Wow - Pandoras Box Got The DIGG Effect!

I never really got into DIGG but when I saw the effect it had on my blog and all the spin off effects, I was addicted! 4500 people visited my blog on Friday - This is an average increase of 4450 people over normal days! Then people started linking to it from their own blogs - More traffic!! People posted the link to del.icio.us and I made the front page of that too!

I am literally over-the-moon with the effect Pandoras Box on Digg has had but with over 70 emails and a shed-load of comments, I had my work cut out today!

I made the app for my own use and decided I might aswell chuck it on my blog to download and got a bit lazy with the features. Lots of people love it for its simplicity but alot more asked for some extra features. I literally spent hours upon hours researching Javascrip and Flash integration, reading hundreds of pages on Windows APIs, Web Browser control, various DOMs and the official Pandora Event Notification Object.

There were 3 main things I wanted to fix, add :

• Some people got an annoying "Object Required" popup. This was my bloody fault and I missed a debug setting when I packaged it up. This has been resolved!
• The current playing song and artist is now displayed on the form caption and the tray control tooltip. This took a while and required a nice hack :-)
• I wanted voting from the tasktray icon. I tried everything. If you saw the hacks I tried to implement to get this functionality, you would laugh! - I have not been successful so far!

Lots of people wanted the source code for the application and a technical overview on how it works. I am going to post both these soon.

The main problem with the voting from the tasktray icon is that I really have ZERO control over Pandoras flash object. They dont expose any functions I can hook into so everything is done with a hack. I got so far at one stage. I found out there are 2 keyboard shortcuts in Pandora itself PLUS and MINUS to vote Positive and Negative respectively. My idea was to focus the WebBrowser control and then use the Windows API or SendKeys function to simulate a keyPress on the focused flash object. No matter what I did I couldnt get it to hook and this also required the window to be focused so the tray hiding was making this null and void. Ah well, hopefully Pandora will release some sort of API and I will work my bollox off to include everything everyone asked for!

Anyway, enough with the waffle, I have uploaded the latest setup.exe file which has the improvements in it.

Click To Download

Upgrading Old Version
To be safe, I would recommend you uninstall the old version before installing the updated app. Also, make sure you close the old app before you uninstall/re-install :-) If your in a rush, belt ahead and install over the old app and click IGNORE on the install screen for any alerts....