Grooveshark Lite takes all the long-tail P2P musical goodness of Grooveshark.com and distills it in a handy quick interface to find and listen to whatever you want. Unlike the main Grooveshark site, you don’t have to have an account or install our Sharkbyte client in order to listen to music. However, signing up for an account (it’s super easy!) allows you to save playlists, and your login will work for both Lite and the main Grooveshark site.

We’re hoping that you’ll find Grooveshark Lite to be the easiest way to listen to whatever you can think of.

We have tons of things planned that didn’t quite make it into this iteration, so keep an eye out for exciting new features over the next few weeks. And if you have any comments, suggestions, ideas, wishlists, problems, or just want to say hi, drop us an email at feedback@grooveshark.com. Or you can leave me a comment here and I’ll do my best to answer you personally.

We just upgraded a few other systems at the same time, so if things are a little shaky, just give us a little time and things ought to smooth out.

I’d love to talk more about Grooveshark Lite, but I’ve been here at the office for over 18 hours straight now, trying to make sure my baby gets off the ground right, so I’m not entirely lucid anymore.

Enjoy the music!

Average of 67.5 hours a week…

Over 21,000 lines of MXML and Actionscript 3…

Me and Jay have been working our asses off for the last month, and all that effort is about to pay off. I’m going to sleep for days…

I’d like to share this error with you:

Apparently this is an error that we’re throwing. A typo, of course, but an unintentionally hilarious one.

Edit: Ah. Apparently it’s more of an Easter Egg than a typo, albeit one that a user would never see on the production server.

First, naively, I tried just committing the whole project folder to the repo. Then I realized all the various hidden files that Eclipse makes (like .project, etc) would also be committed, and if any other developers also starting committing work, we’d break each others projects every time one of us updated after the other committed.

So then I committed only the /source folder where the actual code lives. However, then all the hidden .svn folders that SVN created showed up in the tree view of Flex Builder’s Navigator. I could ignore that, except it also completely broke Flex’s code hinting, Outline view said nothing but ! Root, and Design mode (which I almost never use, but still…) would say nothing but, “An unknown item is declared as the root of your MXML document. Switch to source mode to correct it.”

Looking up the Design mode error on Google found a lot of people mentioning it, but no real solutions, except really stupid stuff like, ‘delete all the whitespace in your code.’ (Which, when I tried it on a small test project, surprisingly did work, until you closed Flex Builder and opened it again. Then you’d have to delete all your whitespace all over again. Obviously, this is NOT a viable solution.)

The only solution I found that looked promising was to install Subclipse into Flex Builder, and create a new project by checking the code out from the repository. So I went about trying to install Subclipse.

At the time, I was using Flex Builder 2, for OS X. I’d never used Eclipse before I started using Flex Builder, and I have the stand-alone Flex Builder, not the Eclipse plugin. Everything I read about Subclipse seemed to imply that it required Tortoise SVN to work, which, as a Mac user, is obviously not an option. Now on the Subclipse site there is no mention of Tortoise. I don’t know if that’s something that’s changed in the past few months or not, cause I’m pretty sure I read all this on the official Subclipse site. Somewhere though, I remember reading that as long as I had the command-line svn client installed (I did) that it would still work for Mac.

I followed the instructions on the Subclipse site to install Subclipse, but whenever I got to the end, it would complain that I was missing some dependencies and that it could not install. I was not able to figure out exactly what dependencies I was missing, or where I could get them from, and I finally gave up.

I still needed version control, so instead I hacked together a little set of Automator scripts to help me get the job done. I had two copies of the /source folder for my Flex project: one was in the Flex project’s directory (~/Documents/Flex Builder 3/Grooveshark Lite/source), and one in a separate directory that I have the rest of our repo checked out into for local testing (/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/GS/trunk/flex/Grooveshark Lite/source). My Automator apps copy the files from one to the other and vice versa, dropping a numbered backup into a separate folder, just in case I screw up. Then I can commit my files using SmartSVN. I could have written a bash script to do the same thing, but Automator lets me add a pretty little confirmation box, just in case I hit one by accident.

They look a little something like this:

Copy Flex to SVN

Ask for Confirmation
tar -cvf /Users/krichard/Documents/Backups/FlexToSVN.tar --backup=numbered /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/GS/trunk/flex/Grooveshark\ Lite/
rsync -vrC --exclude=.DS_Store --delete /Users/krichard/Documents/Flex\ Builder\ 3/Grooveshark\ Lite/source/ /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/GS/trunk/flex/Grooveshark\ Lite/source/


Copy SVN to Flex

Ask for Confirmation (Twice! If I accidentally overwrite the SVN directory, I can just delete and re-check out. If I accidentally overwrite the Flex Builder directory, I've lost work. The backups prevent any real damage, but still...)
tar -cvf /Users/krichard/Documents/Backups/SVNToFlex.tar --backup=numbered /Users/krichard/Documents/Flex\ Builder\ 3/Grooveshark\ Lite/
rsync -vrC --exclude=.DS_Store --delete /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/GS/trunk/flex/Grooveshark\ Lite/source/ /Users/krichard/Documents/Flex\ Builder\ 3/Grooveshark\ Lite/source/


The nice part about using rsync is that the -C automatically excludes the .svn folders from being passed around. I’m also excluding the .DS_Store files that OS X likes to stick everywhere.

So fast forward a few months: I’d switched from Flex Builder 2 to Flex Builder 3, and was still using my Automator scripts. Today I was setting up Subversion on my Slice for a personal project I’m about to start working on. I *really* didn’t feel like writing another set of Automator scripts for this new project, especially as sometimes I’ll be working on it on my off hours at the office (so I can use the huge widescreen monitor), and sometimes just at home on my iBook. So I decided to give Flex Builder and SVN another shot.

Well, I still had all the same problems. However, this time my searching came up with a link to this article. I noticed the screenshots were obviously OS X, not Windows, and felt a sliver of hope.

I followed the instructions, and no errors this time! No complaining about dependencies. Everything installed just fine. I’m not sure what to attribute to the difference in my experience from a couple months ago. Is it a new version of Subclipse? Is it because I had Flex Builder 3 instead of 2? Were these instructions just flat out better than the ones I read before on Subclipse’s own site?

So now I had Subclipse installed. Getting to the import process was slightly different than in the given instructions, I assume because I’m using the stand-alone Flex Builder and not the plugin. Instead of just choosing File -> Import -> Checkout projects from SVN, I had to choose File -> Import -> Other -> Other (Yes, that’s two Others, not a typo) -> Checkout projects from SVN.

And… it worked! It checked out my folders, and I was able to commit changes with no problems. My code hinting still works. I backed up my Grooveshark Lite files, deleted the project, and checked it out as a new project from the Grooveshark repo too. Everything in that project is working fine as well. Bye-bye Automator scripts!

So for anyone out there who has tried in vain to get Flex Builder working with Subclipse on OS X, try the instructions at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ecl-subversion/ with Flex Builder 3. Hopefully you’ll be as pleasantly surprised as I was.

I was also considering the Olympus 4100 (not the 4100-PC, since the only difference is about $20 and non-Mac-compatible USB), or one of those things that turns your iPod into a digital recorder by plugging into the dock slot. Those were tempting, as I already carry an 80gb iPod video everywhere I go, but most of the reviews implied they drained the iPod battery super fast, and I also want to be able to easily use the recorder at work (where my iPod is usually already plugged into my computer). So if I wanted to record something, I’d have to unmount the iPod, wait for the “do not disconnect” indicator to go away, unplug it from the USB cable, plug it into the recorder adapter, wait for the iPod to change to record mode, and honestly by then whatever I had wanted to record would probably be gone.

Both the Sony and the Olympus are pretty similar in feature set. I picked it up at Best Buy, so if I decide I want to compare the two before making a final decision, I can easily return/exchange it in the next couple weeks.

There’s a lot of things I plan on using this little recorder for. One is better dream retention. Lately I’ve been having a lot of dreams in which I solve some sticky programming issue that’s been bugging me, except by the time I’m fully awake, the actual solution is gone, and all I can remember is that whatever I came up with was really cool. Hopefully I can train myself to hit the recorder when I’m still half asleep and mumble something useful into it. If nothing else, I’ll find out that my subconscious is full of crap, and my insightful sleepy solutions are actually worthless. At least I’ll know.

Another use, of course, is as a ubiquitous capture system. I can just dump whatever comes to mind into it, and then later process the notes, GTD-style, so I don’t have to worry about forgetting them later. Even easier than pulling out a pen and notebook, I can just ramble into the mic and worry about sorting it out it later.

And then there’s the number one use I have planned, the one that pushed me to finally go buy a recorder in the first place: lately at Grooveshark we’ve been having a lot of discussions of processes and organization, and I find that while talking to/ranting with other people I can easily come up with many ideas, but later on when the time comes to try to explain these ideas in an email I get so caught up in grammar, semantics, and word choice, that my passion (and often my entire point) gets lost in the shuffle. I’m hoping that if I can record these discussions in the heat of the moment, that later on I’ll be better able to distill them into something that is both meaningful and constructive.

Tech startups tend to be full of really creative people, and it’s awesome to see what various places have done with their space. It gives you a little insight into the sort of people that work there, and the culture they’ve created. Some of the featured offices are truly inspiring.

PS: My desk is visible in the 3rd and 4th pictures. It’s the one with the plant, but not the plant with the lamp.