Look, I’m all for downloading music legally and I’m glad to see more and more purveyors of legal downloads appear on the web, but if there’s only a 1 cent difference in price, what’s the frakkin’ point?
1 cent? Really?
The other day I was catching up on the last few episodes of Hak5, one of my favorite internet-TV shows, and in one episode Darren Kitchen was doing some neat tricks with PHP, Twitter and VLC. This got me thinking about what other kinds of fun projects Twitter could be used for.
Twitter is a great service, not very reliable however (fail whale anyone?), and there are already plenty of mash-ups that uses it for various things. My idea was to use Twitter to select what plays in iTunes. People could send me replies with songs in them and if the song was in my iTunes-library it would be played, as simple as that. Not very useful, but a fun experiment if nothing else. So I started coding.
In order to control iTunes I had to delve into AppleScript for the first time. I find it to be an odd language, but whatever, for this project it’s definitely the most appropriate choice for getting quick results. One of my favorite languages is PHP so that’s what I chose for the control structure of the whole thing.
A couple of hours later I had my first prototype and now an additional few hours of tweaks I give you… TwitTunes!
This is how it works:
Person #1 starts TwitTunes on his Mac. TwitTunes sends a tweet – “#TwitTunes starting” – using Person #1s Twitter-account to let the world know that it is running.
Person #2 sends a reply on Twitter containing search words. These search words are then used to search through Person #1s iTunes-library and the first matching song found is played.
Not very fancy and far from perfect, but admit it, crowdsourcing your jukebox via Twitter is a pretty nifty idea and this is my very first proof of concept 
If you wanna try out TwitTunes yourself you can download it here (sloppy source code included of course), and if you have any feedback I’ll be happy to hear it.
One feature that I’ve found very nice on the PS3 is that I can download playable demos of games from the PlayStation Store. When games cost as much as they do these days it’s really a great thing to be able to take them for a little test drive before forking over my hard-earned cash for the real deal.
Yesterday I downloaded the demo for “Conan”, and oh boy am I ever glad I did. You see, if I’d paid actual money for this piece of crap I’d be livid!
First of all: the graphics. Hello? Isn’t this supposed to be an HD-capable console? I’ve got PS2 games several years old that look way better – “God of war” and “Killzone” to name a few.
Secondly and probably most importantly: the gameplay. You have basically no friggin’ moves and the game seems to respond very slowly so combat is both frustrating and a bore. The minute elements of puzzle-solving that was featured in the demo was also laughable.
Thirdly, the demo is way too short for an action-adventure game. I mean really, I played through it completely in minutes and afterwards I wasn’t one bit interested in seeing more since the demo left me thinking that this was what the game was like, only longer.
So thanks Sony for helping me steer clear of this turd of a game.
Demos I have been enjoying though and that made me wanting to play the game for real are “The Club” and “Uncharted: Drake’s fortune”. Now those left me salivating slightly and definitely wanting more!
The free download of “Lemmings” (full game!) also put a big smile on my face. What an awesome game in all of it’s simplicity and how missed it ever since I played it ages ago on the original GameBoy.
I’ve also download “Kane & Lynch” and “Stranglehold”, but I haven’t gotten around to trying them out yet.
