OK now this is not cool. The MT blog feature is broken I think because someone put a restriction on the bookmarklet that it has to start with “http://”. A bookmarklet is JAVASCRIPT so it starts with javascript! Ok I hope I am smoking crack here because otherwise Mak, you’re in trouble!
This week, Real announced the release of Rhapsody on the Web. I have to say it is pretty impressive. It works really well and for once, the installation procedure was flawless. Playback works well (I hear that it’s the same old RAD/EA technology underneath the hood from our old TuneTo days!). Kudos to JeremyC & JeffL for the effort.
BUT what I really like and I have been telling these guys long before I left that they needed to open up the service through a web api and they did it ! It’s not completely SOAP yet as they simply mapped URLs to Artists pages. They also have RSS feeds to custom playlists. But I hear that they will provide WSDL soon so it’s a good sign for more fun stuff to come. Keep it coming guys!
Meanwhile, I saw in the press release that a new upgrade of the Rhapsody client was available. They call it the
Rhapsody Jukebox Software now. I fired up my version and sure enough an optional upgrade was there. Well I was also impressed. The installation looks a lot nicer. Good job Matt! No more old school Windows 95 dialog boxes ;-). New splashscreen, very nice. AND Alex, the UI master, finally fixed the annoying bug I never told him about. When scrolling down the playlist, there was always some flickering going one at the bottom of the playlist area. Well now it’s fixed. Looks like he rewrote the bitmapped scrollbars once again ;-). I do like the reorg of the playlist controls next to the playback area. BUT where is the visualizer! I can’t believe this feature was cut because we didn’t have a complete full screen support. Now it’s been a year and still it’s not there. Alex, can you show us how to make it show in the UI, I know it’s in the skin still and it’s just a matter of tweaking the xml to make it show ;-)
Now there’s just one thing that is missing. The blogging has not been enhanced to support more blogging sites. When I came up with this feature for Rhapsody, I was running Moveable Type at home but now that I moved to WordPress, it ain’t working no more ;-) So I got to figure out a way if I can use a bookmarklet … Let’s try it!
It is my pleasure to announce that we are now live from the web! My friend Adam finally convinced me to use Dreamhost instead of my poor homemade linux box. I figured I was paying more in electricity to keep that thing running 24/7 than the cost of hosting it online (not even mentioning the level of noise this thing generates).
Last night, I finally was able to install the ‘underground’ pspsdk that allows people to write homebrew applications for the PSP. Of course, it requires that your PSP is still running the v1.5 firmware (until someone finds a way to hack the 2.+ firmware out there).
An interesting homebrew app I am very interested in is FileAssistant++. This has a nice UI perfect for Plutino integration ;-)….
Pluto … my upnp sdk got some setbacks a few weeks ago after I found out that a company had been using the name ‘pluto’ for their sdk. I wouldn’t care much but they are doing some sort of ‘UPnP’ like Home thing. What are the odds!
Of course, I found out right after I posted the request to host Pluto on SourceForge. So I had to withdraw it and come up with a better name. Don’t know if you know what CVS is but it’s a pain in the a*** to change file names once it’s on the server. So the requirement was to keep my filenames intact. They all start with PLT_ . The new name had to have these 3 letters in it.
I came up with 2 contenders: Platinum & Plutino. The latter one being a real name for the ‘little’ plutos orbiting around the earth seems to be a good analogy for the P2P world I am trying to build with my sdk.
Continuing my domain buying frenzy (whopping $8.95 a year), I found out that https://plutinosoft.com was available so I bought it. We’ll see what I do with that …
Don’t know what took me but yesterday I decided to buy the domain name http://www.plastoc.com. It’s the french slang for ‘plastic’. Although I don’t know what I am going to do with this, I figured it was pretty rare to get a 2 syllables 7 words domain name so I took it.
In french, someone would refer to that word about something that feels cheap and is about to break. Hmmm