NOA Development status
Time for a small roundup...
Lyrics
The good: it sure is possible, and it sure is an upcoming feature.
The bad: it's a lot of work. We need to consult multiple sites to find good lyrics. So it will take some time before lyrics will be available.
Updates
The automatic updates are a bit of a problem.
The good: it works, even when still residing in the firefox sandbox (no automatic firefox updates)
The bad: Adding support for radio stations means everybody gets an update notification, even when not interested in those new radio stations....
Known bug
Each firefox window (not tab) will run it's own NOA. And each NOA lives it's own life.
This means that each window will check for new song information every 15 seconds, lookup album info, search for covers.
Okay, that's a small overhead, but it does cause some visual problems, because Amazon Webservices only allows one request per second. This sometimes prevents a Firefox window to display cover art.
Google App Engine
All of the above makes us think about a totally revamped NOA using Google App Engine (GAE).
We did some testing, and it looks promising.
A drawback is that both the Python language and the Big Table technologies are new to us, so development could go a bit slow.
And on the other hand, using GAE could give us a lot of power.
- add radio stations dynamically (no need for another NOA update)
- change logic (and bugfixes) without having to update the NOA extension
- keep track of played songs, maybe add them to a google calendar
- list statistics (most popular songs)
- keep usage statistics (anonymous of course)
- ...
The bottom line is that development of NOA-as-we-now-it will be frozen,
but a more flexible version 2 is on it's way...