Advertising and being OPEN
I’ve been thinking a lot lately: about two differing methodologies that sometimes by chance, sync up. That is, the free and the not-so-free. Everyone wants to say the web is free, but what are the top sites? Aren’t they really basking in the power of advertising dollars. Technology is free as long as its funded by Doritos! That’s a tasty chip right there. Hold on, I’ll be back, I have to get some, and some pringles without principles while I’m at it…
Ok, back… nom nom nom…
As much as we’d like to not sell out or be sustainable by the viewers like you; it’s just not economical. There is always going to be some amount of whoring in order for us to pay the bills. What is putting the money in our pocket is someone not concerned about whether or not they can loan us money for a cup of coffee once in a while (payed subscriptions), but someone that’s concerned about a return on investment: monetary obligations. We all want someone to take us out to a nice restaurant and treat us right, but at the same time they’re trying to push their products on us… hard. So what’s wrong with everyone? Just because you say you’re open, doesn’t mean you are. You praise it like a religion, and then peddle your wares.
Annoyances with Android: MediaPlayer [Part 1]
For the past six months I’ve been a member of Grooveshark’s Android team. Before working on the Android project I was a Flash and Flex developer, working on the main Grooveshark web application and was moved to Android to, as I recall, help fix some of the problems with the 1.0 version of the application. Soon after joining the Android team my team member and I decided that the best way to fix 1.0 was to completely scrap it and start over. Many of the problems in the first version were because of some fundamental design decisions that did not fit well with the Android platform and to fix these problems would almost necessitate a complete rewrite either way.
User Expectations: Flash
This little gem popped up in my inbox not to long ago. VIP users of grooveshark are able to provide feedback and get to complain or file bug reports, which I randomly check (it would be a full-time job if I answered them). Most of the time it’s either feature requests, complaints that they spent about a cup of coffee’s worth of money, or in this case telling us how awesome we are.
Here’s the guts of the email (obviously removed some content for privacy):
mood: Impressed
feedback report:
Nothing too contributary to say to be honest.Just that your product is AMAZING.
It’s literally changed my entire view that every flash application is buggy and unreliable, you guys have done an absolutely stunning job. It’s so bug-less it’s suspicious!
Keep up the great work!
Show Me More: Paging Array Collections
I have been working for a while recently on grooveshark’s newest feature: activity I needed to come up with a way for our array collections to only render or show a small set of what feeds actually have in them. [People stop listening to so much damn music.]
What is great about array collections is they handle all sorts of stuff for you, such as binding and updates. But what’s really great is the ability to differentiate a view from the underlying data, which allows you the use of filters for features like active searching on a collection.
So what I needed was a way to click show more and it would reveal the next set.
And extend and implement…
private var _pagesVisible:uint = 1;
[ChangeEvent("collectionChange")]
public function get pagesVisible():uint
{
return _pagesVisible;
}
public function set pagesVisible(value:uint):void
{
// allow it to be ready for soon to be populated data
if (value <= (pages+1)) {
_pagesVisible = value;
this.refresh();
}
}
private function feedFilter(item:Object):Boolean
{
var isIncluded:Boolean
= (source.indexOf(item) < PAGE_SIZE * pagesVisible);
hasMorePages = !isIncluded;
return (isIncluded);
}