When set up properly, Smart Playlists in iTunes can be very powerful. Up until recently, I used them sparingly (a playlist just for Music Videos, for example). After reading up on what can be done with Smart Playlists, I decided to set some cool ones up in my library. There was a catch – rating music played a huge part in populating those smart playlists. I haven’t rated very much of my music over the years, so I had to make an effort to catch up. Once I started rating my music, I figured out why I hadn’t done it until now – I didn’t have a rating system.

Sure, there are 5 arbitrary stars, but what do they mean? What do I compare songs to, what context do I rate them in?  If I rate songs in my library by comparing them to all of the music out there, my music will come out with uber-high ratings. Everything in my library is better than the latest Rhianna or Britney Spears single, so if I rate my songs against those, my ratings are inflated – all of my songs will have a rating of 4 or 5 stars. This leads to a lack of variety in ratings and a non-natural distribution of ratings from 1 to 5. Because of this, I decided to rethink my scale. Consider this – for a song to be on my computer in the first place, it probably has to be a pretty good song. That’s why someone has songs in their library – they want to listen to them. Wanting to listen to a song makes them inherently “good”, so by that definition, every song in my iTunes library is “good”. With this in mind, I came up with a definite solution – I rate songs by context, not content. What do I mean by that? Well, here’s an outline of my system, with examples.

1 Star – This probably shouldn’t be in my library. I probably included it for completion’s sake (to have all of the tracks on an album, for example). Examples: Mötley Crüe – Glitter, Metallica – Escape.

2 Stars – I only really enjoy listening to this song when I’m in a certain mood. Example: The Smiths – Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want, Echo & the Bunnymen – Rescue.

3 Stars – Pretty good whenever I listen to it. Example: The Ben Folds Five – Kate, Led Zeppelin – Immigrant Song.

4 Stars – Great song; Probably one of the best on the album, or a cool single I bought from iTunes. Example: Death Cab For Cutie – Pictures In An Exhibition, Depeche Mode – Just Can’t Get Enough.

5 Stars – Classic. Transcendent, awesome, rad. Example: Arcade Fire – Keep The Car Running, Weezer – Island In The Sun, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band – Thunder Road (or anything off Born To Run, actually).

Basically, a song’s rating is dependent on how often I will think it is good when I listen to it. In addition, my songs are only rated against each other, not all music. This way, my ratings aren’t inflated, and I have a relatively predictable spread of ratings between 1 to 5 stars. Now I just have to apply this system to rating the rest of my library. The fun begins…

For a little while now, Blu-ray discs have occasionally come with what’s called a Digital Copy. This is basically a way for consumers to have a digital copy of the movie that they can use for watching on devices other than Blu-ray players (PCs with just a DVD drive, Macs, iPods, etc). The way the service works is that when you buy the Blu-ray you’ll either get a separate DVD-ROM along with it containing the video file itself, or a special authentication code that allows you to download the video file from the internet.

This sounds like a pretty good idea on paper, right? You can have another copy of the movie that makes it super-convenient to watch your movie on multiple devices. If only it were so simple… Once you get into the nitty gritty details of Digital Copy, it doesn’t seem that great:

The quality of the video is DVD (480i/p) at best.
The audio is only stereo (2.0).
Downloading an entire movie’s worth of video can be pricey for people with data caps (everyone in Australia, for instance).
No bonus features (directors’ commentaries, deleted scenes, documentaries, etc).
The video file will be DRM’d to hell (especially if you’re using a service like iTunes to download the video file).

Not so great any more, huh. In my opinion, the ideal situation is – well, the ideal situation is no DRM, no data caps, no physical discs, 100% uptime for downloads and rock-solid streaming of HD video over the internet to whatever device you want. In the meantime, Blu-ray is here to stay and by far the majority of consumers only have DVD players/drives in their computers. A good fix could be for studios to ship an actual DVD with the Blu-ray. By “actual DVD”, I mean exactly the same disc as you would get if you just bought the DVD release on its own. This way, the consumer can deal with ripping, encoding and converting the video themselves and tailor the digital copy that they make to their needs – users need to deal with streaming to different devices and creating different-sized files for different devices (a lower-resolution version of the video file for an iPhone, for example). This way, the consumer has control over things like that. If consumers aren’t hip to how to rip DVDs, then there can just be a free, simple application online that rips a DVD straight to a handy-dandy MP4 file that’s compatible with a lot of devices. Chances are if the consumer isn’t tech-savvy enough already to know how to rip DVDs, they won’t mind that much about what resolution/codec/audio format the movie is encoded in. The point is that we need a system that gives control of how the digital copy is made to the consumers.

This just in: pirating the movie is still the easiest way to get it. In some cases, it’s the only way to get it. If the film industry wants to kill piracy, they should make buying the movie the easiest way to get it – services like the iTunes Music Store and Amazon MP3 have shown us that people will pay for music if that’s the easiest way to obtain it. If Hollywood would just realise this, we wouldn’t have a need for crazy hacks to get around archaic Draconian DRM, or complex solutions to simple problems like watching a movie that we already own on an iPhone.

One of the most common approaches to building an application in recent times is a combination of Agile Design and Extreme Programming. The basic premise is this:

- get a prototype out as soon as possible

- iterate constantly to keep up with changes in design

In other words, get a product out, worry about other stuff later. Twitter was developed like this – it started out as a side project, but then became a big deal. Because of this, the amount of time the Twitter team spends on stuff other than iterating through designs of Twitter is almost nil. This is the kind of time that could be spent putting together a business model. When you look at it like this, Twitter’s approach to development (with respect to a business model) is reminiscent of Bill O’Reilly:

F**k it! We’ll do it live!

People are criticising Twitter for not having a business model, but I think it’s fine. Biz Stone said something in his Stephen Colbert interview last week that I thought was really telling of how Twitter works on the inside at the moment:

We’re recognising a difference right now… between profit and value, and we’re building on value right now.

This totally connects with me and with how I feel about designing and developing applications – worry about having a good product, and the rest will (hopefully) take care of itself. After all, isn’t it better to have a popular application that doesn’t currently have a way of making money than an unpopular application that you’re sure you can monetise if you just get a big-enough user base? It is, because you have control over how you can monetise something – you have no control over whether or not your audience thinks your application is cool. I’d rather take the popular application, because it’s probably easier to make money from something than make that same thing popular.

Of course, then the question becomes one of how you stay afloat while developing the product and not making any money – well, that’s outside the area of my expertise, but I know it’s probably a little bit easier when you’ve got $15M up your sleeve, a group of patient investors and a gargantuan user base.

*At least, not as well as people expect it to. For now.

Currently, Watchmen has made $171, 988, 644 (USD) worldwide. That number doesn’t mean much in and of itself, especially if (like me) you don’t really follow how much each individual movie makes in the box office. From that number alone, it’s hard to tell if Watchmen is doing well, so, let’s do some comparing. It also seems unfair to pit Watchmen’s earnings against a movie that has already gone through a full box-office cycle, so let’s just compare opening weekend sales. I think Spider-Man 3 is a good movie to compare Watchmen to: to the general public (by far the majority of movie-goers), Watchmen is just another superhero and/or comic book movie like Spider-Man 3.

Watchmen’s Opening Weekend: $55, 214, 334

Spider-Man 3’s Opening Weekend: $151, 116, 516

So now we have a fair comparison, and we can say that Watchmen isn’t really doing that well. It’s a shame, since I think Watchmen is an awesome movie. The difference in sales figures between Watchmen and Spider-Man 3 (a worse movie in my opinion, and Rotten Tomatoes agrees with me) opens up an interesting question: why did Spider-Man 3 do better than Watchmen? That’s what I’m going to be talking about.

First of all: Watchmen has no bankable stars. Don’t get me wrong – I thought that Patrick Wilson, Malin Akerman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup and Matthew Goode all gave phenomenal performances, but not a lot of people (myself included, pre-Watchmen PR announcements) have heard of them. My dad sees Nicholas Cage movies because Nicholas Cage is in them, and so do most of the movie-going world (insert your favourite A-grade box-office-smash actor). No Nicholas Cage in Watchmen means my dad (and the rest of the majority of the public) won’t see Watchmen.

Argument number 2 supporting my theory that Watchmen won’t make a lot of money: the trailers don’t give anything away. Most of the time, I would consider this to be a good thing – sometimes, trailers spoil for me the excitement of experiencing a movie wholly from start to finish. In this case, I think that more details were needed. We’re talking about a movie starring a team of superheroes that “no-one” (we’re still talking about the general public here) has ever heard of! How do you publicise a movie featuring characters no-one has heard of? Really push the plot, and make it really appealing. Again, I thought the movie rawked, but the trailer doesn’t really make a lot of people want to see the film. It’s just not a “this summer” trailer, which is what a lot of people see movies based on, unfortunately. However, I do really like the second trailer for the film, and wish that it had been the one that was pushed.

So Watchmen is a movie with no bankable stars, whose plot and characters are a mystery to by far the majority of people. What does this mean? It means that Watchmen shouldn’t be compared to movies like Spider-Man 3, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and all of the other superhero and/or comic book adaptations that it’s being compared to. In all of the movies I just mentioned, the characters and plot are more obvious, not least of all because a lot more people had much more in-depth experiences with those franchises when they were young. That explains the first amendment to the title of this post: why Watchmen won’t do as well as people expect – it’s because people are putting Watchmen on the wrong platform, comparing it with movies that aren’t on the same level. Whether or not the movies Watchmen is being compared with are better or worse are a different matter.

The second part of the asterisk note was that Watchmen won’t do well for now. This one’s pretty simple to address – this is a geek movie. Geeks buy lots of stuff. They will buy this movie on Blu-ray, because it’s that kind of movie. Geeks (myself firmly included) love directors’ commentaries, they love bonus features, and they love it when subplots that were left out of the film get made into their own supplementary film. Watchmen was made to be released for Blu-ray. The gorgeous visuals from the film are just begging to be seen at 1080p. This movie-being-very-profitable-in-the-home-market-after-not-doing-so-well-in-theaters thing has happened countless times before – Jersey Girl did it, Joss Whedon’s Serenity did it, it brought Futurama back and it brought Family Guy back. I will certainly be doing my part by buying Watchmen on Blu-ray when it comes out. As an aside, it’ll be interesting how well Watchmen does on Blu-ray as opposed to DVD – it’s a known fact that Blu-ray is far from taking off, but I think that the Watchmen crowd and the kind of people who appreciate the quality of Blu-ray have a lot of overlap. Could Watchmen be to Blu-ray what The Matrix was to DVD?

Sorry to pull the ol’ switcheroo there – I started out by comparing two movies, talked about the reason for the gargantuan difference that arose from that comparison, and then told you that the comparison was worth null. I kind of built up a sand castle only to push it over. Go see Watchmen.

I am on Twitter. Actually, that’s an understatement – I am almost addicted to Twitter. Because of this, I have the onus thrust upon me of defending Twitter when people criticise it.

My lack of aptitude for anything art-related continues to astound me, and no doubt you as well.

The most common argument I hear against using Twitter is this:

Twitter is just a bunch of people telling no-one at all about what they had for breakfast.

A more abstract version of this argument is that none of the information passed around on Twitter has any value at all. The most recent meme to play into this idea is this video, entitled “The Twouble With Twitters”. Everyone laughs, but for some reason, everybody in the tech industry continues to talk about and, more importantly, use Twitter.

While I won’t deny that food-related tweets are eerily common in the Twittersphere (I have been known to chronicle my meal from time to time), there are some genuinely interesting people to follow on Twitter, which means that Twitter has some value to me. These people don’t tell you about how they’re sitting on their couch eating potato chips – they provide a stream of information, entertainment, current news and perhaps even their own skewed commentary on their day-to-day existence.

The kinds of people who are worth following are everywhere on Twitter – a dubious-sounding Christopher Walken, deals from Dell, or breaking news from around the world. It sounds corny, but it’s true – you get as much out of Twitter as you put into it. Assemble a good list of people to follow, and you’ll have a great time on Twitter. Assemble a bad list, and, well, you’re going to find out a lot about what people eat for breakfast.

My response to the “breakfast” argument is this: remember these things called blogs? Go right now onto Blogger, WordPress or LiveJournal and you’ll find thousands of arguably pointless blogs narrating the boring lives of thousands of people. Who reads these blogs? Nobody. But how many people visit more popular blogs, like Gizmodo or Engadget? Millions, literally. This is the result of the way that New Media creates tiers of content. Clay Shirky described it better in Here Comes Everybody than I ever could on my own:

The media landscape is transformed, because personal communication and publishing, previously separate functions, now shade into one another. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact.

In other words: publish, then filter. (I highly recommend that if you are even remotely interested in how New Media is changing the way that people interact with and within groups, you go and read Here Comes Everybody.)

Pre-internet, it cost a lot of money to publish and distribute content, so the filtering of that content (ie. deciding which content should be published and distributed) was done before the publishing – after all, why print a million copies of a book no-one is going to read? Once blogs came along, suddenly we had a medium that cost (virtually) nothing to produce, and could be distributed infinitely. Now because the cost of producing and distributing content is so small, content is created first and then we filter for the minority of good content afterwards. As for the other (less-than-good) content, it may as well not even exist since it cost so little to produce. The same kind of thing we had with blogs is happening now with Twitter. Countless people write metric tonnes of absolute tripe, but the really good content rises to the top because people like it. That makes sense – the stuff that the most people like is the most popular content. Everything else gets all but swept aside.

In summary: Sure, there are a lot of people on Twitter talking about absolute crap that you’re not interested in, but Twitter also has some of the most innovative and interesting content on the web – to get it, you just have to let New Media do its thang.

Blockbuster just posted a $350 million quarterly loss. Here’s what their CEO had to say:

We think the single biggest driver in the current marketplace the last few months has been title strength and this week is a classic example. Box office is down 56% this week versus the previous year. I think the titles say it all.

That’s right – their financial fail isn’t because the video rental market has seen a seismic paradigm shift over the past few years. It isn’t because the economy isn’t in great shape right now. Nope. Apparently, it’s because the movies that have been released recently all suck.

Blockbuster! Get back in the game! You used to own the video rental market! If you don’t do anything to combat the fact that people now use services like Netflix, Hulu, or any number of other services that make viewing video easier, a $350 million loss will look like a great quarter in a couple of years’ time.

The paradigm of “you drive down to our store, pay us money and take home a DVD and then a few days later (or whenever we want) you drive back down and return our DVD” is going, going, gone. Blockbuster needs to realise this. So what can they do to stay in the game? I think that Blockbuster should partner with a hardware manufacturer and integrate their rental service into a DVR so that you pay a monthly subscription fee for streaming video to the device. Alternatively, they could put out their own DVR that just streams movies from Blockbuster (not unlike the original Roku player that only streamed Netflix movies). These options get rid of late fees, returning the video (the file could just expire after a week or something if they really feel the need for it to) and making the customer go to serious effort just to watch a movie.

People still know the Blockbuster brand name as “we do video rental”. Blockbuster should take that brand recognition and move it into the 21st century. It may need a re-work of how they do business (for instance, they would need to seriously invest in some A-grade servers), but the cost of doing that will seem insignificant if it pays off. On the other hand, if they do nothing, Blockbuster will go the way of big-box electronics retailers.

UPDATE: Well well, speak of the devil.

Pick a side – we’re at war!

There’s as much of an argument about whether a plain text editor is better than an Integrated Development Environment for programming as there is about whether Macs are better than PCs.

I can’t wait to see those ads.

In my mind, text editors (like Vim, Emacs and Pico) have always been associated with uber-1337 h4×0r Linux geeks or programmers from a previous generation who learned how to use a text editor inside and out. IDEs (Visual Studio or Eclipse, for example), on the other hand, seem to be the MO of programmers brought up with GUIs and the WIMP model of computing.

The bottom line is: there’s enough features in both text editors and IDEs to satisfy any programmer. If you take the time to learn one particular program inside and out, you can’t go wrong. Once you’ve got one down, focus on the important stuff – writing great software.

I consider Apple to be a special case in the tech world because of their unique business situation.

(great picture, right? I’m a Software Design major, not a Graphic Design major)

Microsoft got some flak from the EU for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows – why doesn’t Apple get served with the same kind of lawsuit for bundling Safari with OS X? Because Apple is a special case. Steve Jobs took a leave of absence, but why doesn’t Apple (a publicly traded company) make details about Jobs’ health publicly known, even when there’s evidence that Apple’s stock prices are directly affected by Steve’s health? Because Apple is a special case. A lot of computer and software manufacturers move on to supporting Blu-Ray, but Apple doesn’t. Why can that happen? Because Apple is a special case. Apple implements an almost-Draconian approval system for apps in their App Store for the iPhone/iPod Touch (recent case in point). Despite horrendous backlash, Apple keeps the system in place. Why hasn’t the tech community at large boycotted the iPhone? Because Apple is a special case. Apple still doesn’t support Flash for the iPhone. Why does something like this happen? Because Apple is a special case.

Beginning to see a trend?

Time and time again, Apple has gotten away with the kinds of feats that any other company in any other industry never would have. Sure, I can just point you to a bunch of articles that talk about these individual cases, but I think the more interesting thing to do is explore how and why Apple is in this extremely unique situation. Some might say that it’s because Apple’s products are better than everyone else’s, and having such great products is worth suffering those flaws. Others might say that it’s because Apple doesn’t have a big enough market share for its issues to be a big deal. Either of these could be true, but I think it has more to do with Apple’s place in the industry.

Apple software can only run on an Apple operating system, which can only run on an Apple computer (well, kinda). Almost everything Apple-related is made by Apple. Because of that, the only market that Apple has to compete in is the Apple market, and since Apple is really the only company in the Apple market, Apple is its own market.

The effects of Apple being its own market are felt in a lot of places. I think that the reason Apple’s App Store has been as successful as it has is because it’s so easy to write for the iPhone, because it’s the only phone developers have to deal with because it’s the only phone in the market! Can you imagine if Microsoft announced an Apple-esque mobile application store? Can you imagine all of the hassles that Microsoft would have to go through in terms of certain apps only supporting a subset of current Windows Mobile phones? Can you imagine if something like that happened? Oh wait, it just has. It had to happen eventually, given Apple’s success with the App Store (and to a lesser extent, having to keep up with the other big mobile OS providers). Admittedly, it seems that Microsoft has done the right thing and waited until the debut of Windows Mobile 6.5 before opening their new store.

Another effect of Apple being so closed can be seen when Apple releases (or doesn’t release) a new product or feature. When Apple finally do announce Blu-Ray support, Apple will make a huge deal about it. The rest of the tech world will say “we had Blu-Ray in computers years ago, this isn’t anything new” – the thing is, it will be a big deal because this will be the first Apple computer to support Blu-Ray! That’s the first computer in the whole market! The same kind of thing can be seen across Apple’s computer line – Apple almost withholds new technologies, so when new technologies are announced, it’s a huge deal to the Apple community. You want some examples?

• Hard drives in Apple computers are (by default) smaller than those on Windows-based machines with similar system specifications, so when Apple starts putting bigger hard drives in their computers, it will seem like a big step up because the only viable comparison is with the previous Apple computer.
• There aren’t very many USB ports on Apple’s laptops (and certainly no SD card slot) compared to other companies’ laptops – if/when Apple bumps this up, Steve Jobs will cause a heap of hullabaloo, even if it has been the standard in the rest of the computer industry for the past couple of years.
• Up until last October, Apple’s MacBook line of laptops all had Intel’s X3100 integrated graphics chip, when the industry standard for notebooks of that system size, price and specification was a dedicated video card (and even now, Nvidia’s GeForce 9400M isn’t a proper dedicated graphics chip).

There are other examples, but suffice it to say, Apple being its own market (and being the leader of that market by default) is something that affects the way Apple does business.

Whether or not Apple should be allowed to be in the kind of situation they are is an interesting question, but not one for this blog post, or even one for me to answer. One thing is certain though:

Apple is the market leader… in the Apple market.

Today, I took this app I wrote in Python the other day and beefed it up. It’s a program that scans a webpage (Apple’s listings for refurbished MacBooks in their Australian store) and looks for mention of a particular MacBook. If one or more of the MacBooks I want are there, I have a Twitter direct message sent to me. If not, the program waits 55 seconds and then tries again. It will run until a MacBook is found, or if the user closes the program. It doesn’t affect your download usage very much, since rather than getting a webpage (with text and images), all the program gets is the source code for the page, which is just text.

Here’s the code for the app (with Twitter usernames and passwords removed, of course):

package au.com.MacBookNotifier;

import java.io.BufferedInputStream;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.Reader;

import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.URL;

import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JLabel;

import winterwell.jtwitter.Twitter;

/**
 * A class that checks for a 2.4GHz aluminium MacBook once a minute, and
 * tweets me as soon as one is there.
 * @author Scott
 *
 */
public class Notifier {
	/** The HTML of the URL. */
	private String sourceCode;
	/** Gives access to the Twitter API. */
	private Twitter twitter = new Twitter("usernameyousendthetweetfrom","password");
	/** A window for the app. */
	private JFrame window = new JFrame();

	/**
	 * Returns the number of occurences of a substring within a string.
	 * This method doesn't really belong in this class, but I want to keep
	 * the app as a single class for brevity's sake.
	 * @param string The string you're searching in.
	 * @param subString The string you're searching for.
	 * @return
	 */
	public int numberOfOccurences(String string, String subString) {
		int count = 0;
		int pos = string.indexOf(subString);
		while (pos != -1) {
			count++;
			pos = string.indexOf(subString,++pos);

			if (pos == -1)
				break;
		}
		return count;
	}

	/**
	 * Returns the HTML code of a web page.
	 * @param url
	 * @return
	 */
	public String getHTML(String url) {
		String html = "";
		try {
			URL macBookPage = new URL(url);
			HttpURLConnection urlConnection =
				(HttpURLConnection) macBookPage.openConnection();

			InputStream instream = new BufferedInputStream(urlConnection.getInputStream());
			Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(instream);

			int currentChar;
			while ((currentChar = reader.read()) != -1) {
				html += String.valueOf((char)currentChar);
			}
		} catch (Exception e) {System.out.println("error occured getting the HTML.");}
		return html;
	}

	/**
	 * Constructor for the Notifier class. The meat of the app is here.
	 */
	public Notifier() {
		try {
			/* Set up the window. */
			window.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
			window.setTitle("MacBook Notifier");
			window.add(new JLabel("Checking for a MacBook..."));
			window.pack();
			window.setResizable(false);
			window.setLocation(50, 50);
			window.setVisible(true);

			/* Check for a 2.4GHz aluminium MacBook. If successful, tweet it.
			 * Otherwise, try again a minute later.
			 */
			while (true) {

				sourceCode = getHTML("http://store.apple.com/au/" +
									 "browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbook");

				/* When Apple list their refurbished MacBooks on their site,
				 * they don't mention what colour it is until the end. If it's
				 * an aluminium MacBook (the one I want), it's simply called a
				 * "MacBook 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo". If it's white or black,
				 * it's called a "MacBook 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - White"
				 * (or " - Black" at the end if it's black).
				 *
				 * So we get the number of occurences of the 2.4GHz MacBook
				 * and take away the number of occurences of the white or black
				 * 2.4GHz MacBook, which leaves us with the number of occurences
				 * of the aluminium 2.4GHz MacBook. Then we check if that number
				 * is greater than 0 (ie. we ask if an aluminium 2.4GHz MacBook
				 * is there.
				 */
				boolean macIsThere = (numberOfOccurences(sourceCode,"MacBook 2.4"+
											"GHz Intel Core 2 Duo")
									-
									  numberOfOccurences(sourceCode,"MacBook 2."+
											"4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - Black")
									-
									  numberOfOccurences(sourceCode,"MacBook 2."+
											"4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - White"))
									> 0;

				if (macIsThere) {
					tweetIt();
					break;
				}
				/* If we make it this far, the MacBook isn't there, so try again.*/
				Thread.sleep(55000);
			}

		} catch (Exception e) {
			System.out.println("error occured.");
		}
	}

	/**
	 * Sends a direct message to me saying that my MacBook is there.
	 */
	public void tweetIt() {
		String messageRecipient = "usernameyouwanttosendthetweetto";
		String messageContent = "Go to http://is.gd/lop0 because your " +
								"MacBook is there!";
		twitter.sendMessage(messageRecipient, messageContent);
	}

	/**
	 * Entry point for the application.
	 * @param args
	 */
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		Notifier n = new Notifier();

	}

}

The most obvious change is that this time around, I wrote the app in Java. I used Java because it’s the language that gave me the quickest, easiest access to the libraries I needed. That’s not to take anything away from Python – I think that first app was a really great example of what I like about Python. I think that Python is great way to quickly punch out an application as soon as you have an idea. In this case, Python was my sketching pencil, and Java was my pen. (For the record, you can do a lot with a sketching pencil)

This app fixes a few problems the Python program had – now when a MacBook is found, I have a direct message (and because of that, an email) sent to me over Twitter instead of just showing a popup window on the computer running the program. I did this because now I can be alerted by more means when the program finds a MacBook. This version of the program also fixes the bug from the Python version where if a 2.4GHz white or black MacBook was found, it would register as having found the right MacBook. This happened because the Python program just looked for the term “2.4GHz MacBook”. There were no 2.4GHz white (or black) MacBooks in the store when I wrote the Python program, so that’s why that bug occured.

This isn’t a full-fledged blog post – just somewhere I can post the code for this little app I’ve just written. Basically, I’m trying to score a refurbished 2.4GHz aluminium (or aluminum to American readers) MacBook from Apple’s online store, and I’m sick of just hitting Firefox’s ‘reload’ button every couple of minutes, so I wrote a quick app in Python that gets the HTML of the page containing all the refurbished MacBooks currently for sale and searches for any mention of a 2.4GHz aluminium one. If it finds one, it creates a message box saying as much and also plays a sound. If it doesn’t find one, it just waits one minute and searches again.

It’s very 1.0 at the moment – it currently needs to be open (in the taskbar) all the time, it will freeze if you try to close it while it’s running through IDLE, it’s hella inefficient and it relies on Apple keeping the same syntax for its listings. But it does work. Awesome, right?  This is the code.

### A very quick and dirty app that looks on Apple's ###
### refurbished Macs page for the words "MacBook 2.4GHz". ###

### Title: Is My MacBook There? ###
### Author: Scott Jackson ###
### Version Details: 1.0 ###
### Released: 2/3/09 ###

import urllib
from Tkinter import *
import time
import winsound

times = 1

while 1:
    webPage = urllib.urlopen('http://store.apple.com/au/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbook').read()

    macBookIsThere = webPage.count('MacBook 2.4GHz')

    if macBookIsThere >= 1:
        print times
        winsound.PlaySound("SystemExclamation", winsound.SND_ALIAS)
        msg = Message(text="Go to http://store.apple.com/au/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbook because there's a MacBook there!")
        msg.pack()
        mainloop()
        break
    else:
        times += 1
        time.sleep(60)

The next step (if there is one) is to minimise the program to the system tray. Maybe add a tooltip for the system tray icon that shows the current search status and/or how many times it’s searched? Who knows. I might return to this app later, but for now it’s running and waiting to get me my deal.