Thoughts for the next version

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Revision as of 23:14, 15 October 2008 by Horatio05 (Talk | contribs)
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Well, we're not completely finished making what we consider the "first" version. We still need to

  • ship the playlist object within Facebook/FBML
  • build all of the API in HTML
  • test it

Here are our current thoughts on how we plan to improve the iLike Developer Platform in the future...

Playing music while navigating between pages

First, we believe that users across multiple music applications (iLike's own, and those built by developers of this platform) will want to consumer music while navigating from page to page. To solve this problem, we will build a pop-out song-player that can persist music playback across pages. We will build this pop-out player as a simple HTML pop-up, but also using browser plugins for FireFox and Internet Explorer, for advanced users (those who hate popups but who know how to install/configure software and browser plugins).

The best thing for you: developers won't need to know the difference, we will just make it work. Continue using the same calls to iLikeDisplaySong and iLikeDisplayPlaylist, and we will modify the song-display interface in order to properly integrate a pop-out player.

Adding custom styles

Our basic user interface is design for simple Web pages: white background, basic typeface. We know that developers and users prefer greater customization, so we plan to add a css style parameter to the iLike Developer Platform, enabling developers to choose some styling parameters to customize the display of songs and playlists

We are considering offering all 3 of the following approaches:

  • automatically inherit font color, link color, background color/img for developers that don't want to do any work, and we'll match pretty well inside their UI
  • give developers the CSS style names so that they can include an inline <style> tag over-ridng these value (or they can put them directly in their css file)
  • allow developers to set global variables like _ilikeBGColor to define styles. This approach is useful for developers that are working in the constraints of script-only and who may not have access to the rest of the rendered page.

The specific styles we hope to let you customize are:

  • font color
  • bg color
  • bg img
  • bg repeat (repeat-x, etc)
  • link color

There is also a question of whether to include border for a playlist or song. We don't draw a border now, but we let any developer add their own. However, we are considering a border-color parameter and then drawing our own if specified.

More?

Other ideas people have suggested:

  • RESTful APIs for read/write access to the music selection in any playlist
  • Parameters for the pre-selected songs in the SongChooser
  • callback function for whenever a playlist is changed
  • iLikeDisplayAlbum call to display all the songs for a particular album
  • callback function when the song chooser popup closes
  • iLikeDisplayArtists
    • displays all artists I like
    • optional parameters
      • randomly pick X (e.g. randomly pick 5): shows X artists randomly picked
      • recent X (e.g. recent 5): shows X artists most recently added

Please add other stuff here, thank you very much

How about searching tags/genres? Playlists on tags and Genres? CSS Styling? Support for requets from Flash/Flex clients?

XML/JSON Webservice that allows for retrieving of music metadata and search results so that developers can customize the format in which they want the search box and results displayed?

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