dTunes
And here we are, with another idea and potential project. I have many as you probably know reading this blog. But I normally don’t put the necessary effort to transform the initial example into a full fledge project. Hopefully this idea will see the light just because my spare time has moved into my full-time job. Here’s some personal background. I have to spend around 3 months unemployed. So I was thinking which way to spend the free time I have being productive from the programming point of view. I never had such a possibility from the beginning of my professional career and the results were a bunch of unfinished spare-time projects. As things stand now those projects have less and less reasons to exist and my time is constrained before I’ll start a new job. Well I couldn’t resist to think about the next killer-app! :) Of course I don’t mind if this application is not cool enough and doesn’t have the necessary market space. I’ll have to learn many interesting things and this is just what I want.
You probably know that there are several tricks you can use with Google Search to find available media on the Internet. If you don’t try this to see all Coltrane’s songs actually available for download or streaming. The Google Search API is just one service available on the Net where you can find that kind of information. Of course contents on the Internet are always changing because they’re the result of the average sharing of the community. But who cares if you just want to build a temporary playlist for your current session? For session I mean the time you spend in front of the laptop or some other networked system that you can use to listen music or watching movies. Is not much different from an on-demand streaming radio: you just need some background music but you also want to filter what to hear. So here’s the “disposable” concept: background music or videos that you don’t want to download or organize (maybe with a specific application) but just use for a specific moment of your day.
dTunes is exactly this: a web-based (nothing to install) client-only (no server-side apps need to be up) media content player and browser. What is collected in dTunes is subject to the current availability of what was discovered. In other words, content playback can abort anytime even if when there are more sources of the same content. But this is not the point: the content in dTunes is unreliable by design.
What’s the actual status? I did several proof of concept and I started working at the communication library which provides a generic JSONRequest object to use to make asynchronous calls to JSON-based (with padding) services. This library is also intended to be a sub-product available separately and it’s almost done. Since I’m not proficient with JavaScript I’m using GWT with great satisfaction until now (there is some JavaScript to be written though). My intent is to release the JSONRequest component first, just as an excuse to publish the source code and relative project structure. There are many interesting technical issues writing the code I’d like to talk in this blog, so expect updates regularly.
And now the legal part. Browsing the Net you can have access to copyrighted material. I’m not an attorney so I’m not sure about what I’m saying here just using common sense. As I said, the content cannot be stored locally (at least this is not a service provided by dTunes), so if the source disappears, the user loses the content. So dTunes cannot be seen as a p2p application for sharing files. The share is done once somewhere, while dTunes stores just a pointer to that location. Since the content is unreliable by definition, I’d like to offer the link to the online store where the content can be purchased in case the user wants to fully experience the content. For this reason I find difficult to compare the songs from a CD or from iTunes to a disposable song. It looks to me that a disposable song is more comparable to a preview before purchase instead.
Well, back to work. December is not so far after all.
Reblog Details
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
