Tape it off the Internet, iPhone

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First: I have a few invites to the beta of Tape It Off The Internet, which is sort of a Web 2.0 torrent search engine. It actually indexes TV shows by name, season, and episode number, then provides links to torrents for each episode. This is a lot more efficient than blindly searching or browsing Mininova or eztv. It also has all the requisite Web 2.0 junk: social networking, tags, RSS feeds, fancy graphics with rounded corners, etc. The content is a little sparse right now and some of the features are still rough, but it is certainly shaping up to be fancy and nice. I believe I have 5 invites, so if you want one, drop me a line.

In my previous post, I talked about the iPhone and how my gut feeling is that the “real” applications will be Apple-only, with maybe a few 3rd party titles, to keep the user experience consistent. I also said that my gut feeling is that they’ll open widgets up to everyone because they are nicely sandboxed. It looks like the closed-application model is the way it is going to be in the immediate future. You know what? That’s actually okay. The web browser is quite powerful, and there’s a crapload of stuff you can do with fancy “Web 2.0” sites. And you know people are going to build webapps targeted specifically to that phone. The Widget situation–can we add our own, or are we stuck with Apples?–is still up in the air.

With all the crazy JavaScript stuff I have been doing recently–some of which I can share and some of which is under NDA — I wonder if it would be useful to (re-)study up on Widget creation and fancy client-side browser applications. I wrote a Widget a long time ago, back when they were first announced, called Codes. It that does some basic encoding/decoding of things and is primarily of interest to programmers and ARG players. There may or may not also be an easter egg in a hardware product somewhere out there that is effectively minesweeper implemented entirely in JavaScript. I may just poke around at other useful (to me) client/server webapps in the coming months.

Posted in: Code

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