tcpdump -
...coincidence?

The past few days I have been working a lot with the IUI Framework to create an iPhone friendly version of Finetune. The tricky part of this project is going to be making it legal. At Finetune we have rules in place, like randomizing tracks and limiting skips, that we have to follow to keep the service free and the labels off our backs. While I cannot share the URL to the app (it is far from legal right now) I can share some screenshots. Here is the home screen. While you will not be able to build playlists, you will be able to listen to them along with Artist Radio and the Finetune Stations. If you click on Profile, you'll be prompted to enter your username. You can enter anyones username here and you will be shown a list of all their playlists for you to listen and enjoy. Now select one and you'll get a list of tracks to play. This is still sort of skunk works right now, but stay tuned. Finetune will be on the iPhone soon.

After many weeks of tweaks and refinements we are finally ready to launch kwargs! The basic idea behind kwargs was to make it easy to search specific sites from one plugin. For example, typing "amazon hitchiker's guide" should take me directly to the amazon search results page.

The idea really came together when we discovered this website which contains links to over 8,000 OpenSearch plugins. This was exactly what we needed to create kwargs. So I wrote a script to spider this page, parse all the OpenSearch XML files, and dump the data we need into a database. After letting the script run for a couple hours, we now have search querystrings for over 8,000 sites and a keyword (which we call a kwarg) that represents each site, as well as an icon and description for each one!

We used Turbogears to develop the website and CherryPy for the auto-complete service you see on the homepage. You can check out the site at http://www.kwargs.com, and you can watch the kwargs screencast here.

Enjoy.