Kinoma Notes

Face­book. It’s the world’s largest social net­work. But did you know it’s also the world’s largest photo shar­ing site?

And with the new, built-in Face­book Media app, Kinoma Play is now the eas­i­est, most con­ve­nient way to:

• Update your sta­tus
• See your friends’ sta­tuses
• Instantly upload pic­tures that tell the story of your life
• Post links to videos and music you want to share

Update your status

This is the main screen, where you can choose Update Sta­tus to tell the world what you’re thinking.

Tip: By pressing-and-holding Update Sta­tus, you can add a Zoom­Link directly to this fea­ture on your Home Screen. That way, you can update your sta­tus from your Home screen with just a touch.

See your friends’ sta­tuses and photos

Choose My Friends to see your friends’ statuses.

Choose a friend to see their details and view their photo albums.

Choose Photo Albums to browse their albums and view the pho­tos inside.

Upload pho­tos

Maybe it’s a photo mark­ing an impor­tant mile­stone in your life, or maybe it’s just a goofy photo that you know will put a smile on their faces.

Either way, share it with your friends in sec­onds by show­ing Kinoma Play’s menu pod and choos­ing Media > Send > Face­book.

Imme­di­ately, your newly-uploaded photo will appear in the photo album you picked, and on your friend’s news feeds as well.

Thanks to Kinoma Play’s exclu­sive cross-social shar­ing, you can upload pho­tos to Face­book from lit­er­ally any­where — your phone, your Flickr or Picasa accounts, even your home PC via Orb. There’s noth­ing else on the planet that gives you this kind of flexibility.

Share videos

Kinoma Play is the best YouTube client for mobile, and so of course you can share your favorites on Face­book in seconds.

While watch­ing any YouTube video, just open the menu pod and choose Media > Send > Face­book. You can even add a com­ment if you like.

Your video will instat­ntly appear on your friend’s news feeds, where they can play it directly.

Share tunes

We’re huge music fans, so we know how it is when you run across a track so amaz­ing, weird or cool that you just have to share it.

Instantly, your friends will see what music you’re dig­ging on their news feed.

As you can see, if you use Face­book you should be using Kinoma Play — we think you’ll agree that it’s the best way to Face­book on mobile!

Last week’s big update to Kinoma Play includes Get Apps, and built-in ser­vice that lets you down­load more great apps for Kinoma Play. One of the stars of the show? Twit­ter!

Of course, you can use Kinoma Play to update your sta­tus and ride the tweet­steam. But because Kinoma Play’s Twit­ter app is so beau­ti­fully inte­grated with your favorite way to enjoy media, you can do so much more!

• Eas­ily tweet about the music, videos and pod­casts you love
• Photo-blog your day with built-in Twit­Pic support
• Use built-in social search to see what the world’s say­ing about break­ing news…and you!

Share music and podcasts

The track you’re lis­ten­ing to is so great you just have to share. We under­stand. Just open the menu pod and choose Media > Send > Twit­ter.

Share pho­tos with TwitPic

They say “the best cam­era is the one you have with you”, and more often than not that’s your phone. Now you can share the pho­tos that tell the story of your life as eas­ily as choos­ing Media > Send > Twit­Pic.

Thanks to Kinoma Play’s amaz­ing cross-social shar­ing abil­i­ties, this works no mat­ter where the photo hap­pens to be. You can just as eas­ily share a photo from Flickr as you can a photo on your phone.

Search

Touch the mag­ni­fy­ing glass icon (or use your 5-way) to go to the Search panel, where you can:

• Search for anything
• Drink the whole world’s tweet­stream with the Pub­lic Timeline
• Track the trend­ing top­ics that are hot right now

Home

This is like your Twit­ter home page, but opti­mized for mobile. Here you can:

• See tweets from every­body you’re following
• Choose What are you doing? to tweet yourself

You can choose your text size with the Twit­ter menu. Note the live char­ac­ter count, which helps you stay within Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Updates

The Updates panel shows you your tweet history.

Pro­file

The Pro­file panel is a handy sum­mary, and includes a sur­pris­ing amount of func­tion­al­ity. Here you can:

• See all the tweets that ref­er­ence you
• Read your direct mes­sages and favorite tweets
• Send direct mes­sages to any­body you’re fol­low­ing, and any­body that’s fol­low­ing you
• Get the name, loca­tion and bio for any­body you’re following
• Get the name, loca­tion and bio for any­body that’s fol­low­ing you
• Log out, which is handy if you use mul­ti­ple Twit­ter profiles

As you can see, Kinoma Play’s Twit­ter sup­port is amaz­ingly com­plete. Try it out, and we think you’ll agree that Kinoma Play is the best way to Twit­ter on mobile.

Shuf­fle play is a great way to sur­prise your­self – there’s noth­ing like pon­der­ing the pos­si­ble mean­ing of hear­ing Lenny Kravitz ask “Are You Gonna Go My Way”, and Dwight Yoakam answer “Ain’t That Lonely Yet”.

For some cus­tomers, shuf­fle play in Kinoma Play is unex­pect­edly straight­for­ward com­pared to other play­ers they’ve used. Here’s how it works…

Shuf­fle play all of your songs

To shuf­fle play all the songs on your phone, go to My Media Files > Music > Songs and choose Shuf­fle.

Shuf­fle play all songs from an artist

To shuf­fle play all songs from a cer­tain artist, go to My Media Files > Music > Artists. Choose the artist, then All to see all songs by that artist, then Shuf­fle.

Shuf­fle play all songs from an album

To shuf­fle play all songs from a cer­tain album, go to My Media Files > Music > Albums. Choose the album, then Shuf­fle.

Shuf­fle play all songs in a genre

To shuf­fle play all songs in a cer­tain genre, go to My Media Files > Music > Gen­res. Choose the genre, then Shuf­fle.

That’s it!

Sim­ple, right? You’ve now mas­tered the Kinoma shuffle.

Now about all the Barry Manilow on your phone…

No, it’s not an insur­ance com­pany. No, it’s not the curse-word-substitute used by a pop­u­lar sci-fi series – FLAC is an audio com­pres­sion for­mat. It’s dif­fer­ent than other pop­u­lar audio for­mats because it does loss­less com­pres­sion.

MP3s at 128 kbps can sound really good. But the bitrate of the uncom­pressed CD source is over 1,400 kbps — 11 times larger! To achieve low bitrates MP3 encoders do lossy com­pres­sion, which is a nice way of say­ing that they throw out a lot of hopefully-unnoticible audio detail.

FLAC, on the other hand, is all about qual­ity. It’s only capa­ble of per­fect, bit-for-bit dig­i­tal audio repro­duc­tion. But audio encoded in FLAC is still only about half the size of the uncom­pressed CDs source.

Inter­est­ing note: Although FLAC files need about 5 times the space of aver­age MP3 files, play­ing FLAC files uses less CPU time (and so less bat­tery power) than play­ing MP3 or AAC files.

Lots of apps can cre­ate FLAC files, but I can rec­om­mend Winamp or Medi­a­Mon­key for Win­dows users. (For the unhealthily-obsessed, using Exact Audio Copy for rip­ping can be worth the usabil­ity challenge.)

If you’re not will­ing to com­pro­mise on audio qual­ity just because you want to take your music with you, then FLAC and Kinoma Play are the per­fect combination.

• FLAC [Wikipedia]