify supports public and private groups, too. A feature, which makes it a perfect tool for collaborating with your team mates or business peers.

If you really haven’t heard about Amplify before, go check it out now! You needn’t go through complex signup, simply use your existing Twitter or Facebook account to start amplifying your ideas.

If you purchase stuff online, chances are until today you’ve seen thousands of shopping sites, many of them looking indifferent.

Check out HEMA!

Caution: Just visit our link and resist the temptation to click any of the products. Lean back and wait!