An OSX developer from Spotify’s labs came out with a new third party desktop client for Spotify to show off the power of the libspotify and CocoaLibSpotify API features. The client, called Viva, is only runnable on Mac OSX Lion systems and with those with a Premium Spotify account. It can be downloaded from here, or you can view and build it from source on Github. With it, you get a quick and buggy version of Spotify, but with some notably missing features from the standard version such as a visualizer. To be honest, Viva really didn’t work for me at all. It told me that every normal track wasn’t playable in my area, but as a concept it does point to an early 2000’s Winamp era of customization of features for Spotify.
To build hype with developers, Spotify also recently invited 100 coders from Stockholm to their offices to listen to speakers and learn more about how to build Spotify apps. The event was free to attend, and filled up quickly on Meetup.org. The results seemed mixed, one attendee said, “To little Spotify Apps and to much “How to code JS”. Nice anyway,” while another felt it was a recruiting event. Still, Spotify seems to know that if they can hook into a community of free innovation, there well be a lot more value given to their customers.
