Alwees Froosh 
October 28th, 2007
That is the name of the application that Jake, Chris and I made for the inaugural Nitobi Hack Day last Saturday.
Yes, we may have had the biggest team and yes some teams didn’t even stick around until the sweet, sweet beer but we came within a whisker of winning it all! Of course, how you split up a single iPod Nano amongst three people is anyone’s guess.
The idea behind the application was that we wanted a desktop app that would be running all the time and would bring in information from many different sources about music artists / bands that you like. In particular, I never know when new albums come out from bands that I like. The trick is that we use, in this case, your top tracks XML listing from Last.fm to determine what you like - ie what you listen to most is what you like. Then we use that info to look up different information about the bands. At the time of building the application we decided on two things to bring in; new releases and events. The original reason that we went with the AIR application was because I wanted to use my iTunes XML file. We found a problem with that early on - my iTunes XML files is >7MB and AIR has a tough time opening it. That is when we decided to go with Last.fm.
I will release the app shortly once I get some time to fix it up.
We were able to deal with the new AIR security model pretty easily and of course chromeless windows and all the great CSS3 support was much appreciated!
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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Web2.0, AJAX, JavaScript, Nitobi, air, hackday, adobe, adobeair. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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November 7th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Sweet lookin’ app! Can’t wait to try this puppy out.
Dave, any chance you’ll be writing more about the changes to the security model in AIR?
November 8th, 2007 at 3:35 am
I don’t know if anyone knows what AllweeeesFROOSH means. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t send me the source for this thing dave!
November 8th, 2007 at 5:54 am
I was going to post a witty link to the old mark messier lay’s commercial, but who woulda guessed it’s not on youtube..
nice looking app, though — kinda similar to the last.fm desktop client but the events tie-in is pretty slick.
November 13th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
@frank, I am going to post about the AIR security model - it is near and dear to my heart
@jake, source code is in the mail. for everyone else we will release it once we are happy
@nick, it is sorta like last.fm client but last.fm doesn’t tell you about new releases does it? It would have been way nicer to have been able to load itunes xml rather than use last.fm data
November 19th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
I dunno about you, but my iTunes Music Library.xml on my office machine alone is 15.7MB. not exactly quick parsing, and it’ll probably make AIR as-plode.
the new releases is a really good idea.. did you ever get the code for this cleaned up? I’m just starting to mess around with AIR and wouldn’t mind checking out the code.