In Part I of Queued and AIR issues, I talked about some of the challenges we faced during the development of Queued, our AIR application that allows you to manage your Netflix queues. In this post, I’ll discuss five other issues we ran across.
Posts Tagged ‘queued’
Queued and AIR Issues, Part II
Monday, April 6th, 2009Queued and AIR Issues, Part I
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009During the course of developing Queued, we ran across a number of challenges developing with AIR that we needed to solve. Some were very difficult to get around, while others were the result of our team needing to think outside the web-based paradigm. In this post, I’ll talk about four issues we ran across that ended up shaping part of the Queued codebase.
Queued: API Challenges
Thursday, March 26th, 2009SitePen’s new Queued application works very well with the Netflix API, but the smoothness of this functionality was the result of a lot of research, and trial and error. In fact, this experience led me to propose that future project timelines should budget extra time when working with an unfamiliar API—and even more time when that API is brand new and untested. Netflix released one of the more exciting APIs in recent months and SitePen began to work with it right away. The Netflix team did great work on their API and they were also very helpful with us when we had questions or there was a bug on their end. I can imagine the challenges of setting up a (Netflix) REST API with an existing system and a large and complex library of items was not simple. Integration with the Netflix API presented its own set of challenges to us.
Queued: New Interaction Tricks for the Old Netflix Dog
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009Sometimes building an application from scratch is easier than building on an already existing interaction model. For Queued, our goal was to take the Netflix user experience and port it to a lightweight desktop application, while adding some modest enhancements.
Creating an alternate interface for an already well-known web site carries some unique responsibilities. First, unless there is something seriously wrong with the original site, straying too far from the established model can be counterproductive. Second, innovating on existing features becomes more important than replacing them. And third, adding new interface functionality without obstructing existing interactions remains a crucial consideration.
For the Queued project, SitePen faced the additional challenge of showing off features of Adobe AIR that might not necessarily lead to the most fluid interaction, but which were powerful enough to merit inclusion as a demonstration of AIR’s powerful capabilities. We’ll discuss a few of our interaction changes here, though these aren’t the only modifications that we decided to implement.
Queued Overviewed
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009Last month, we announced Queued, an open-source application for managing your Netflix Queue. Queued is a desktop application created with web technologies and techniques including the Dojo Toolkit, and it is distributed as an Adobe AIR application to provide several performance boosting benefits from living on the desktop.
At SitePen, we help our clients build great web applications. Most are not available for public consumption as they live behind company firewalls and/or require licensing. On the other hand, Queued is free and open-source software, BSD-licensed, and hosted on Google Code.
Simplifying Maintenance With Event Driven Design
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009Dojo is big, but it’s not unwieldy. You don’t have to learn it all to be productive. There are probably large pieces of the toolkit that you’ll never even need, but Dojo is built so that if you don’t need something, it doesn’t weigh you down. Where it counts, Dojo is actually quite lean. In the most basic unit of the toolkit—dojo.js itself—you’ll find enough power to get real work done. It’s worth looking at what you buy when you spend 26KB (gzipped) on JavaScript code rather than a pretty PNG. I think you’ll like what you find.
Let’s start with event handling. I’ll cover the basic techniques first, then finish with a real-world implementation of the concept by looking at Queued, our AIR-based Netflix queue manager.
Introducing OAuth in DojoX
Thursday, February 19th, 2009As web applications, services and mashups evolve, a perennial problem begins to assert itself—the issue of authorization (or in layman’s terms, making sure both application and service know who you are). A number of different approaches have been developed; one such approach is the OAuth specification, which is designed as a fool-proof way of validating requests.
Because of the growing popularity of the OAuth protocol, we’ve added support for it to the Dojo Toolkit in the form of dojox.io.OAuth—which can be used to sign any request made with the Dojo Toolkit’s various Ajax methods, including XHR, IFrame and Script transports.
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