Saturday, May 5th, 2007
Pitchfork MPD Client
Category: Showcase
Roger Bystrøm has written an Ajax frontend to MPD, Pitchfork:
The benefit of Pitchfork is that once it’s installed it’s available on any machine with a modern web-browser. With icecast you’ll also be able to remotely listen to your music through pitchfork. To get a feel of pitchfork, have a look at the video and screenshots. Pitchfork has been written from the bottom without any external ajax libraries which makes it possible to make optimizations which otherwise would be impossible. This means that it isn’t that far from a normal application you would run on your computer with regards to speed and usability. Also because it’s a web-application it allows us to do some nifty things like showing album cover in the middle of the screen and linking to the lyrics site.
“Pitchfork has been written from the bottom without any external ajax libraries which makes it possible to make optimizations which otherwise would be impossible. This means that it isn’t that far from a normal application you would run on your computer with regards to speed and usability.”
Now you know when you say something like that, you’re inviting people to critique your code, aren’t you? :-)
Let’s just say this: It may be a fine application - I haven’t tried running it yet - but coding everything from the ground up is NOT what makes it fine. That takes hard work and good design instincts, library or no library.
Michael: Critique of my code is welcomed :] It probably isn’t the prettiest code in the world, but it’s fast. And the main point is really that there are optimizations which wouldn’t be possible if pitchfork was relying on libraries to do the hard part. Libs to help you do stuff is great, but people have *huge* playlists and because of that pitchfork has to be fast and make assumptions where available.
You can also take a library that fits your needs best, freeze it and optiimize or replace the parts that need to be optimized.
What Martin said. We froze jQuery and optimised it to our app, runs nicely now while still retaining a good level of ease of use.
When I navigate to the website of the AJAX client for MPD, Pitchfork
http://pitchfork.remiss.org/wiki
I now get a squirrelmail login page instead of the old wiki and other content that existed there. The google cache pages still exist, and have refreshed as recently as Aug 3rd 2008, but all of a sudden it’s gone now.
Any idea where I can grab a copy?
Thanks!
The package file:
http://pitchfork.remiss.org/files/pitchfork-0.5.5.tar.bz2
Returns a 404 as well
I had a copy of it lying around and uploaded it: http://www.box.net/shared/s8jy2ne609
Hope it’s useful to someone!