My fourth descent into ADD » The Web

Go Home: One-Click directions for iPhone hack

jordan314 — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 07:14:24 +0000

Here is a hack that allows you to click a button on your home screen and get directions home or anywhere else from your current location.

Instructions

To begin, open Safari and go to this address: http://jordanbalagot.com/gohome.php

Next, enter your full address into the address field:

Then, add the next page to your home screen by clicking on the share button, the middle bottom button in Mobile Safari:

Choose any name for it.

Now, whenever you click on the Go Home shortcut, it will first open Safari, and then redirect to google maps with automatic directions to the address you specified.

You can repeat the steps again to set up as many shortcuts you want, such as work, friends, parks, etc.

This has been tested on the iPhone 3G, 3GS, 4, and the iPad, and should work on all iOS devices. It does not require a jailbreak. Currently this only works on iPhones in the English language.

This hack relies on connecting to my site to redirect you to your current location in google maps. Here is my privacy statement: I don’t care where you live!

?autoplay=false

jordan314 — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:42:59 +0000

I added this simple code to turn off autoplay when loading my site:

$autoplay = ‘true’;
if($_REQUEST['autoplay'] == ‘false’)
{
$autoplay = ‘false’;
}
?>
[object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”300″ height=”153″
data=”http://jordanbalagot.com/xspf_player.swf?playlist_url=http://jordanbalagot.com/jbplaylist.xml&autoplay=&autoresume=0&volume_level=50″>

value=”http://jordanbalagot.com/xspf_player.swf?playlist_url=http://jordanbalagot.com/jbplaylist.xml&autoplay=&autoresume=0&volume_level=50″ />
[/object>

(Replace the [s with <)
Now you can add ?autoplay=false to any page or blog post on my site and it will disable autoplay.

‘Neoteny and Human Evolution” video online

jordan314 — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:21:21 +0000

I did the music for Andrew Lehman’s “Neoteny and Human Evolution” video, RT ~10 mins:

Andrew reaches a very interesting theory towards the end of the video. Check out his work on evolutionary theory at Neoteny.org.

I will be uploading an edited version of the music in mp3 format soon.

Yi Soon Shin Trailer Online, MP3 Download Available

jordan314 — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:38:49 +0000

I recently completed the score for the trailer to Yi Soon Shin, a comic by Onrie Kompan:

The mp3 is available here.

Please visit the Yi Soon Shin Website for more information about the comic, it’s very good!

Huge Improvements to the Flash Music Player – Autoresume, Volume, Shuffle, and more

jordan314 — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:24:48 +0000

I upgraded the XSPF player to a hugely improved version I found here:
http://www.boutell.com/xspf/
Now, as you surf the site, the music will auto-resume to where you left off. Also, if you stop the music, it remains stopped as you surf other pages or come back to my site later.
The enhanced XSPF player also allowed me to set the default volume from the start (50%), allows you to seek through songs, and allows you to shuffle and repeat tracks.
Thank you, Fabrico Zuardi (original creator), Lacy Morrow (shuffle version), and Boutell.com (auto-resume version)!

Edit:
Looking at the ActionScript, I realize I was wrong, after a minute auto-resume times out and the site will go back to playing from the beginning. This was a feature programmed so that auto-resume only jumps between pages. I’m debating turning off the one-minute time-out. What do you think? Is auto-play acceptable if the volume is turned down? When you come back to a site days later, do you want it to resume playing music where you left off?

New Facebook App: Group Friends by Location

jordan314 — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:45:16 +0000

I wrote a new facebook app, Group Friends By Location.
If you install it, it shows your friends grouped by city, state, or country. This can be used as a reference to create events and easily invite friends in your location. Please try it out and let me know what you think. Note: the app cannot count friends who have set their location via API access to private.

Syndicated floating flash music player available

jordan314 — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:05:24 +0000

I’m going to be including the floating flash player with my music on some other sites I’ve made. If you’re interested, here is code that you can paste in that will display the floating flash player on your site and remotely fetch the most recent music from my site:

Music from jordanbalagot.com

If you want the music to start automatically call this swf instead:

http://jordanbalagot.com/xspf_player.swf?playlist_url=http://jordanbalagot.com/jbplaylist.xm&autoplay=true

Sometime in the future I’ll make a separate playlist that only has more web-suited background music.

New Flash MP3 Player

jordan314 — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:50:20 +0000

I’ve finally implemented a working new flash mp3 player. It floats in the bottom right corner of all of the pages on this site and highlights my more recent work. On the home page, it plays automatically, and on my blog it starts paused. It uses the excellent XSPF web music player and this floating layer script.
If it gets in the way, please make your browser window wider.
Please feel free to leave me comments or suggestions!

Peeling it Off Now Online, Official Selection at Slamdance

jordan314 — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:24:35 +0000

Matthew Singletary’s Peeling it Off is now available for viewing online, and also made the Slamdance film festival:
http://www.slamdance.com/videos/products/742.html
I did all of the music in the film except for the R&B song.
Please check it out, and if you like it, vote for it in the festival! Voting registration is free.
Thanks for watching and congrats Matt!

New Custom Growl and MP3 Download Notification System

jordan314 — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 05:27:03 +0000

This weekend I wrote and combined some custom statistics software that broadcasts activity onto my site. I’ve been getting lots of direct mp3 traffic from China thanks to the music search engine Soso. I wanted to highlight that activity as well as try to encourage users to browse the rest of my site. I also wanted to access download information easily and make my site more interactive.

The first thing I did was wrote a mod_rewrite in my htaccess file to redirect mp3 requests to php. I had the php script store the request to a database, and then serve the file.

From there, I could analyze which of my mp3s were most popular. On my homepage, I visualized this with an open source tool, HTML-Graphs. If you click on an MP3, and then refresh my homepage, the graph will update.

Next, I wanted to broadcast across my site whenever someone downloaded an mp3. I have used Growl for a long time on Mac OS X and it is one of my favorite things about using my computer. I wondered if there was a way to emulate Growl on my website, and quickly came across jGrowl. Amazing! You can generate growl notifications on your website with one line of code–it’s actually easier than using the applescript/shell hooks regular Growl uses.

So I used this helpful tutorial on AJAX polling (in this case for a chat program) to poll my custom site events database for changes. I ended up using jQuery instead of Prototype though because jGrowl uses jQuery and they conflicted with each other. Once I wrote the script, it was easy to include it from my blog template and other pages of my site.

Now, if you open up a new window and click on any MP3 on my site, within 10 seconds every page of my site will broadcast that that mp3 is being downloaded. Try it! It will broadcast to several pages if you have several pages open, and will even work if you use a different computer to download the file. It shows the first two digits of your IP address to show that I’m not “faking” this, but rest of it is masked to protect your privacy.

I imagine this is just the start of new forms of website interaction possibilities. The other jGrowl notifications that come to mind are facebook and twitter status updates and blog posts. Any RSS feed could potentially be imported too. I think I will use this for site news as well. What would you like to see in my website or other website growl notifications? Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions.

Edit: Wow, because it’s just AJAX and javascript, both monitoring and downloading even work on the iPhone!