Wednesday, August 20, 2008

list of radio streams that work on your iPhone with ooTunes

I spent a bit of time today exporting and making searchable the list of radio stations that I've confirmed to work on iphone and ipod touch via ooTunes.  This is (of course) an ever growing list, which I've built mostly by requests from folks who are wondering how to listen to streaming radio on their iphone, usually with a favorite station or two.  There are some great programs out there for streaming certain streams (AOL radio, Tuner, Flytunes.fm, etc.) but to my knowledge, ooTunes is the only one that allows windows media streams (.asf, .asx, .wmv, .wma, mms, etc.) to be streamed to iPhone.  So, without any further ado, check out the new searchable station list (I'll try to update it every few days), and as always, if you want to know if your favorite NPR station or specialty stream works, drop us a note and we'll look into it!

 

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

an undocumented change in iTunes interaction with applescript

Noticing a pattern here?  Apple changed the way that iTunes returns a track from most applescript calls.  Instead of returning a Track itself, it now returns a list with a single track in it.  Go figure, so this basically broke every bit if interaction between ooTunes and iTunes 7.7 or higher.  Since there's no documentation on it (that I've found), who knows if this was inadvertent or intentional.  We may never know.  It may change back, it might not.  Nevertheless, since this is pretty much the only easy way to interact with iTunes on Mac's, I'm betting there will be more than one broken application (since I already can think of a handful).  So, the latest release fixes this (and a number of other smaller bugs, mostly relating to windows and Quicktime).  

Also in this release, preliminary support for playing movies or viewing pdf's from a regular browser, instead of only on the iPhone/iPod Touch.  This feature is off by default, but can be turned on for just the session, or globally.  I used the excellent jquery media plugin to do the embedding based on mime type.  It's not perfect (yet), so add your comments below if you find problems or have suggestions!