An undocumented change in Javascript on your iphone

Just thought I'd make a quick mention of a change that broke some ooTunes functionality in the safari browser on the new iphone 3g and iphone 2.0.  When picking a specific genre, artist or album from a playlist, ooTunes updates the list of songs using ajax, by listening for the "onchange" event on the select component.  Well, with the new firmware, that stopped working.  I did a few quick checks and thanks to someone with the new firmware, discovered that the event is simply never fired anymore.  The only event I found that I could use that would work the same on both firmware's was the "onblur" event.  This means now the playlist isn't updated until you click "done" whereas before, it updated as soon as something was picked from the list.  The change was already made and can be downloaded from the ooTunes website.

A busy week for streaming radio to your iPhone

This week was the launch of the new, faster iPhone, and the opening of the iPhone app store.  While the launch had a few rough times, and the app store is pretty underwhelming, there are a few great things.  I already commented on the Pandora app (and should have blogged about the last.fm one, since imho it's waaaay better than the Pandora one).  Anywho, lots of cool stuff in the future, even if the app store's pretty anemic for now.

So, what's new with ooTunes?  I just uploaded a brand new version (0.3.3.3).  Here's a few of the changes/fixes/improvements:

ooTunes can now stream windows media streams (lots of internet radio stations use this format...  usually the stream address begins with mms://).  iTunes can't play these streams, but with the help of a wonderful free (and open source) program called VLC, you can now play these streams on your iPhone.  See the transcoding help section for the nitty gritty details.

Trying to keep up with the big guys, we added the ability to start a new Pandora station from a search term.  In the future we'll have a way to start one from any song in any of your playlists (like you can by dragging and dropping songs on the pandora playlist in a regular browser), but for now, manual search will have to do.

Continuous play playlists in mobilesafari (the browser on the iPhone) have been re-implemented.  Apple has left things in a pretty frustrating state when it comes to playing music in anything but the iPhone's own song library... (e.g. no javascript player controls or events in safari, no background processes in SDK applications, no way to keep playing when the phone is locked, no way to use the double button push to bring up the controls, the modal quicktime player in safari, the skip buttons won't skip to the next song in the quicktime player, can't show album art, etc., etc.)  Nonetheless, we've done the best we can given the current state of things.   The nice thing about playing music in mobile safari is that you CAN put it in the background and it will keep playing... you just can't show anything else (even art)... you can even lock the screen and it will keep playing... so it's the closest thing to "usable" that we have. 

Previously, we used a javascript timer to guess when the next song should be played.  Unfortunately that broke things when you put safari in the background since javascript stops... so we use genuine playlists now...  there are two (new) downsides to this... 

1.  You have to push "play" twice to get the playlist to start... once to load it, once to start it playing.

2.  When you put safari into the background or lock your phone, the next song doesn't start playing until it is COMPLETELY DOWNLOADED!  So, even though the player is CAPABLE of buffering and playing before the whole song is streamed, it choses not to when in the background... if you have a fast connection (wifi) this download is fast and it's not super annoying.  On slower connections, it's more annoying.  As a (crappy) workaround, you can simply switch back to Safari for one second and it starts playing, then go back to whatever else you were doing.  

Seriously though, it sucks that developers are left with two (differently) sub-par solutions for streaming music on a device that is designed to do so.  Hopefully apple will address this in the future. 

Bugs fixed:

windows iTunes interaction was broken in a previous release... songs should be marked played again with this version (if you have that turned on).

A "remember me" login option was added.  NOTE: you should be careful with this since it's stored in a cookie (it expires in 7 days), so you probably don't want to use it on a computer that others use.

Fixed a minor bug with the seeqpod playlist showing up as playable without anything to play.

Future:

Now that we have all the hooks in to use VLC, that opens the door for future support and transcoding of lots more formats and thus, lots more content.  

Apple says they're "processing"  my iphone developer program application.  Hopefully that gets approved quickly... I have a great "flashlight" application that just HAS to be in the store ASAP!

Updates... Linux iphone streaming, last.fm ratings, etc.

A couple notes of fixes/improvements in the latest version...

1. The server will now run on Linux (or solaris, or any other *nix). It was an easy port (ooTunes is mostly written in java) but there were a few difficulties.
2. There is now an option to turn off all iTunes interaction globally. This means a) you can run without any dependence on iTunes and b) you won't have to have iTunes open while running ooTunes, unless you want iTunes' artwork or marking things played, etc.
3. Fixed a few minor bugs in the price search code (if you haven't seen, you can search 10 stores for prices of mp3 downloads or cd's). I've added a few new stores and fixed some bugs that were preventing finding some albums.
4. Fixed pandora integration in the browser. The pandora flash player wasn't working in all browsers. It should be working again.
5. Now, when you give a last.fm stream a low or high rating, it is marked "love" or "ban".
6. I've been working on a couple youtube demo videos... they may be a good place to find out about features that may not be documented yet.
That's all.
Enjoy!

P.S. Still waiting to hear back from Apple about being accepted to the iPhone Developer program... kinda frustrating, but at least ooTunes should work just fine in Safari on iPhone or iPod Touch, even the new 3G version.