Lately I’ve been building web applications for a living but it’s hard to cross that skill set over into my creative doings because, after working with web applications all day for work, I’d rather not sit down and do it some more. I’m trying to get over that because there are some cool things you can do on this here net right? But then, I fall into the same frustrating issues. Like for work I’ve always got to make sure the application works in a bunch of different browsers, usually going back to IE 6. This browser compatibility stuff is a real bother, but I guess it’s what keeps me working. Anyhoo, I started on this mp3 player site for my band, Erin Edmister and Three Tons. It’s new, right –so of course I want to make it work on those iPhonePads. And of course it behaves differently in IE8 versus Firefox versus Chrome; and of course the layout requires all kinds of tricks just to be sure it looks the same across browser. And as you might notice there’s not much fancy designing going on even. I’m using a jQuery application called jPlayer. This stuff is fancified javascript which is the main language you want to use when you got a web app that requires stuff happen on the client’s computer. Btw, you sir are the client (pretty boy). The jPlayer will use HTML5 if the browser can take it and Chrome can. Works pretty cool. Will use Flash if the browser can’t take it. iPadaPhonies don’t use Flash but they’ll eat up that HTML5 –just don’t make your app do anything without the client rubbing his greasy fingers across the screen to make it happen. There in lies the rub, still don’t think I got it right for iPadookas. Bound and determined though.
Hope you like Three Tons.
I think the only way you’re going to get it to work with an iPhone is to just make those links go straight to the mp3 file. This means that you’ll want to check the user agent for iPhoniness and, if detected, redirect to a special iPhone version of this page, where the songs don’t play in-page. Maybe one day you’ll be able to play the songs in-page on an iPhone, but from my limited bit of experimentation, that day is not today.
I will do that if nothing else. jPlayer documentation does dangle a carrot.
Let me know if you get it to work. I tried a bunch of HTML5 experiments for my covers page a few weeks ago and wasn’t successful with any of them. The closest I came was the Yahoo Media Player, but you have to use the JavaScript libraries on their server, so you don’t have much control over it. And it still doesn’t work on the iPhone.
I’m going to keep working on this but want to have an iphone or ipod or ipad or mac with emulator available. In the meantime I just want it to display and function in a way that makes sense for iPeople. So I added some javascript…
Instead of saying “now playing” under the logo it should say “geared for apple devices. click on a song to download.”
The “play” and “stop” buttons are hidden and so is the link to download the mp3 zip file. So you should see at the bottom “download: image.”
And you should be able to click on the song title to download an mp3. This is the part I’m most unsure about so let me know if that doesn’t work.
Heavy Country 105.1: The Anvil
Nice. We’ve got a lot of work ahead to get to the sound that’s in my head when I think of “heavy country.”
“Anvil” helps though.