Joostteam 1st Joost widget: AutoSurf
October 3, 2007
OK, I confess, I have lost my programming skills… but that did not dether me from writing my 1st useful Joost widget!
I was hanging out on the #JOOST IRC channel on freenode and saw a discussion about how cool it would be if Joost could show random programs every 60 seconds. One could sit and watch programs pass by on the screen until one showed up that appeared interesting. At that point the viewer could simply stop random play and watch the playing program.
So I tought… this sound easy enough to do with a widget… but I needed a function to return a random Joost program from a valid list. Guess who was hanging in the channel too? Hal from onthetoob.com (now a Joost owned web site).
Hal was nice enough to customize, on the fly, onthetoob.com to allow me to submit a query for a random program link.
With Hal and Jim (another nice developer working for Joost) I was able to crawl my way around JavaScript coding and put together a widget in less than 3 hours!
The result is called the “AutoSurf” widget. You can download it and install it in Joost by using the Widget Manager in the GUI. Be warned, the current version is pretty rough. It only support 3 functions:
- Start AutoSurf
- Stop AutoSurf
- Surf Now (force a new random program to be selected)
I will keep hacking at it over the next few nights, so keep an eye for the evolution. My next goal is to allow selection of categories to restrict the randomization. This way one will be able to only get random Joost show in the “Comedy” category. But this will require the magical intervention of Hal… Hal, are you reading this?
The biggest issue for the widget right now is that Joost insist on showing pre-roll ads every time a new program start… so you get to see ads every 60 sec… I am sure advertisers will like that 
So don’t fear widget coding! It is fairly simple, even for someone that has not coded since 1993! Ouch!
If you are interested to write your own widget visit Joost’s development website at http://dev.joost.com/twidl/ (login: widgetarian, password: wonderland42).
If you have written a widget and would like to show it to the world send me an email (bmaltais@gmail.com), I can post it on joostteam and even let you write your own joostteam blog post about it.
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