WILLIAM KHOE

Been itching to blog about this, if not because of that NDA I signed

Yahoo! Music Unlimited (YMU) is now Rhapsody! I think this is one of the right move that Yahoo! made. We really shouldn’t be in the application business that compete head-to-head with iTunes. There had been several setbacks in this direction, particularly the acquisition of MusicMatch, which app ended up being cannibalized and its users alienated. I am glad we finally got out of this messy and unrewarding business and focus on what we do best. And suffice it to say that we (the Y! Media Player team) have got a lot of work ahead of us to integrate our player with Rhapsody.

You can read more about this announcement here. Seems like the media couldn’t get enough of Yahoo! these days.

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I have been working on this player for a while now along with 2 other team members and last week it is finally released! Soon after, it got featured on CNET, Wired and TechCrunch! Yahoo! Media Player enhances your web site or blog by creating an embedded player for each audio link. All the links can be played with one click, turning the page into a playlist.

It’s really exciting to see a product you had a hand on being used by other people out there! If you haven’t seen this player head to Aurgasm.us, a music blog with very nice collection of eclectic songs. I think I might do my own music blog soon.

If your hands start to get itchy and you want to try this player out, head to http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com. It really is as simple as adding one Javascript line!

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So what did you do this weekend? I had fun with Flex! Based on Ely Greenfield’s DisplayShelf, I present you, yet another ripoff of iTunes CoverFlow, I call mine iCatalog (watch out Apple, I am gonna trademark that name!) Browse bestselling Books, DVD, and Music courtesy of Amazon E-Commerce API. The cover images are huge, so make sure you have a big screen real-estate. (oh, and a fast computer, I got a 2Ghz w/ 2GB of RAM and it still lags)

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like to whet your appetite:

Oh, and please mind the adsense, I’m hoping it’d pay for 1/50th of the hosting fee.

Thanks KrazyDad for showing me how to cache these images on my own server so I can do whatever Bitmap mod I want to ‘em.

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If you use Facebook, now you can enjoy eBayer without getting of your seat! Announcing eBayer for Facebook! Add it to your application from here. You need to be a Facebook member to view/add the app. And as always, feedback is highly encouraged!

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• Refresh button now works. Of course, it’ll be disabled if no item is currently selected.
• Send feedback functionality is implemented. Now you can spam me as you please

Now…time to enjoy the rest of my weekend…

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So I’ve been hearing a lot of cool stuff about Flex and I finally started playing around with tutorials. But there isn’t really any good ones out there and what’s a better way to learn than to create something for real. So I decided to create a Flex eBay browser! I buy and sell quite a few stuff on eBay and I was thinking how I can use Flex to browse listings faster, hence eBayer was born.

This is an initial release, it’s still rough on the edges. If you have a second, please be my guinea pig, test the app and let me know what you think.

Some known bugs/limitation:

• You can only search US listings for now.
• Currency is US $ only for now.
• Mouse-wheel scroll does not work on Firefox (wmode=opaque/transparent bug with flash)
• The app is too tall (?) Most laptop users would not be able to see the bottom.
• Search results are capped at 100 listings for now.
• Description section disappear if you resize your browser to smaller than the flash size.

Features I am working on:

• The refresh button on Item Info panel
• Send Feedback functionality
• Viewing seller feedback
• Real time time-left countdown
• Charts (still not sure what the chart should show)
• Add to a listing ‘Watch List’
• A better error handling
• Listing pagination (not sure if this is really necessary, do people actually paginate through thousands of listings instead of refining their search term?)

Thanks Judah for your HTML Component!

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This set of tools is actually quite old, but I think it’s worth another introduction. The idea is to have the common utilities a web developer cannot live without, all in one page.

Some very useful ones I still use til today:

• Code Paste: Pasting code on email or IM usually ends up with unreadable code. Paste it here and send the URL instead. It has built-in code highlighting!
• Javascript CSS Compressor/Obfuscator: Strip whitespace and comments. Obfuscate Javascript with a click of a button.
• Encode/Decode: Do all sort of character encoding/decoding business here.
• Regex tool: Easily test your regex.

I’d really love feedback on this tool!

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