I want to build an app where a user can see what their friends are listening to.
I can get my own currently playing track by using the player model.
I can get another user's toplist by supplying a userName to the toplist model.
But how can I get another user's currently playing track?
You can't, directly.
If you want to do this, you'll need to have your own web service that keeps track of it. When a user uses your app and opts-in to having their currently playing track uploaded to your service for your friends to see. Of course, that means that everyone needs to use your app in order to keep your service populated.
Another approach will be to connect to the Facebook API and get friends' listening history that way.
Related
I am fairly new at this. I am using Nodejs and Express linked to a mySQL database to build an application and now I need some library that allows that realtime messages are sent to the right users.
I have already tried socket.io but it was a little complicated for me to understand the documentation, so I searched for some other alternatives.
I found Mediator.js and I was trying to implement it in my server but now I am getting to the conclusion that I don't know how to make it work in real time.
The website has an Admin and several normal users;
The users can belong to groups (one, many or none) that the admin assigns.
The Admin has to be able to send a string to the users that belong to a specific group if they are online - realtime.
Is this possible to implement with mediator-js? Admin sends string to server and then server broadcasts to the members of the group that are online in realtime?
Or do I really have to use socket.io?
Thanks for your help in advance.
I want to develop a mobile app where a registered user can search among other registred users. User A can chat with user B. User A can view user B's profile. Upon this, user B have to be informed that user A is watching him.
So its some kind of chatroom where the server should be able to be notified when a user watched/contact another user, and let the latter know about this.
My first idea was to use node.js. But I begun to read a lot on XMPP-protocol. Do you think an XMPP-server would be more adequate to this kind of app? What I udnerstand you can customize your xmpp-server, write plugins so it can behave the way you want. Is this correct?
This is a perfect use case for socket IO using NodeJS. In fact, I have implemented exactly what you are describing with an iOS client and node backend in less than 50 lines of code. See https://github.com/MegaBits/SIOSocket for the iOS library, and http://socket.io/ for SocketIO.
XMPP is much heavier and verbose, and you'll be spending a lot of time parsing/building XML when you could just be communicating in JSON all the way. Take a look at my repo here:
https://github.com/alhill10/chatapp3/blob/master/View%20Control%20App/ChatView.m#L34
You can see on the viewDidLoad method it simply opens a websocket connection and listens for events from the server, then updates the tableview being used as a chat window with any new incoming messages in real time.
Then, look here https://github.com/alhill10/simplechat/blob/master/app.js for a simple example of the Socket IO backend that receives and relays the messages, as well as maintaining the state of current users online. You could trivially add in user authentication and .
I recently just got through the beginning tutorial for creating a web app with the spotify api. https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/tutorial/. The tutorial was great for showing how to authenticate a user with oauth and log in a user.
The problem I am having is with the endpoint. I can't seem to figure out how to change the endpoint so that instead of displaying a users profile, I can see a list of a users track, better yet starred or top 10 tracks.
for a 10,000 view perspective of what I want to build is a app that would allow users to easily log in through their spotify account, take their stared or top tracks and push them to a radio that I am building with an raspberry pi.
I am new to working with the spotify api and working with api's in general so whatever advice would be awesome.
At the moment, there is no way to get the "starred"-playlist. (At least it's not documented)
I don't know what you mean with "Top 10 User tracks", since this doesn't exist as far as I know
To get a list of the account's current playlists, change the URL to:
https://api.spotify.com/v1/users/{user_id}/playlists
With this URL, you will get a list of simple-playlist-objects wrapped inside a paging-object. Now you can select one of the playlists (or loop through them) and fetch its track this way
NOTE:
If you also want to fetch private playlists, make sure you use the scope playlist_read_private
Is it possible to create an app-bound playlist?
It's possible to create a playlist for a user, but how will I know which one that is when they move away from my app?
Ideally, I would only need to be able to create/edit 1 playlist.
Edit: Have found this http://developer.spotify.com/technologies/apps/guidelines/integration/#appsthatcreateplaylisturi:s
But if anyone has great ideas, I'm still open!
As you've found out yourself, you can't create a playlist in a user's library that's somehow linked to your application using the Spotify Apps API.
I thought it'd be a good idea to also quote the relevant part of the Integration Guidelines that you've linked to:
If you want to generate and save the user’s personal playlists in the
app, you should not keep playlist information only saved within the
app. Playlist information should instead be handled by utilizing user
playlists, so that the user can access playlists as usual. They
shouldn’t have to go to the app to access a certain playlist that they
have created.
Suggestion:
I think there's several ways to do what you want to do though.
One way could be to let a user create a new playlist using your application and save it to the user's library, and at the same time save the playlist URI to your own back end. As you've noted, playlist URIs are obfuscated (e.g. they look like spotify:user:#:playlist:783BHaT7Xb8K5VyYstxsj3 instead of spotify:user:thelinmichael:playlist:783BHaT7Xb8K5VyYstxsj3, the username is replaced by # for the currently logged in user, and #xxx.. for other users). You could still save the last part of the URI, which I believe is unique for every playlist. Using a hashmap to map that part of the playlist URI to properties you want to keep track of would let you do quick lookups of a user's playlists to see if they are associated to your app. You could iterate though the user's library to gather all obfuscated URIs, and send them to your backend in a single HTTP request. The response from your server could be the index of the library playlists that matched the playlist on your backend, along with the properties you've mapped to it. Again, this was just a suggestion and possibly not the best way forward but I hope it gave you some ideas. :-)
I just want to experiment writing a little app that will let you know how many people on spotify are listening to the same song you are. Not just your friends but everyone!
given the responses to similar questions that can be found here, here, here and here I would say that it is probably not possible for privacy reasons, as the spotify API does not intend to let you access the users spotify id which would be required to get the tracks you where listening to.