Spotify Hits Symbian
Undoubtedly the success of the iPhone is down to the usual slick Apple design and clean UI implementation, this is all backed up by the very successful App Store which
is way ahead of Nokia's Ovi Store (although lagging behind in terms of the number of potential customers). Given this it's very easy to overlook the fact that Symbian is a truly remarkable operating system that has its roots in the low power consumption mobile device world and is still technically very advanced. Certainly the UI leaves a lot to be desired and the recent S60v5 touchscreen implementation has the feeling of bolting a touchscreen UI onto a creaky old button based interface.
So the release yesterday of Spotify for Symbian S60 is all the more remarkable for the fact that not only does it bring the usual iPhone Spotify functionality to the Symbian platform but that it does it with a really impressively attractive interface that wouldn't look out of place on an iPhone. This appears to all be due to the use of TAT Cascades, a UI framework library from a company called The Astonishing Tribe or TAT. Cascades allows the developer to build cross platform applications without the need to customise the UI for each target platform.
Contrast this with Gravity, the current state of the art in good looking Symbian apps, which was written with hand crafted C++ code in order to implement that kinetic scrolling that everyone is, justifiably, very excited about. Whilst this clearly worked it must have been a complex and time consuming process to code, something that a framework library like that offered by TAT could reduce the need for. Hopefully Spotify will be one of many new visually attractive applications we see written for the Symbian platform in the near future.
Symbian-Guru.com has a rundown on the Spotify features here
And here is a video from TAT showing Spotify in action on an S60 device.
