When people hear the word “hacker”, one of the first thoughts that comes to mind is someone breaking into a computer. But in computer programmer subculture, “hacking” refers to building something quickly, testing the limits of technology, or learning a new way to solve a problem.

Hackathons are where hackers gather to test and invent these skills. But hackathons aren’t just for computer scientists and software developers. Here are some other types of people that make hackathons successful:

• Designers: Everyone knows that engineers aren’t always the best designers. Designers bring creativity, vision, and user experience to a hack. A hackathon with a lot of designers brings a special sense of style and art to the event.
• Business minds: A small percentage of hackathon projects become actual products, and one reason is that when they are being created, no one thinks of a business plan. Biz dev folks add value to hackathons, almost as the devil’s advocate, to test and challenge an idea.
• Marketing sharks/product ninjas: You need to be realistic about what you’re building, and make sure it would be a usable product. These creative minds will help balance out a successful team at a hackathon.
• Other experts: for example, a music hackathon should include music fans, producers, DJs, artists, record labels. Art hackathons have painters, graphic designers, LEGOmasters, and seamstresses.
• You: if you haven’t been to a hackathon, put your skills out there. I participated in StartupBus 2011, a three-day roadtrip from San Francisco to Austin, Tx for South By Southwest. People pitched ideas at the beginning of the trip, teams formed, and we hacked together a product before we got to the festival. There were people of all skillsets on the bus, including people that didn’t even have a Twitter account. We had a team nanny, who refilled our Red Bull and helped us with the video production of our final pitch. Everyone’s skills were utilized.

In his letter to investors yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explains how his company practices a philosophy called “The Hacker Way”. Every few months, they do internal hackathons that include everybody, not just programmers. The result is a more focused, open, socially valuable working environment.

Update on Thursday, January 12th: A new build has been uploaded with the following fixes:

• Documentation corrections.
• Bugfixes in Toplist class.
• Events on the Application as Session classes now fire correctly.
• Add subscriberCount property to Playlist class.

The download links below have been updated for this new build.

Original Announcement

We’re pleased to announce the release of a new developer preview build of the Spotify client.

This preview contains a much more filled-out public API as well as much improved documentation with examples.

We’re releasing this preview now to allow you to test our new APIs before they go into our live client for full release. If you have any feedback or bug reports, please contact us at platformsupport@spotify.com.

Downloads

Mac: Download .dmg file
Windows: Download .exe installer
Preview Documentation: Online HTML Reference

Please note that these builds will expire on February 11th, 2012. For more information, see our API Preview builds page.

We are really excited to give developers access to the latest addition to the Spotify Platform family: Spotify Apps. Here are some reasons why you should consider building an application inside Spotify:

1. The first free music platform. This is the first time you can create an application with instantaneous access to a world of music. Not just 30 second previews or songs gated behind a subscription fee. Free for the developer, and free for the end user. And fast, like the music is right on your user’s hard drive. It’s legal, and artists are getting paid.
2. You can grow. You can get in front of 10 million active users in 12 countries (and growing fast). A Spotify App enables you to engage deeply with your users, build awareness of your brand, and drive traffic to your other services outside of the Spotify environment.
3. It’s easy to use. Spotify Apps are written in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS; just like a web app. We believe in the future of web standards. These APIs give you access to all of the powerful features in the Spotify desktop client with simple Javascript functions. In a sense, it’s like Chromium shipped with 15 million songs.

You can read more about the Spotify Apps API here. If you have any questions, please email platformsupport@spotify.com.

No major new features this time but here is the obligatory list:

• Volume normalization (on x86 platforms)
• Support for arbitrary URIs in inbox (albums, artists, playlists)
• Reduced memory requirements (at least 90% less to be more specific) for artist browse if you don’t need to include all tracks.
• A couple of new APIs related to offline sync.
• The ability to list friends have been removed.

See the ChangeLog inside the archives for the full list of changes. As usual the downloads can be found on this page.

Important: Due to changes in Spotify’s architecture we need to deprecate support for all versions of libspotify prior to version 10. There is no exact date set for when that will happen. To be prepared you should upgrade your applications to use version 10 as soon as possible.

Today we are announcing a great addition to the Spotify Platform. The Spotify Embedded Player libspotify 9 is now available for iOS.

We hope this will enable a new category of iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch applications with Spotify inside and allow for more immersive music experiences within iOS apps.

The documentation should help you understand what features are available and get your creativity going. Download libspotify 9 here. Samples to get you started are included. You may want to use the Objective-C wrapper available here. We also have a new FAQ that answers common questions and helps you avoid common mistakes.

Changes since the last release:

• New: binaries for iOS devices
• Change: login API - passwords must not be stored
• New: sp_offline_time_left() - exposes time left before offline tracks will expire
• Fixed: Logged in state now tells you when the user is in offline mode (logged in, but offline)

Please make sure to review the Terms of Use. If you want to use libspotify commercially please contact our Partner team.

We’ll also be hosting a tech meetup in New York on September 7th where we’ll be talking about this release and all things Spotify Platform and APIs so come and join us if you can.

Sten Garmark, Director of Platform

CocoaLibSpotify adds all those Cocoa buzzwords you were craving for when writing that libspotify-based Mac app. It’s all Objective-C objects, KVO, KVC and awesome! Use it to build EPIC Mac apps with bindings, outlets and all that usual magic stuff.

The repository over on GitHub includes two sample projects (a simple track player and a “Guess the Intro” game) and is supremely documented, so get stuck in!

A new version of the Spotify client is out, version 0.5.1. On the Mac, this version contains a basic AppleScript dictionary for getting the current track and controlling playback. You will be auto-updated to version 0.5.1 of the client over the coming days, but you can download the update manually from www.spotify.com/download if you can’t wait.

This is an experimental feature at the moment, which means it may change or disappear in a future version depending on how feedback on the feature goes.

I’d like to thank the following developers for working with us to get this feature in the Spotify client:

• Matt Patenaude. An update to Bowtie containing Spotify support and a small handful of features is in the works and should be released soon.
• The folks over at Rogue Amoeba. Airfoil 4.5 will support Spotify metadata and control, and is expected to ship in the next few weeks.
• Craig Hockenberry. An update to Take Five is currently in beta and should be released soon.

A new version of libspotify is out. The major change this time is offline support. The API is extended with methods to synchronize users playlist to be playable without connectivity to the Spotify servers. For details see the documentation and the spshell example which contains a new command for controlling offline sync of playlists.

A short summary of the ChangeLog

• Offline support
• Support for spotify:image: URIs
• Various bugfixes

Today we are happy to announce libspotify’s support for the ARM platform. So now is the time to bring those Beagleboards of yours back on the table and start hacking. On top of this libspotify now also supports querying for the list of playlist subscribers and we’ve filled the inbox feature gap.

Download the new version here.

A short summary of the ChangeLog

• ARMv5, ARMv6 and ARMv7 support
• Playlist subscribers
• Inbox messages and read/modification of track ’seen’ status
• Support for creating playlist folders from the API

There is also an important API change in how playlist notification callbacks are handled. Please read the ChangeLog before upgrading your application to 0.0.7 (but that’s something you always do, right?)

The ARM release should be considered beta as we have not been able to run the binaries on proper hardware for all of the three ARM versions released. If you notice anything strange or have a problem, please let us know on our Spotify API forum.

There is no nice (or even official?) way of detecting and handling the media keys on the user’s keyboard in Cocoa. Some semi-private events are sent to all running applications, which is why iTunes previously started when you tried to pause Spotify. Apple has solved this problem internally by having their media key using applications cooperate and resign media key controls to the application that was in the foreground most recently. However, there is no way for third party applications to join this cooperation.

Spotify 0.4.9.295 for Mac introduces a workaround using CGEventTap. This event tap intercepts all events in the NX_SYSDEFINED category, figures out if Spotify should intercept it, and if so, does *not* send it on to other apps. If you’d like this functionality in your app, get our SPMediaKeyTap. This class is smart enough to resign the media key event tap whenever another application that we know will want to use the media keys becomes active, and keeps track of which media key using app was recently started.

If everyone uses this class, and everyone add each other’s bundle ID to that list of whitelisted bundle ID’s, we’ll get nice behavior from all apps. An even better solution would be if Apple provided a way of acquiring the media keys; we’ve filed a bug report with Apple.