ptalk > April 2005

Now We Are Three

OpenLaszlo 3.0 is out. Drawing API. Dynamic Libraries. Unicode. Serverless.

Serverless? Yup. You can write a standalone app that talks directly to data sources. Hm. Guess that would mean that app in the left column there. Gotta try it. More on that in a minute…

Shufflin' the Shuffle

Cool.

Making the iPod’s shuffle function work better [Maximum Aardvark]

I already had the ‘Favorites’, ‘New’, and ‘Unusual’ playlists, but didn’t realize you could make playlists of playlists, or consider that you could set the mixing ratios by setting the sizes of the playlists. I now have:

• Music: a playlist that excludes books and ‘specialty music’
• Favorites: a playlist that selects 500 from Music by highest rating
• New: a playlist that selects 300 from Music by most recently added
• Unusual: a playlist that selects 200 from Music by least often played
• WPTW: a playlist that selects 24 hours from Favorites, New, and Unusual

And I fill my shuffle using a random selection from WPTW.

Acutally, I first manually put the book I am currently reading on the shuffle, and then fill the rest from WPTW. I make sure the book is ‘song’ #1 on the shuffle, so that I can get to it by using the ‘click play 3 times to go home’ in non-shuffle mode.

Laszlo in Business

Laszlo Systems (which designed the Earthlink mail program)

So Long to Clunky Web E-Mail