³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Podcasts Browser prototype
A few months ago a couple of my colleagues developed an optimised podcast directory for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. In a piece of work along similar lines, also started under our 10% time initiative, I've had a go at developing a full-fat podcast browser application prototype using the visualisation.
The podcast browser allows you to browse all our ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio podcasts, filtering for a particular station, genre or keyword. You can play a podcast episode while continuing browsing and subscribe to any podcasts you like. Please note this is a beta and may be unstable. It may slow down while buffering playback.
Please have a play with it and let me know about any bugs and/or if you have any suggestions for it. If you want to know a bit more about how it works, read on.
The project was initially a reason to try out , a powerful 3D library for ActionScript 3. There are a number of CoverFlow implementations using Papervision on the Internet and I used one by as a starting point because he built it using the latest Papervision v2 alpha codebase. The project also incorporates the library for animations. Both are available under the .
Adobe are currently developing (Adobe Intergrated Runtime) which provides a framework for writing desktop applications using HTML, JavaScript and Flash and this provides possible further development of the application. At the moment I have an AIR version of the same browser application but I intend to add the ability to manage podcasts subscriptions.
Quite a cool app, it would be good to see the AIR version though, is it available for download?
PS, it works ok in IE7.
Interesting! We've been thinking about the Cover Flow user interface at work, specifically wondering:
* Whether it works as well using a mouse as it does using a finger on the iPod Touch/iPhone.
* Whether it works best with images that you're familiar with (ie album covers in your personal collection) rather than public libraries.
* Will 'glass floor' reflections ever go out of fashion? :-)
Incidentally, it'd be good if you could update your prototype so that you can select (centre) podcasts by clicking on their cover, as well as using the slider...
Frankie
Hi
This is fantastic, with the ever growing number of podcasts available using the standard web site can be very frustrating.
One feature I wish was available, an easy way of seeing what shows had been newly released as podcasts. With the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ constantly advertising that the number of shows available is growing all the time and only allowing podcasts to be downloaded withing 7 days of broadcast it is easy to miss when a new interesting program is released without going right through the bbc.co.uk/podcasts website every week to see if you can spot any new additions.
But thanks for what you have given us so far with this app and the ipod touch/iphone podcast website.
Cheers
Really nice, good work Chris. The little touches are nice, like the images growing towards the screen as they're loading :). For some reason I think I'd like the satisfaction of being able to view *all* podcasts in one go, perhaps just to feel smug at the amount of podcasts we do. And I'd like to be able to grab and scroll them with my mouse like real coverflow. But it's really cool and shows our stuff off fantastically
Sorry for being a bit off-topic here but I can't find the right page to be able to do this.
I've thought of a nice new application which you could have on the site. I heard a song earlier on Radio 1 and for the life of me can't remember the name of it. How about a listing of all songs that you've played on each station in the last few days? (Wth times). You could integrate this into your song playing software to update the DB each time a song plays.
What do you think?
Steve - yes, absolutely, in fact we're already working on it. It should be live sometime in the next few months I think. In the meantime you can always check our .
Darren - we decided not to offer the AIR version for download because there we're worried that there may be issues with us providing a desktop podcast application. Sorry.
Is it possible to do something similar to this but with the iPlayer Radio instead?
Could you use this same interface to show all the shows available to stream through that player or can you not show Real and Windows Media streams through flash?
One of the things I found most useful about this app was the ability to listen to the podcast as a stream and still browse other shows.
If I could browse everything on Listen Again in the same way - that would be pretty cool.
It doesn't work... click click click drag... why...I can only open the first one...why.. eh it only works with the keyboard, oooh nice though. You would have thought someone would have made it work with the mouse....scrolls down finds scroll bar...arrrgg damn designers and their huge monitors... note to self must by a bigger monitor.