joe shaw

By now you’re probably all sick and tired of hearing about Novell’s hack week, so this is a great opportunity to tell you about my hack week project.

I got a late start (ie, today) because I was off yesterday, but I’m working on a web interface to Banshee. The need is obvious: my iPod can only hold 8 gigs of music, and I often want to listen to a song somewhere in the other 40 gigs of music stored at home. DAAP is great for local sharing, but if you want sharing across a WAN, you need the web.

This is also my first attempt at learning JavaScript. I’ve touched it a bit here and there — mainly in the Beagle Firefox extension — and still don’t know many “best practices”, but I am enjoying learning as I go. I’ve been using the excellent JQuery library thus far in building the UI. Right now there are a few AJAXy requests in the page. The list of artists is loaded separately from the page. Clicking on one or more artists loads a list of albums. Clicking on one or more albums loads a list of tracks. Right now all the data is in static files of JSON and there isn’t a server component, so it doesn’t matter what you select. Lastly, I plugged in the open source JW MP3 flash player for actually playing the music. This is probably a temporary solution, but it’s nice to be able to play the music on the page without reloading or opening an external application.

Jakub created the fantastic layout and has been helping with the UI — it was a train wreck before. He also helped me set up git so that we can share our work.

You can play around with a “live” setup here. I hope you like my Grammy award-nominated song, because that’s all you get.

Now that the sun has set and the temperature has dropped below 90 I can go home.