This is a review for NowPlaying by Nirmit Kavaiya.
[Disclaimer: Nirmit is one of the writers for WpSauce]
NowPlaying is an excellent app for tweeting the current song you are listening to. The next version that is coming soon can also publish to your Facebook wall.
If you have been living under a rock or on top of the Himalayas, there is a hashtag on twitter called #NowPlaying, where people broadcast what song they are currently listening to. This app for windows phone, NowPlaying, appears in the “marquee” section of the Music + Videos hub and automates this process. When clicked, it shows the tweet it is about to send (“Start Me Up (2009 remastered) by The Rolling Stones #NowPlaying”). With one more click, you can send out the tweet to all your followers. It’s clean and simple, and it works.
Before the app can tweet, it needs to set up an authorization with your twitter account. The authorization workflow is also simple, but it could use a sentence or two of explanation. It will send you to Internet Explorer to perform the authentication, and you will need to copy-paste the authentication code. It is the same workflow as the popular and clean “Rowi” twitter app. I wonder if we, as a set of WP7 devs, couldn’t come up with a simpler workflow for this. (A hosted IE control, with automatically pulling the auth code, maybe?)
I was given an opportunity to test the next update of this app, and includes some bug fixes. For example, if the resulting tweet was too long, the edit button first required you to pick a different tweet format, whereas I would have preferred to edit it myself. (I had to use TouchStudio to find a song name long enough for this scenario to trigger. Don’t look at me like that, I was curious.) These issues have been fixed in the new version.
The next version of NowPlaying also supports Facebook integration and instant-tweet. I tried out Facebook integration, and it worked pretty well. A single button published to both my twitter and Facebook pages, and the post had the default permissions.
There are a few things that could be improved in the app. For example, if the tweet length is between 132 and 140 characters, #NowPlaying could be shortened to #NP. When both twitter and Facebook enabled, there could be two buttons --- one for publishing to twitter, one for fb (since fb is a low update medium for some people). But this app does one thing and does it well.
If you are someone who broadcasts what song you’re listening to, then I highly recommend NowPlaying.
Download NowPlaying from Zune Marketplace here, or visit the NowPlaying website.
