It’s been a while since our last update but be assured that we aren’t sleeping on the job.  We’ve recently revamped our XM landing pages and we’re including more stuff than what was there previously.  The new design is cleaner, more to the point and hopefully more useful with the additions of the What’s On and XM-Sync pages.

The What’s On page is similar to the channel view of the gadget, it gives you a real-time listing of the currently playing track and information on a per channel basis.  Think of it like watching the weather channel, but for music instead. 

XM-Sync is something new we’re working on for our various XM gadgets and players.  The idea is to be able to back up your favorites and settings so they can be retrieved and / or updated from the players themselves.  We’re still working out the kinks, but it will be available on the next platform we release an XM player for and we’ll retrofit the rest of the gadgets.

The service is privacy friendly, we go over the details on the landing page, which when it’s finished, will allow you to log in and modify favorites and settings at will (all authentication is off from XM’s servers).

We’ll try to keep the details coming as we move ahead with our next projects.

Another quick XM update for everyone.  Nothing too major here, but we’re preparing for some channel group swapping to be going on in the future.  As of right now, the AOL channels are no longer on XM Online, so it’s a matter of time before we know if they are to be replaced with another group or if that’s it.

Otherwise, couple tiny tweaks to the gadget:

• Buttons cleaned up for size and clarity
• Channel up and down now use arrows instead of + / -
• Minor tweak to bad channel handling in favorites

As a word of caution, export your favorites (Settings -> Favorites -> Export) to the desktop.  Just in case.

Download XM Online Radio (For Vista Sidebar)