Design Diary: jsAMP MP3 Player

Back in March, Scott Schiller’s SoundManager 2 jsAMP player was formally introduced to my Blog as todo list. My first use of jsAMP is now online. These are my questions and remarks:

• jsAMP must be absolutely positioned—to not use this positioning means the dropdown list of audio tracks will appear incorrectly. This is not a problem—based on my relatively new understanding of CSS positioning shown in “Block Alignment: Relative Positioning of Absolute Blocks.”
• Is there a way to start the player with the track list displayed? My preference is to trap a jsAMP “player ready” event and then run soundPlayer.togglePlaylist(). This would show off the cool animation effect during the page load and subconsciously introduce this feature to the interactive audience.
• After clicking and holding over the scrolling text, it is possible to drag the player around the screen. Is there a way to turn this ‘feature’ off?
• jsAMP searches for all the MP3 links on a page to use in its play list. Is it possible to click on one of these links and cause jsAMP to load and play the selected item? Is it possible to have jsAMP search an external XML file instead?
• My design impulse is to use the “on available” feature in the YUI library to run soundManager.createMovie(). Is this possible? One crazy idea is to make jsAMP so generic that developers have the option of plugging in YUI or any other framework via something like a jsAMP API and it just works!
• jsAMP embraces the openness of the Web and reveals the exact location of the MP3 files. This is not a criticism. This is just a reminder of what may be considered by some obvious.

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