One of the uses of the WebpageAPI that wasn’t part of our initial thinking was being able to provide webpage hosted library navigation. But shortly after we got some pieces of the API working it became clear that was going to be a really interesting application. It is easy to get locked in the mindset of a 4 pane library view with the 3 top panes being filtering on the one big list of media at the bottom. To be sure that is an efficient way to find the tracks you want to play, but there can certainly be other, more engaging representations.

A few months ago Keisuke came up with one. He demo’d a tag cloud web page that displayed the users library in a tag cloud. I loved it but it required some php setup on a server so I sat down and re-wrote it to only use JavaScript.

You can load this url in your Songbird and bookmark it to use it as a way to view your library.

It does a little caching right now and isn’t smart about dynamically pulling in new tracks if they get added while you have the page showing. I plan on adding some smarts to the caching and will probably wind up filing a few bugs from this experience (and then fixing them!).

The next thing I have in mind is a dynamic html menu based version this. Basically working like filters: genre->artist->album->click loads a playlist.