Today we’re happy to debut real-time Now Playing notifications for all exfm users. We think you’re really going to dig it. 

There isn’t anything you need to do on your end. It just works automatically. The instant you start playing a song it will be reflected at the top right of your profile page. Anyone who is following you on exfm or visits your profile page (here’s mine for example ex.fm/kirklove) will be able to see the song you’re playing as well. They’ll even be able to click through to go directly to that song page if they want to listen to it.

Of course, you’ll be able to see all the great music folks you follow are playing as well. Quickly scan the left side panel that houses exfmers you are following. If they’re playing a tune you’ll see a small Now Playing icon to the right of their name. Clicking their name will take you to their profile page to see their currently playing track details.

It’s pretty slick. And even better it’s just a start. This real-time foundation allows us to start building out some other great features – things like enabling you to “listen in sync” to another exfmer’s music or even create listening groups around certain genres or artists to name a few.

Real-time Now Playing notifications on exfm. Available now. Enjoy! 

Say adiós to audiophile fails, ear bud sharing and ugly T-shirt wearing! To celebrate exfm’s shiny new next-gen site we’ve teamed up with Audyssey, Urbanears and some of our favorite indie labels to bring you the Ultimate Exfmavaganza Giveaway!

Over the next two weeks we’ll be giving away one of Audyssey’s South of The Market Audio Docks and a set of Lower East Side Media Speakers, along with four sets of socially inspired Urbanears Plattan headphones. Plus, tons of vinyl and CDs courtesy of Cantora Records, Ghostly International, Paper Garden Records and Family Records. Every winner also receives a highly sought after, but rarely acquired, exfm tee. Now that’s how you celebrate!

How do you get your hands on these goodies? Simple: starting NOW until end of day November 15th reach out to us on Facebook or Twitter.

Facebook: Visit our Facebook page then post on our wall “I want to win Exfmavaganza!”

Twitter: Tweet “Hey @exfm I want to win Exfmavaganza! http://tinyurl.com/3hbym63 #Audyssey #Urbanears”

Winners will be chosen at random and announced Friday, November 18. Good luck!

Read more about the giveaway goodness here: Ultimate Exfmavaganza Giveaway

Be sure to check out what our partners are loving on exfm:

audyssey urbanears papergardenrecords ghostly

Giveaway Terms & Conditions

UPDATE: Find the latest version of this template at http://marshallbock.com/fun/iphone4s.

Pretty much every decent iPhone app ever made also has a website extolling the virtues of the app and its features. And pretty much every one of those sites has one thing in common: an image of an iPhone, its screen displaying a shot of the app.

It’s an incredibly common practice.

So the developer provides the screenshot, but where does that iPhone image come from? Probably a template. Somewhere, at some point, a designer sat down and recreated the device in Photoshop, and it eventually ended up on that website.

Another iPhone Template?

There are a lot of those templates out there, but for one reason or another, I’ve been a little disappointed by all of them. Without naming names, they’re all decent-to-good, but I always feel like something’s a little off.

Some tend to be inconsistent with the rendering Apple uses in its own iPhone product images. With others, the proportions are off. Or the buttons are in the wrong positions. Or the image is rasterized and unscalable. Or it’s made of vectors but riddled with split pixels.

For a whole host of reasons, I haven’t been satisfied with the existing options. So I made my own with these goals in mind:

• Both 4 and 4S models
• Both black and white body colors
• Portrait, landscape, and angled orientations
• Every combination of the preceding bullet points
• Rendering that matches Apple’s product images as closely as possible
• Created at high res scale for Retina Display
• Made entirely of vectors and layer styles for scaling up
• Full alignment to a 2px grid for pixel precision at 50% scale
• Screen images as Smart Objects for inserting your own screenshots
• Clean, organized, color-coded, well-named groups and layers

The Result

Click the image below for a full-resolution preview.

Free Download

Dig it? Download the PSD for free :D

Feeling generous? Feel free to buy me a virtual cup of coffee with the Donate button below.

There’s a readme.txt file in the zip, which you can check out for instructions on how to use the template.

Enjoy :)

NOTE: This template was made using Photoshop CS5. It should open just fine on earlier CS versions with a couple caveats: the shadows under the devices will render incorrectly before CS4 (feathered vector masks); and the screen images are Smart Objects, which CS1 doesn’t support.