So I upgraded to Windows XP, in order to play with cool new things like Konfabulator and Yahoo Music Engine. I’m excited about the possibilities of Konfabulator, but most of what I’ve seen is too complicated to learn from in my preferred way — which is reverse engineering something that already works to figure out why it works. I know this isn’t the best way to learn, really, but it’s what works for me. What doesn’t work for me, and also a trend which needs to die: documentation only available in PDF.
I’m a bit miffed, as well, that the Picture Frame widget appears to do exactly what I want to do, displaying a random picture from my Flickr favorites, and yet I can’t use it because the Flickr API was just updated and the widget hasn’t been. I recently abandoned an obscenely complicated project to do this same thing as an Active Desktop channel, and to have the functionality right there, yet broken, is crazy frustrating.
Being a Launchcast Plus subscriber, I’m mostly looking for Yahoo Music Engine to be a better client for accessing my radio station. That it does, and it even allows plugins, so that the 60-90% of my music listening that I do via Launchcast can show up in my last.fm via this plugin (more plugins). I’m not thrilled that YME only takes music ratings on a four-star scale, particularly since all of my previous ratings are on the 100-point scale offered as an alternate by every other Launchcast client.
I didn’t expect to be impressed with Windows XP. As I mentioned, I only updated due to new applications which aren’t compatible with older versions of windows. I have to say, though, the sheer number of really annoying misfeatures is amazing. I can only imagine what Vista is going to be like.
4 Responses to 'So I upgraded to Windows'
Track 
replies to this post.
Yahoo Music Engine has become one of my favorite programs lately. I love the program itself, as well as the possibilities from the API and other plugins. Unfortunately, plugins.yme.music.yahoo.com is no where near the one stop shop for plugins. There is an awesome deskbar remote here, and a cool “now playing” plugin here (who’s xml i try to parse out through javascript at my site, only succeeding in firefox). Anyhow, I hope you do some cool things with YME. Also, be sure to sign up for the yme-dev group here.
Ooh, more toys! I was rather surprised by the lack of a more central developer community for YME. I should have figured it must be taking place on a mailing list.
BTW, if the ‘now playing’ plugin doesn’t work out for you, there’s always last.fm. There’s plugin support for every music client in existence, and they still provide RSS for your recently played tracks at http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/rdf/history/username
Are you doing it in javascript for fun? Otherwise, for parsing XML in PHP4, I like XML2Array.
Yeah, I do use the audioscrobbler plugin and for about a month has the most recent played song from AS, but that doesn’t show up until half way through the song. Then the Now Playing plugin came out, so I got that. As far as the PHP thing, the short story of it is that the site my blog is hosted on doesn’t have php, mysql, anything.
…but I am working on fixing that.
I’ve only had one hosting company, so I don’t know how they compare… but my peeps haven’t yet given me any problems, and they’re dirt cheap if you don’t have much traffic. What sold me is that there’s no monthly fees for bandwidth that my lil’ ol’ blog is never ever going to use. And hey, they host bugmenot, so they must be good guys. Even though they elected not to hire me. [smirk]