Free Thinking.

The post.

  1. Back from Mashed

    Posted 4 months, 4 weeks ago and tagged as ,

    mashed.jpg Craig put together this cool little video interview with me, discussing my Mashed project, LoungePlayer:

    Unfortunately I’ve not made it publicly available yet as the solution at the moment is extremely hacky. I leveraged Remote Buddy to re-map the buttons on the Apple Remote to applescripts. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to attempt to work with the Javascript API of the iPlayer flash widget, so the play and full screen functionality relies on a simple C script which absolutely positions the mouse cursor over the relevant button and simulates a left-click. This means that the Safari window needs to be positioned at the top left of the screen and have all the chrome, such as the toolbar, hidden.

    The playlist management is pretty simple, I managed to uncover the XML feeds where the BBC stores all the program info, so I just parsed these and then used Wordpress to manage the data. Each item on the playlist is essentially a post by that user, and then to display the playlist I just used query_posts() to pull the posts for the logged in user and display their playlist. I love how quickly you can build these sorts of apps using Wordpress, it has user management, CRUD and templating out of the box which makes life so much easier.

    I’d love to look at taking this forward though, perhaps building a simple Cocoa app which can interface with the Apple Remote and the iPlayer flash widget more smoothly, I just need to find the time to do it - perhaps a goal for next years Mashed?

    All in all, it was a great weekend and many thanks go out to Matthew Cashmore and the rest of the Backstage crew for putting it all together.

    Over and out!

The comments.

  1. Added 4 months, 4 weeks ago by Dan Oliver

    Very cool idea. I would certainly use something like this. It would be great if you did eventually take it forward one day. Cool little video tour too :)

  2. Added 4 months, 4 weeks ago by Chris Garrett

    Thanks Dan! Hopefully someone inside the Beeb will pick up the batton and take it forward.

  3. Added 4 months, 3 weeks ago by Phunky

    Very cool :) good to put a face to you at last!

    I’ll be keeping an eye on this as only last night i sat at my PC screaming as i couldnt find a simple way to play my MP3 without too much fuss… ended up going for FooBar.

Say something!