Today my boss gave me a “Kinder egg”:http://www.magic-kinder.com/mkv2/IT_it/changeLanguage.html. Inside there was a toy car. I call him Stanley. He enjoys long drives, oil checks and sitting on my Macbook’s speaker (pictured below). I’ve also gathered all the ports of i7AWF and made a project page for them.

Stanley doesn’t do much. He just sits there. But I know that deep down, he cares for me. With those big brown headlights he admires me while I work. He’s a good toy car. But I digress. The i7AWF project is a huge success! I’ve had about 30.000 unique visitors to that blogpost alone, since monday. I made over 1600 diggs on “digg”:http://www.digg.com/ and it was exceptionally well received. The biggest success of the project, is the many ports that were written, and just days after its release, several people had written projects using the library! There’s a site where you can upload your song list from iTunes, and it will find all the cover art you are lacking. There’s a program that scans your harddrive for MP3 files, and finds the appropriate cover art. It’s quite cool, actually. I’m working on this site where I’m gonna host my projects, their subversion repositories, and I’m planning to write a few articles there too. Although not done (far from it), “it now hosts”:http://avantlumiere.com/project/i7awf/ a project page for i7AWF, and their respectable ports. Let me tell you about some of the projects I’m working on currently. CueDrop CueDrop is an application for Mac OS X. In iTunes and on iPods, since version 4.1 or so, you have been able to make something called an “enhanced podcast”. How is it enhanced? Well, you can attach various metadata to parts of the audio. Apple calls these “chapters”. You can put a picture per chapter too. Cool for podcasts, eh? Well, CueDrop goes a little further than that. It takes advantage of the same principles. I, for one, enjoy electronic music. I like listening to recorded radio shows and livesets played by DJs. These are typically one or two hours long, and they consist of anywhere inbetween 5 and 30 tracks played together. Whenever I hear something that I really like, I have to backtrack in the tracklisting (if there is one), and figure out what track is playing. That is so annoying! Ok, to the point: You give CueDrop a cue file (a file that contains the names of the tracks and when they start, I think this file format was used by Nero or something), and it will chapterfy your audio! What does that mean? That means that all the time, you will know exactly what track is playing. It means that you can pull down this little menu that appears in iTunes once a track is chapter-fied and jump directly to the track you want to hear. I have an initial version, but it fails to convert files over ~10 megs to AAC, probably because of a bug in QuickTime. That means I have to use Carbon APIs, and I simply haven’t gotten around to that yet. I will, soon. What else, what else.. Oh! recordb recordb is an online media database. It’s for CDs, DVDs, and even Books and Vinyl! It uses AJAX in all the right places, and it has it all figured out. It fetches covers from iTunes for your CD collection, and it fetches high resolution DVD covers from (for now) undisclosed sources. It features lending-out-to-your-friends, it features sharing your library with friends and family, it features personal ratings, and all kinds of cool stuff. I used to work with PHP a lot. Like a lot. So I know how to write PHP. Usually when I write projects, I like to take on a challenge. In this case, the challenge is not the project, its the quality of the project. Being a no-brainer, my focus goes into making it “right”. So, unfortunately no cool demos this time, just me blogging about a toy and some things I got in the pipeline.