I spent most of this afternoon and evening trying to get the myitunes.swf widget to load it’s actual data from somewhere other than the iTMS. Part of that was writing a fairly simple Cocoa app to generate the XML data I wanted – i.e. a “feed” or my actual favourite music, not a list of stuff I’ve purchased from the iTMS. Grrr.
Unfortunately, despite the app being very successful, the bloody widget always uses https://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/ as it’s base for the data URL. I haven’t found any way around that as yet. The only suggestion that’s still a possibility, that I haven’t tried yet, is embedding the widget inside another Flash widget, which would apparently let me intercept URL requests and rewrite them. I don’t particularly feel like learning how to use Flash to that detail, though, and Adobe’s Flash app sucks royally.
The XML generator is something, though. I’ve called it myRealFavourites for lack of a real, creative name. It’s revealed some unexpected ‘favourites’, depending on what criteria you use for ranking… I might spiff up it’s output a bit more, and provide the raw feeds if nothing else.
Or, make a JavaScript widget which looks much like myitunes.swf but doesn’t suck. That was F1’s suggestion, but again I don’t see why I should spend a week learning some dodgy scripting language in gross detail – especially the JavaScript/HTML/CSS combo, which is probably the worst ever to exist – just so I can display my music preferences in an aesthetic fashion.
I hate web development. It truly is the greatest mystery of our age how so much outwardly pleasant and functional infrastructure can be built on such a crap foundation. Proof that given a soup spoon, one can build a diesel locomotive.
