alex.mullr.net/blog

Needed a little something to take my mind off everything, so spent the morning messing around with Javascript, trying out Last.fm’s Realtime Submission Protocol. It was my first time playing with any kind of API, Javascript and web forms, so I’m pretty pleased with the result.

Enter your Last.fm username and password on the handshake page – this requires a certain amount of trust, sure… but you can see exactly what the code is doing, and if you know me, you’ll know I’m hardly competent enough to bother storing your credentials. You’ll be taken to a URL beginning http://post.audioscrobbler.com/ which should have 4 lines, the first being "OK". On the second line, there’s an authentication token that you’ll need to submit tracks.

On the submit page, enter the authentication token in the first box, followed by the song information. The timestamp is given at the top (I’m sure there’s an easy way to copy that into the field, but I haven’t figured it out yet). Source should be "P" and all the other boxes should be played with carefully, unless you bother reading the documentation. The result should be a simple "OK".

The client this submits as is set to "tst", but as "client authors should use the tst identifier for clients which are not publicly distributed" please don’t go messing with it too much. This was just meant to be a fun project.

It looks fairly pretty in Firefox 3 RC1 and Safari 3.1.1. The MD5 hashing function in Javascript is BSD licensed from Paj and the time converter is free from Epoch Converter.

This, I had to share… simply because it’s the best explanation for anything to do with Facebook, ever:

You know [he] can actually still see this message despite temporarily deactivating his account. He memorised the source code for this particular website and there’s no privacy for the coding from which the words can be obtained.

♥

I’ve started playing with an app called Screenflow. As always, I’m totally late to the reviewing-brand-new-Mac-software game, but I’ll throw a couple of compliments in their direction anyway.

Wow, this thing is incredible. Really amazing. On first launch, having read absolutely no documentation, I recorded a minute and a half of me on the new Last.fm beta, which you can find on YouTube. It’s simple and flexible, exactly what my impression of a Mac app is. Easy things, like changing the size of the pointer to make it easier to see, or having a "radar" bubble appear every time you click, make it so much nicer. Export to movie, upload to YouTube – just as easy as creating content should be.

Go, play…

The May 2008 beta version of Last.fm is live for paying subscribers, and I have to say: I really do like it.

It’s a lot cleaner than the current design, though some testers have called it too much like other social networking sites – this is a valid concern, and from the staff posts in the beta forum they are listening and constantly adjusting the site.

The one issue of system development this has raised for me is that there are a lot of people who have absolutely nothing useful to say at all:

My only feedback to this beta design:
Get rid of it and completely keep the old (current) working and functional design!!!

This is totally useless in terms of figuring out what users want. Staff have spent so many man hours working on this new design to improve the site, and their asking for help is totally ruined by this comment. Somebody, teach this guy to give useful feedback or hit him hard with the banhammer.

A quick screen capture:

Last.fm May 2008 beta from Alex Muller on Vimeo.

I’m still thinking on my complete opinion of it, but subscribers can see the current version live at beta.last.fm

A couple of things I’ve mentioned/sent feedback on so far:

• The “On tour” red text after a band’s name doesn’t look great when it runs over onto a second line.

I guess it’s true that even the simplest things take the longest time:

You may not be able to see it on the above screen captures (right click, view image might make it better) but replacing the logo with a new version to remove some ugly white pixels took four days after the new version had been created. That’s the work of one developer changing one image on server – I can appreciate that server admins have a lot to do, but wow that was a long wait. Anyway, end rant.

Don’t know if you’ve seen this or not, but Rapidshare’s latest captcha is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. I mean honestly, it took me the best part of a minute to figure out.

Seriously? Type the letters that have a cat next to them? Which idiot came up with that?