Porting Pandora to the Desktop
May 3rd, 2008
So there I was, hacking away at AIR, and my iPod runs out of batteries. I was in that rare coding zen where you really need the audio to lock you out from the rest of the world, so I was fairly annoyed that the random conversation here at Apropos suddenly started to interfere with my productivity. No worries though, I could always resort to Pandora, right?
Now, I’m not a big fan of Pandora. Don’t get me wrong, I love what they’re doing and have found some phenomenal music there, but the fact that I always have to keep a browser window open to make use of their service has kindof annoyed me, and now was no different. I could deal with it though for the sake of productivity…. until I realized that AIR came with its own embedded WebKit browser.
Two beers and some experimentation later (apparently Webkit doesn’t like running on a transparent window), I am now sitting on an application I shall dub “PandorAIR”, because it’s an AIR port of Pandora. There’s not much to it- there doesn’t have to be- but for what it’s worth it’s a clean little application that I’m fairly certain others would be interested in adopting. You will need to download and install the AIR runtime environment first, but once you’re done with that you’re golden. I’ll work on putting an Installer Badge here as soon as I have the time.
Note that during the install it’s going to complain at you twice: Once because this application isn’t digitally signed, and once because AIR requests unrestricted access to your desktop. To fix the former… well, if you have a spare THAWTE certificate lying around I’d be grateful: that will uniquely identify myself as the distributor. As for the latter, well, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to take my word that I’m not trying to do nefarious things to your desktop (given that my professional credibility hinges on it, that should be easy).
width="100%"
height="200" style="border: 0px none #000000">
Caveat: It’s a bit of a memory Hog- 60MB. Trying to figure out how to fix that.
Very nice Mike! I was thinking about making one, but figured there had to be one out there by now. Little did I know a co-worker would make it!
HA!
Mike – this is freaking awesome. I saw your mention on twitter, and as an avid user of pandora had to nab it!
Michael, this is amazing! I love the small, dedicated, and ad free window, as well as the release from the fear of browser crashing ending my tunes. I was initially excited to minimize it to my tray…but I’ll wait patiently for that fix
Mike,
Please explain to the rest of us how to install and use your application.
Thanks.
Ivan
Very, very cool, Mike. I’m assuming that because it’s mainly web-based, it’ll still work fairly well with any Pandora upgrades?
I’ve had no problem with it stopping on minimize on Windows. There was a short gap at first, but that’s it.
Just found your app Googling “pandora AIR” and it works beautifully. Thanks for making this great app for AIR.
Really nicely done, thanks.
There is an official version of this that we use in the office all th time:
http://www.pandora.com/desktop
I have no idea if that is related to your work.