We heralded the coming of Planetary [iTunes link] last month, and now the free app is available for download.
Its progenitor, Bloom Studio, recently closed a seed round of funding led by Betaworks with participation from Ron Conway’s SV Angel and individual investors. It plans to create a suite of iOS applications that present social media and streaming data in playful visualizations with personal context. (One of the
co-founders is Jesper Andersen, maker of the Forgiveness Engine and Avoidr.)
Planetary is the first of Bloom’s offerings, and focuses on iTunes. When you open the app, you’ll find a homescreen on which you can surf through your music collection. Artists are depicted as stars, albums as planets and moons as tracks. While listening to music, you can explore a beautifully rendered universe of sound.
Ever since the iPad launched, music services and app developers have tried to create a lean-in experience on the device (Pandora was an early example) — the screen size really demands it. Apps like Aweditorium and Vevo have found intriguing ways to make use of the iPad’s screen real estate, and we wager to say that Planetary has as well.
Like Aweditorium, which presents music as playable tiles packed with videos and facts, the app encourages the users to click around and listen. However, Planetary taps into one’s own music collection — Aweditorium is more about indie music discovery — a limitation that actually makes it fun to rediscover music otherwise forgotten.
We’ve heard that Bloom might incorporate streaming services like Spotify and Rdio into future iterations of Planetary, a move that will only service to expand this exploratory, musical universe.
Source : Mashable
