Irish Developer » My Space Now Playing??

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My Space Now Playing??

Posted 2 years ago, mid-August by Dave.
Categories: Uncategorized, Internet.
Post Views: 677 Views.

Last week I decided to redesign my My Space profile, since I work as a web design and developer. I thought I would design a profile that shows my skills. After a few days and loads of comments (all great comments) about the design. I decided that I needed to push the boat further, so I decided to make a Flash interface to display what I am currently listening to on my iTunes and Windows Media Player.

The Flash interface was the only way I was going to get what design & developers call Dynamic Content on the page because MySpace blocks the most common scripting language to do this, Javascript. And since Flash has its own scripting language, Action script. It was the only real choice. The way the interface works is, I have an addon to both Windows Media Player and iTunes that connects to one of my Internet servers every time I change a song. Then the Flash player connects to the same server and reads the information through a markup language called XML.

One of the problems that I found was that the server was called 15 seconds after each song started (to allow for me skipping through songs), but the Flash player loaded the play list into the players cache (the memory) so the song you would see was old and you would have to refresh the page to see the new song. So using some fancy scripting with VB Script (Visual Basic Script) and random numbers in the query string I was able to get around this. The second problem is, Flash doesn’t update on its own; you need some scripting to do this. So now that I have all these little problems solved I have the player refreshing every 60 seconds and displaying the new song. I hope to have a version in the few weeks for the public.