WebGyver Revisited

jQuery + MP3 = jPlayer

Posted by admin on May 16, 2009  |  No Comments

Every now and then, someone comes up with something that seems so simple, it makes you wonder why you didn’t think of that yourself. Then you start thinking of all the possibilities that this new technology or gadget has to offer, the many uses and the smiles on your clients’ faces… and you realize that the person who came up with this thing is a genius.

May I introduce to you: jPlayer by Happyworm (who cites Mark Boas, Mark Panaghiston and Silvia Benvenuti as the essential key players in the development of this super awesome multi-media jQuery add-on).

Don’t get me wrong, by the way. I didn’t mean to say that the jPlayer jQuery MP3 player plug-in is a simple thing. It just seems so simple, and like all things that seem simple, there’s a ton of work and thought and sweat that goes into it.

In the end, the easier and simpler it looks to the people who will be using it, the more work it requires to craft it.

OK, but rather than gushing on and on about the many possibilities and the various configurations of jPlayer, please go and check it out yourself at the jPlayer demo page. All I would like to say is that several ideas came to my mind immediately when I found out about jPlayer:

• Build audio training directly into web applications
• Finally add audio jukeboxes in a straightforward and stylish manner to all those band web sites I’m working on
• Provide audio annotations to blogs and photo web sites

One caveat, though, just in case you’re picky about Flash or the Flash Player: Yes, there is invisible Flash involved. You need to be able to store and access SWF files on your web server. That’s nothing fancy, really, but it might be a hassle for the 1% or 2% or Internet users who do not have the Flash Player installed on their systems.

And now, dear reader, if you’d please excuse me, I have some development tests to do, involving MP3 audio.

Simple E4X Example with RegEx (Flex)

Posted by admin on May 9, 2009  |  No Comments

Michael Fitchett, who runs the Fitchett blog, has posted a simple but very educational Flex example, showing how to display XML data from an RSS feed in a datagrid, using E4X as the resultFormat.

What’s so amazing (to me) is that :

1. It is simple
2. It works
3. It shows you ho the E4X syntax works
4. It does some extra stuff on top of that
5. Michael Fitchett is providing the source code for all of that

The majority of experienced Flex developers agree that E4X is the best format to work with XML data in Flex. Unfortunately, if you’re trying to find code examples of how to make that work, you can spend hours on end to find what you’re looking for. And even then, all you get are random snippets with partial solutions.

Thanks to Michael, I was able to finish a personal project (trying to learn how to work with E4X so that I’m prepared when I take on actual XML projects in the future). In the end, it was all about making a couple of syntax changes . . . and magically, everything began to work.

However, unlike some of the people I sometimes work with, I would never say, “Oh, was that all?”*

I am very grateful for the example and the inspiration.

*Have you ever worked on somebody’s computer to fix an annoyance? Or look at someone else’s code to get them over a hump that was causing work to be delayed? By the time they call you, it’s already been hours or a day since they last did anything productive. Then you come by and look at the problem, try a few things, and POOF, it works. After that, they just shrug their shoulders and say something like, “Oh was that all? I could have done that.”