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).
Caveat: It’s a bit of a memory Hog- 60MB. Trying to figure out how to fix that.