Category: Companies

All Powerful Playlist Generator of the Future

I don’t know if this exists or not, but I certainly think it would be interesting.

I’d like a music playlist generator that does the following for me:

  1. Is random, but not entirely random. There should be a chance that the next song is similar to the current song.
  2. All probabilities should be adjustable
  3. There should be a probability that the next song is the next song on the album
  4. … that the next song is from the same album
  5. … that the next song is from the same artist.
  6. … that the next song is from the same genre.
  7. … that the next song is from a related genre.

Ideally, the probabilities would get higher as you went along — so that you’d likely stay in the same genre for a while, listening to a couple songs by a given artist before switching to the next artist.

Also, I think that the “smart playlists” in itunes are really just, “not retarded playlists” — I think they need a big upgrade.

I need to be able to groupings of unions and intersections (ands/ors), for one; and “subplaylists” would be good too. — Let me create a couple smaller playlists, and link them together into one larger playlist, possibly by having a, “where playlist = ‘x” option. That alone would let me do some ‘orring of ands’ that i want to do.

If anyone knows of something that does this, please reply to this post!

I wonder if it’s possible to write something like this using the itunes scripting interface?

Where will the browser appear as a platform first? — The Enterprise

Here’s a thought from the future:

  • The browser is the platform.
  • Microsoft has embraced this and has released Office as an ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax application for enterprises.
  • Microsoft is continuing its push into ‘Software as a Service’
  • You can now rent Office XML Application Server for Windows Server 2007
  • All of your enterprise users, using IE7.0, Firefox 2.1, Opera 16, or Safari can now access all their office applications from their desktop. (No, IE8.0 still won’t be out, but Firefox will be at 25% marketshare, and I’m not even going to guess at what Firefox will be alled then — how about ‘Burning Rabbit’ ?)
  • Here’s the catch — When users click on that ‘Microsoft Word’ button (or any of the office apps), a local application doesnt load. It loads a rich web application that closely mimics what we now think of as word.
  • All of the users have their own document storage on your Windows Server
  • All of the users have access to their documents seamlessly through existing methods (the remote storage automatically shows up in a user’s ‘my documents’ subfolder, apple’s finder/searchlight, etc)
  • Users can specify permissions on these centrally stored files, and they are easily shared — people don’t have to navigate to a random person’s desktop to get a document they shared, and a person doesn’t have to email it to them. The documents on the server are all searchable by the user’s local desktop (depending on permissions).
  • When it’s time to upgrade to a new version of Office XML Application Server, the upgrade is done on the server, once, and all clients automatically have their update.

    • I know some of this isn’t new OR likely, but it’s fun to take an old idea that was once pure ‘out there’ thinking and bring it down into the realm of “I see how this is possible even if it’s not either soon or likely”

    Also, who knows if it will even be microsoft who does this? Maybe it’s SUN, maybe this will all play out on linux desktops first, with “OpenOffice Network Server” — who knows. I think the day of the browser as a platform IS coming, and I think we’re going to see REAL productivity applications created this way, and I think it’s going to come to the enterprise first.

    They’re the ones who can see the real cost savings and increased productivity — through ease of deployment and upgrades for the former and ease of collaboration in the latter.

Original Ajax

I thought this was interesting over on Scobleizer: Apparently Jean Paoli’s team at Microsoft created XMLHttp in 1998 in order to give the Outlook team a way to do Outlook Web Access.

I mean, that’s not all that interesting. It’d be more neat if what we were using it for now was totally not what was expected, but I guess the tool is being used for what it was invented.

Full article about that, the Microsoft Atlas project, which I’m guessing is Visual Web Developer 2005 + ASP.NET 2.0, you can go to ScottGu’s Blog. There, he talks about the upcoming Atlas Client Script Framework, which will provide ajax support to ASP.NET

Next, we need to have System.Windows.Forms implemented in XHTML+CSS+AJAX. Wouldn’t that be something?