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After the excitement of getting liveText into RadioAunty, I thought I’d get my head down and implement the two biggest features I get asked for. These being:

• Choose from any of the 66 online BBC Radio stations
• Navigate through the past 7 days ondemand listening

See more RadioAunty photos

So, this update has taken quite a few train journeys, but I hope you’ll agree with me in thinking the hard work has paid off. I’m really quite pleased with the results. The application now packs quite a punch feature wise, but still fulfils its primary remit of being really simple to operate, hiding any extra functionality from those that just want to listen to the Radio.

As always, if you’re not interested in reading this stuff, your current version will autoupdate, or just head off to http://whomwah.github.com/radioaunty and download it.

Local Radio Support. Currently in RadioAunty, you can only listen to the national stations. There are many more BBC stations available, specifically local ones. You can now go into the preferences, and choose from all the BBC stations, selecting which ones appear in the Listen menu.

See more RadioAunty photos

The ability to now opt-in to these extra stations is a design choice. The most important thing for me, is that RadioAunty is just a simple radio (the same goes for TellyBox as a television). All these updates I build bring great extra functionality, but my first assumption is that people couldn’t care less, and just want to listen to the radio. Anything I do to make this more complex, just means they won’t use it.

So, now, not only do you have the opportunity to listen to these other stations easily, you also get the current schedule and the ability to play catchup shows too, all within a very simple interface.

See more RadioAunty photos

7 Day Catchup. Talking of catchup, this brings me on to the other big feature I have added. I really think this one takes RadioAunty to a new level, and why I still believe native radio listening applications, with their ability to spread the UI around desktop, will always be far superior to anything you could do on a website. The ability to simply see all of the available catchup programs for the last 7 days in simple menus. If you can click them, you can play them. So if you’re listening to Radio 1 on Monday and would like to listen to the Essential Mix you missed because you were in bed, you can now simply navigate to the previous Friday, and see the essential mix in the drop down menu.

See more RadioAunty photos

Also, as you can see above, when you hover on any of these menu items, you also get a brief synopsis and how long there is left to listen.

So, if you like this application and it’s features, please spread the word. I really believe this is a great way to listen or catch up on BBC Radio.

After talking about XMPP and pubsub in my last post, the I have just pushed said version 2.0 release of RadioAunty. It took a bit longer than I expected, mostly due to me adding the LastFM scrobbling support I alluded to.

A few things I should mention about these new features. RadioAunty is written by me, to try interesting things with the BBC’s radio player, that the BBC chooses not to do themselves. This means features may come and go. So the Twitter support is now gone. Due in part to the fact I stopped using the service day-to-day a while back, and didn’t want to re-implement the OAuth stuff.

The new BBC Livetext support is a little bit experimental. Whilst the service is stable, I can’t guarantee it will be available all the time, although I’ve seen no problems to date. This and the fact that it currently will not work if you don’t have direct access to the internet, for example if you are behind a firewall and go through a proxy. If someone fancies adding SOCKS support, that would be wonderful.

The LastFM scrobbling support is also a bit experimental. It’s using the API 2.0 Beta which is still actively being worked on. I created a little Scrobble class to do the work. Do note though, that the app will only scrobble based on the now playing information provided by the liveText service. Every tracked played is not always sent via liveText, so you may well see some tracks not showing up in your Recently Listened Tracks.

Enjoy.

[UPDATE] This is now live, oh and I added the scrobbling support.

I’ve been doing a lot of XMPP lately, so I figured I should share some of this stuff with you all. This all ends up with me telling you that I have added LiveText support to my RadioAunty application (Hah! not even the proper iPlayer Radio console has that).

LiveText is the content that appears on your DAB radio, with information about who’s on, what’s currently playing, and what’s coming up in the show.

So, XMPP. To start with, two books which I can recommend are:

• Professional XMPP Programming with JavaScript and jQuery
• XMPP: The Definitive Guide

One is great for understanding what the hell XMPP is, and the other for how you can use it on the web. In traditional style, I read both these cover to cover many times, until I finally got it, and felt I could build something interesting. Here’s a brief overview:

XMPP is the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, a set of open technologies for instant messaging, presence, multi-party chat, voice and video calls, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, and generalized routing of XML data.

Over the course of the last few months I’ve been building various internal XMPP based apps, which have been primarily web based. This has come about possibly due to this years buzz word seemingly being Real-Time, but possibly more because –in the case of XMPP– modern browsers have implemented Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, which means cross-origin requests can be done with pure JavaScript. Using a fantasic library like Strophe.js coupled with an XMPP server like Ejabberd, you can easily create fantastic broadcast/subscription web applications.

One of the side effects of using this technology so much, has meant that I’ve grasped enough to make a contributions to open source XMPP projects. One of which being the fantastic XMPPFramework. As you’ll guess by the name, this is an XMPP Framework in Objective-C for Mac and iPhone. My colleague Alan wrote last November that the BBC was starting to make it’s LiveText service available over XMPP PubSub. I really wanted to integrate this with RadioAunty, but the XMPPFramework did not support PubSub or SASL ANONYMOUS. Due to my new found knowledge, I was able to help, and submitted a couple of patches adding this support to this library.

So, I will push out the new version of RadioAunty in the next couple of days. There is a limitation at the moment that the LiveText won’t work if you need to go through a SOCKS proxy. I’m hoping I can fix this, but at the moment I’m not quite sure where to start. The radio will continue to work fine.

Oh, and yes, I realise that the elusive Last.fm scrobble support is possible now. One step at a time.

RadioAunty updated to work with the new iPlayer radio console. Oh and I’m pulling in JSON data instead of XML for the schedules, which has proved much quicker. Not quite sure I like the new now playing text on the console.

Not because it’s not useful, but because it’s just not very pretty. With all the text handling power Flash gives you, I’m sure they can do more. Hopefully they’ll fix this.

A very quick post to let people know that RadioAunty is working again. I though I’d been hit by the SWF Verification fiasco, but it turns out it was just a url change. Your app should update itself.

In my on going Cocoa learning I have been working hard on updates for RadioAunty. ( If you didn’t know, RadioAunty is Mac app that allows you to listen to live and catchup BBC Radio ). This means the feature list is now quite compelling, so I decided to give and overview of the features to date.

1. Select your Favourite Station – Choose from all the BBC National radio stations. You can listen to them in Normal RealPlayer or the much higher quality ACC streams. Make your decision via the preferences screen.

2. Minimise the radio – I didn’t think people generally stare at the player whilst they are listening, so you can now minimise it like you can with iTunes, using ^ cmd Z or the window menu. You can also tweak the width whilst minimised. You will also see that the window title shows the current show playing. This updates along with the schedule as time goes on. More on this next.

3. View the schedule – In the Schedule menu, you will see the day schedule for the station you are listening to (using data from BBC programmes). You will see a tick next to the show you are currently listening. You will also see that some shows are clickable. This is stuff you can listen to, that is available to catchup in iPlayer, it also displays how long left that show is available in iPlayer for. This schedule updates as you listen throughout the day.

4. Twitter support and other preferences – The preferences window gives you the chance to change some of RadioAunty’s settings and turn on others. From the top, we have updates. Turning this on allows you to receive updates to the application when they become available. Next is default station. This allows you to choose a default station to open with (I think this may be removed next release, and the app will just remember what you last listened to. Next is audio quality. It’s best to stick to high quality, but those streams are only available in the UK, so if you are listening abroad you will have to choose normal quality. Finally Twitter support. Opting in means that as you listen, details about what you are listening to will be sent to the @radioandtvbot account on Twitter. If you supply your twitter username, this will be added to the tweet instead of the default, which is your computer login FullName. The screenshot below next shows you what gets sent.

5. A nice dynamic app icon – The wonderful Tim Broom made the current icon. The icon changes, showing the network you are currently listening to.

6. Growl support – If you use Growl, then RadioAunty will notify you when a show starts playing. If you choose the twitter support it will also notify you when this information is sent to twitter.

Next then. I’m going to be transferring the twitter and scheduling stuff over to TellyBox (A Mac app that allows you to watch live and catchup BBC Television). So watch out for the updates. Then I think lastfm integration is on the cards. It’s be nice to scrobble what tracks you are listening to.

[UPDATE] I’ve updated the app to now use the new higher quality live streams. Yay, no more RealPlayer for the majority.

I’ve seem to have spent a lot of time reading about Cocoa without actually building anything of substance. So to put a change to that I have built RadioAunty.

1. RadioAunty – This is a Cocoa Application that lets you listen to the radio, BBC radio, on your desktop. You can view the current schedule and select listen again shows, as well as simply changing the station via the menu bar and via the Dock. You can also set preferences to decide which should be your default Station to start with, and whether you would like to receive updates to the application when they are available (very important). If you have listened to BBC radio via Safari, then RadioAunty should work just fine for you.

Download RadioAunty from it’s project site

There are now many *.frameworks that come as part of the Apple Developer Tools and I found it pretty daunting to start with. So to make life easier for myself, I decided to start small and build bigger as I go along. This is why I started with the simple idea of RadioAunty. Oh and it’s Leopard only because it seemed silly to have to learn old ways of doing things as well as new.

RadioAunty is at a high level not that complex. It basically embeds an already existing webpage into a desktop app. It seemed like an ideal starting point. Once I had got that working (Thanks Apple, it takes about 3 lines of code!), the next thing was to make use of other classes and functionality to actually learn something. The app as it stands uses only uses these Cocoa classes (I’ve left the boring ones out):

• WebView
• NSMenu
• NSProgressIndicator
• NSWindowController
• NSPropertyListSerialization
• NSUserDefaults
• NSBundle
• SUUpdater (Part of the wonderful Sparkle Framework)

I’ve used @property quite a lot (properties are a bit like Ruby :attr_accessor) to automagically create getter and setters. I have also use key-value bindings, which once I understood them were amazing, and allow you to chop huge chunks of code from your source. I use a stations.plist to store the radio station data, but hope to pull that from the web in the future, meaning that it could play any radio station and not just the BBC’s. I also use delegation a lot whenever I can.

As I only started the app on Tuesday, I’ll continue making it more polished, that and I have a few other ideas, but I wanted to get something out for people to use as quickly as possible, so first main thing to add (apart from the radio) was auto-updating. This is taken care of by Sparkle 1.5b6.

Sparkle was super simple to implement. Their wiki documentation worked great, and I was amazed that something I always think is cool, and take for granted was so smooth to implement in this application. If you’re building OSX applications then this should surely be a must.

I have a few other projects in the pipeline, that incorporate more frameworks for me to learn, so stay posted. I’m progressing well with is an app called LeaveFrom, that does what is says on the tin really. It uses Core-Data which again had a bit of a learning curve, but I’m getting on ok. Can my old brain take all this new fun information.