Huge changes in PandoraBoy on the way. I’m working on full-screen mode, so you can run PandoraBoy from across the room and still see what’s currently playing. Building a smooth transition from window to full-screen without interrupting playback has taken my a couple of days, but I think it’s a pleasing effect. Right now it doesn’t do a lot more than be a full-screen Pandora window (which isn’t very exciting in itself, though much harder than it sounds), but next I’ll work on a plug-in architecture to let you put various information on the bottom portion of the screen. Then it’ll actually be useful.

Why is it so hard to go full-screen you may ask? Afterall, it’s just a webpage. But the mini-player is a web page that assumes the window is a specific size. Getting the background gradient to look right at any size is the main problem, since there is no direct way to scale a background in CSS2. repeat-x handles left-to-right scaling, but the pandora background isn’t tileable vertically. My final solution was to build an NSImageView which holds a flipped version of the Pandora background, and then placed it immediately underneath the pandora webview. It handles all vertical stretching and gives a nice darker area at the bottom rather than just fading to white.

I’ll also investigate a black-screen mode with the pandora player standing with no background. I had that working at one point, but it’s been hard to recreate it in a way to zooms cleanly. CSS2 and Javascript just aren’t nearly as powerful as Cocoa….

If you’re feeling insanely adventurous, it’s all checked in on truck in subversion….