Well, the winners of the Boxee/Twilio developer contest have been announced. Due to a mix-up, my entry never got considered :/ But that doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with it. It’s called BoxeeQ and it’s a super-simple way to save movies and online videos to your Boxee/Netflix queue when you’re not at your computer.
You can read all about it here. Keep in mind this isn’t totally ready for the general public yet, so beware of exploding phones.
I submitted my entry for the Extend Firefox 3 contest last night. (Awesome way to spend the 4th of July, I know.) I’m calling it Harmony, mostly because I was short on time and couldn’t think of a better name. My goal was to create a lite version of the Last.fm client that specialized in web media, but I had to cut a lot of features to make sure it got done in time for the contest deadline, so this first release isn’t really like I imagined it would be when I started. (The contest began on March 17th, I found out about it two weeks before the July 4th deadline.)
In this release, you can look up information about artists by selecting the artist’s name, right clicking, and hitting “look up artist.” Also, if you listen to music on the Pandora web site, or using FoxyTunes, you’ll get real-time information about the song; just click the Harmony icon in the browser’s status bar to show the panel.
If you’ve got a Last.fm account, you can scrobble the music you listen to on the Pandora web site, or in FoxyTunes; just go to preferences (either by clicking on the “tools” menu in Firefox, then clicking “add-ons,” selecting “harmony” from the list and click on the “options” button, or by clicking on the Harmony menu icon on the top left of the Harmony panel and clicking preferences) and enter your Last.fm account information. You’ll probably need to restart the browser to get it to integrate with Pandora and FoxyTunes properly.
In the next release, I’d like to add support for displaying album information, and caching listening information if it can’t be scrobbled when the song is played.
If you’re interested in playing around with it, you can download it here. I’m going to be using Get Satisfaction for handling support, so drop your bug reports and feature requests there. Here’s a video to get you started.
That’s it for now. I’m off to enjoy the rest of the Independence day weekend by paying $10.50 to watch Hancock :/
The e-mail I’ve been waiting for finally arrived today. The latest version of Map+ has just cleared Mozilla dev review and is now available on the Firefox add-ons web site. Here’s a list of what’s new.
I wasn’t able to get any language translations done in time for the release, so they’ll be included in the next version. So far, all I have is Traditional Chinese.
Special thanks go to Sunny Chan who added the code for dynamic zoom and address completion while I was still working at IBM. Open source at work, it’s a beautiful thing.
I’ve created a Get Satisfaction page for Map+, so be sure to post there if you need help or have feature requests. Hopefully, it’ll keep things more organized than everything ending up in my e-mail inbox.