But if you’re the betting type, I’d be putting my dollar on a free jQuery book – because if the SitePoint search results are anything to go by, we’ve got it in the bag…

The news was announced shortly after markets opened this morning and lead to a buying or selling frenzy, sending the company’s share price soaring or plummeting. CEO of the company reluctantly or tentatively gave a brief, vague, yet slightly plausible statement at a press conference at corporate headquarters this morning. “It’s a devastating blow to, or fantastic opportunity for us” CEO remarked, “but there are still a lot of details to be decided.”

Some old piece of news that vaguely relates to this news could be rationalised and connected to this new news in such a way as to make the new news not seem so ludicrous, and also highlights the importance of the new news to the company’s rival company. Rival company CEO was unavailable for comment, but released a statement expressing concerns or insincere condolences – adding that he or she would not speculate on the news’ impact to their core business. Rival company’s stock rose or fell some amount.

The book opens with what we might assume to be the present day. A sense of tension and foreboding seeps from the text as we are introduced to the perils and dangers of cross-browser Web development. A likeable and handsome protagonist – the reader – emerges from darkness and attempts to harness the powers of jQuery to overcome these obstacles. By the end of the piece, our hero has changed: the naivety and timidness replaced with a quiet strength – an enchanting energy that knows no boundaries.

At least, that’s what I got out of it. If you wanted to ignore the sub-text then I guess you’d just say it was a kick-ass jQuery book.

I’ll conclude this review by saying that it is possibly the most important work released in the last 500 years, and leave you with an appropriate quote from Australian television personality, John Safran:

If you’re not writing your own reviews, then you don’t deserve to be famous.

Play Corporate Best Friends Forever

Lol! You spawn something new everyday. Quite by chance I came across a youtube video about “Hacking windows pinball” which reminded me of an article I wrote yonks ago called, strangely enough, Hacking Windows Pinball. “I wonder if it’s related?” I wondered. It was. It was just a video of the “hidden test” cheat I found. Then, to my surprise, I looked at the related videos… There’s zillions of them!

Some of them take even longer to explain how to type 2 words than I did explaining how to reverse engineer in assembler language. And sooooo much bad music… But it does highlight an important message: If you want your content to be popular, it has to be relevant to the interests of 14-year-olds.

(There’s oh-so-many more, but I think it would start killing browsers)

Ok people of the internet – The last challenge I threw down to you was conquered with relative ease, so here’s a tougher one to ponder – from a local drinking establishment in Sydney’s inner-west:

Enticement: Free bacon and egg roll!

Condition 1: With purchase of schooner of beer.

Condition 2: Monday to Friday only.

Condition 3: Between 10am and 11am.

Right. So the offer is: “We’ll give you a free bacon & egg roll if you buy a beer in the sixty minutes following 10 in the morning, on a week day.”

Most of this seems fair enough, at face value. Everyone loves bacon & egg rolls and beer (well, us vege’s substitute the bacon with additional beer). Everyone likes bacon & egg rolls in the morning. Some people like beer in the morning. Between 10am and 11am. On a weekday.

Therefore: some people who wanted a beer and bacon and egg roll on a weekday between 10.00am to 11.00am might be enticed away from their regular pub or bacon & egg roll shop, creating a competitive advantage.

Who is this marketing ploy targetting?!
And why for just a single hour?!

If the offer extended from 8am to 11am it would make perfect sense. From 10am to 1pm – also perfect sense. Heck, just about any other hour of the day would make sense.

As it stands, it does not make sense. I’d like to hear what you have to say on the matter. Once we collect some wisdom of the masses I’ll head to the pub on a weekday between 10 and 11am to order a beer and see who was closest.

You know, very special occasions – those of cultural and historic importance – demand certain graces: and I think it’s fair that an announcement as auspicious as this be marked with both the Blink AND Marquee tags:

!!! TURNTUBELIST HAS BEEN RELEASED !!!

As the flashing and scrolling have made blinkingly apparent, Turntubelist has been released! Indeed it has certainly been some time coming.

Perhaps a tale of hardship and mateship in these uncertain economic times might stir your soul, and bring you closer to understanding the intricate genius inherent in Turntublelist – The Web App….

Turntubelist: The early weeks

Like most useless-to-the-general-masses inventions, Turntubelist was born out of petty necessity: Keeping those house parties jumping by loading two YouTube videos in separate Firefox tabs was getting tedious. But we had the music in our blood and no one was going to keep us down.

So we loaded two instances of the YouTube web-page into iframes. Granted, this made transitions and song-selection smoother – but with two videos sitting sidewise like so many… um, turntables, the cross-fader just about wrote itself.

Thanks to the nice YouTube APIs and the wonders of jQuery, a working demo was completed in a couple of hours – and it seemed pretty fun.

The proceeding month was spent writing an extensible javascript foundation (with a passable crossfader algorithm) and knocking up a suitably awesome design. “Cross-fade YouTube videos and create video playlists” was the simple idea we dropped on the WebJam crowd in September of 2008. The presentation, and Henry Tapia’s sweet design skills, were enough to give Turntubelist a victory: despite some tough competition.

With a WebJam win under our belts we were sure that international web-nerd super-stardom would follow, and Turntubelist would be bigger than Facebook My Space.

Turntubelist: the boring times

There was only one slight issue. We hadn’t “finished” it yet. So we spent the next 5 months working on it, at a rate of about 1 line of code a week. If nothing else, it taught us these valuable lessons: don’t add features you don’t truly need, and it sure is hard to call something finished.

Turntubelist: the that’s-good-enough period

But our slowly-but-surely approach finally paid off, for we lovingly announce Turntubelist “beta”. Break out your killer DJ chops and get busy on the virtual wheels-of-steel: search for a set-worthy collection of YouTube music videos, and add them to your playlists. Then stun the crowd with track-after-track of dance floor stompers – seamlessly mixed for their pleasure! If you just need to dance – switch on the auto-play mode, and if you’re a DJ from way back – get tricky with the advanced set/cue features and keyboard shenanigans.

And if you come up with that monster playlist – hit the “publish this set” button and post the link here: craziest set wins. Ready? Go!