MeFi Music Gadget?

December 5, 2007 11:17 AM

Has anybody considered developing a MeFi Music Gadget (basically, an iGoogle gadget featuring an mp3 jukebox that plays the most recent or most favorited MeFi music posts on a subscriber's iGoogle homepage)?

Just curious to know if anyone else thought this might be a good idea, as I recently developed a similar application for my record label, and it's really easy to develop and publish gadgets to the iGoogle gadget directory.

posted by saulgoodman to Feature Requests at 11:17 AM (6 comments total)

I'm actually trying to get a friend to write an Adobe AIR app (like the Pounce and Twitter ones) that will play from any number of playlists (like recent songs, most favorited, your playlists, tag-based, etc). It'd run as a standalone flash type app, so it'd be completely browser independent. I think it'd be a killer app I'd use all the time.

So far I've had trouble finding any Adobe AIR developers though, since AIR is still in beta, it has changed significantly (pissing off a lot of AIR developers online), but there are lots of sample MP3/podcast player apps out there that I just need modified for our purposes.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:26 AM on December 5, 2007

i wasn't familiar with adobe air technology before your mention of it--thanks for pointing it out to me. reading up on it a little, it seems like the basic idea is to push web content (html, flash, etc.) to desktop client applications developed using the air technology, is that the gist of it?
posted by saulgoodman at 11:37 AM on December 5, 2007

It's basically like flash content running in a small widow, as an installable desktop app. So imagine the mefi music player applet but on your desktop as a draggable thing that didn't have to interact with your browser.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:23 PM on December 5, 2007

wow. that sounds cool. i may have to play around with that myself some, if i ever get any more spare time.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:54 PM on December 5, 2007

That indeed sounds cool. So, if I understand correctly, this app that you are trying to develop would be a desktop player for MetaFilter Music stuff?
posted by micayetoca at 7:24 PM on December 5, 2007

well, for what it's worth, i could build a google gadget to host any particular mefi music playlist we wanted in only a few minutes with nothing more than a url to an html page containing only a flashplayer running the mefi music playlist of choice... at it's most basic, it's as simple as creating a google gadget of a particular length and width that points to the html /flash/etc. content you want to serve up in the gadget.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:17 PM on December 6, 2007