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There are some of us just love music – we couldn’t do without it. I’d definitely count myself in as one of the music crazy group; in fact, I’m listening to music as I’m writing this post, using my favorite music streaming service, Grooveshark.

Grooveshark is one of the most popular online music search and streaming services, and it has a beautiful web app and extensive catalog of music. The team behind Grooveshark recently updated its interface with a bunch of cool new features, and today I’ll show you the changes. Continue reading to find out what’s better, what’s not, and what should be worked on!

The Main Interface

The new frontpage of Grooveshark, the search section, is much more minimalist. The left sidebar has been removed, leaving your queue of songs hidden at the bottom, links to different sections of Grooveshark at the top, and the giant search entry box in the middle. It could be turned back on in the settings page, but the interface looks much nicer without it. Putting attention on the search box is a really good idea: you can immediately type in any song you want to find, hit enter, and bam, you got a list of all matches. Also, more focus is given to the beautiful theme backgrounds – there are a variety, some being simple and others being complicated artistic patterns.

The Queue

As mentioned earlier, the queue for your currently playing music is always at the bottom of the screen, ready for you to interact with. To view it, simply click and drag the grey bar in the middle bottom of the screen. You can view any songs in your queue, change the order they play in, and favorite songs or add them to your library. Handy.

The Sidebar

Another of the changes made to Grooveshark is the new popup sidebar: if you click and drag a song to the far right side of the screen, a sidebar will appear that’ll allow you to access a range of basic actions, such as adding a song to your library or sending it to a friend via email.

Explore: Find New Music

Moving along, we have a completely brand-new area dedicated to helping you find new music. I’m a fan of the idea, but the execution wasn’t as great as I’d like. Under the explore section, there are three tabs: Featured, Popular, and Stations. While the latter two work as expected, the Featured section only shows a rather small selection of artists and new releases, and there’s no way to customize this to your own music tastes. However, if the Grooveshark team was aiming for keeping things tight and focused, they did an excellent job with it: there’s no unnecessary cruft.

Music: Your Library

The cool thing about Grooveshark (and other similar online music streaming services) is that even with all the music out there, you can add the music you like to your own personal library; so no matter where you go or what computer you’re using, you can log into your Grooveshark account and your full music library will be sitting there waiting for you. Grooveshark deals with handling your online music collection by diving all your music into groups: all your songs, your favorites, and playlists. I find that this system works very well and allows you to easily find songs you’ve listened to in the past.

Community: Share with Friends!

One of Grooveshark’s strong points is social integration. The community section shows a complete feed of what songs, albums, artists, and playlists your friends on Grooveshark are listening to. Also, you can send any song to social networks like Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter by simply right clicking a song or playlist and clicking “share.”

Shortcomings

As cool as it is, Grooveshark isn’t perfect; it has its problems. Chief among these problems is that Grooveshark doesn’t have a consolidated selection of music. This means that when you search for a song, you may likely come across duplicates, and some songs might have lower audio quality. There may not be correct album artwork for all music, and there may be minor differences in a way an artist’s name is spelled or capitalized. I believe this problem could be solved if Grooveshark allowed users to upvote songs that are good quality and correctly labeled, and downvote songs that aren’t.

Additionally, the audio player for Grooveshark still uses Flash, which is frustrating for those of us who hate using Flash. It would be neat to see an innovative service like Grooveshark jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon a bit ahead of everyone else.

Conclusion

All in all, Grooveshark is a simply outstanding service that keeps getting better. There are a few minor annoyances mentioned earlier that should be fixed, but other than those, Grooveshark is just about one of the best music streaming services around, especially with the latest updates. I’d highly recommend it.

It’s no secret that I’m somewhat of a productivity junkie, and I’m often looking for the latest and greatest way to keep track of my to-do’s and deadlines. In the more recent months of working with these apps, a particularly explosive niche that I’ve noticed has been web apps and services dedicated to organizing a team. Collaborative to-do lists, group calendars, and even direct communication platforms are examples of core features that are finding their way into these apps.

Today I’m going to take a look at the web service Orchestra, one of the more lightweight solutions to collaborative productivity. Orchestra has both a web app interface as well as a companion iPhone app that was just reviewed earlier today on iPhone.AppStorm. Hit the jump to find out more about how this web app can coordinate efforts between you and your coworkers.

Interface

The interface for Orchestra is clean and simple, and even somewhat reminiscent of some design trends that Mac.AppStorm has discussed regarding the interface layout of apps like Twitter.

The leftmost column contains your lists, each with a number of to-do items displayed alongside the list title. The middle column is your task list, complete with tasks sorted by due date, a drop down menu for selecting a task list, and a “Create task” button. Finally, the space to the right is reserved for a pop-out pane that displays detailed information about a selected task.

The pop-out pane lets you manipulate tasks easily (more on that later) without suffering from feature bloat or confusing organization. You can change the list or coworker that a task is assigned to with drop downs, and set a relative due date with a few preset buttons, or select a specific date from the calendar. Also, any comments you or your coworkers append to a task, as well as all activity associated with the task, are displayed on this pane.

Features

Creating lists and tasks are pretty self explanatory in Orchestra (hint: look for the + symbols), but where the service excels is the ease with which you can manipulate tasks after they’re created. We’ll start with collaboration, since that’s really what Orchestra is all about.

In the screenshot below you’ll see the drop down menu that lets you filter your tasks by colleague. This will help you keep tabs on all of your coworkers, and make sure that everyone is sharing an even load.

Comments can be added to each task item, and a communication/activity record can be viewed in the bottom of the tasks pop-out pane. This includes any comments or activity from your coworkers, which can be added to a task on the Share tab of that pane. Additionally, use the share tab to “nudge” a coworker associated with a particular task if they are, say, slacking a bit.

Any time you share a task with a user (either via email or mobile phone number) they are added to your Orchestra contacts, and can be shared with again, nudged, or assigned tasks.

When you assign due dates to your tasks, the main task list in the middle column will auto-arrange itself so you can keep focused on the most pressing issues. If you need further prioritizing functionality, selecting the star icon on any task will mark it as urgent, and clicking on the star icon at the top of the task list will display only urgent tasks.

Finally, Orchestra affords you a little bit of extra control over your experience with a Settings pane accessible from the bottom left corner of the app. Each user has a profile that can be manipulated from this window, including a profile image that can enhance usability. You can even add email addresses and mobile phone numbers to keep everyone in the loop.

Streamlined Or Powerhouse?

I generally feel pretty positive about Orchestra, but it’s important to note the features necessary to your organization before choosing a collaborative productivity tool for your team. Orchestra lacks some of the features that adorn more complex to-do list apps, including nested and recurring tasks. As long as you know what your group needs to get things done, these missing features aren’t necessarily a deficiency. It is certainly sometimes believed that fewer features in such an app will let you spend less time organizing and more time doing, and Orchestra is no different.

Conclusion

Orchestra certainly executes well what it intends to, but if you’re considering implementing an organizational tool for your team, be aware of your needs. Orchestra is a robust service, to be sure, but if your team is in need of a more complex, featured, and powerful system, it may be beneficial to look elsewhere. For those of you looking for a lightweight and streamlined solution to staying organized, Orchestra may just be what you’re looking for.

Have you given Orchestra a try? How does it stack up against other tools you’ve used?