that’s whacked

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Wednesday, Oct 17. 2007  –  Category: Songbird

Don’t you love it when you add one cool thing to another cool thing to get something even better?

I do.

Root beer is good. Ice cream is good. Root beer floats are fantastic. Daphne was good. Velma was good. Add them together and you had the Scooby Doo gang (well the only members worth watching anyway).

So Songbird is good. Nay, Songbird is great (okay so I’m a little biased). Last.fm is good.

Songbird + Last.fm is yabba-dabba-doorific.

Here’s a really simple example I threw together to familiarise myself with the Webpage API. (Of course it only works from inside the Songbird client, so make sure you load it from there) It’s perhaps not the greatest, but it is pretty straight-forward, so hopefully it’s of use to others. Basically it adds listeners to the Songbird events that monitor when the tracks change. It then makes AJAX queries to Last.fm to load album cover information (including cover art), tag information for the current track, and a list of similar artists – all using Songbird’s wicked powerful Webpage API and Last.fm’s handy dandy XML web services APIs. On the right hand side, it does some somewhat unrelated tag-clouding of your own media library. Yeah – it’s not related to Last.fm, but I wanted to try it. So sue me.

So this is just a mere example of the kind of goodness that comes from two open APIs adding up to a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.