Here's a little look at my little program "shown off" at Mix 09.
Please view this in full screen mode (by double clicking the video), because of the small text and high-res recording.
So here is a little background on the "Couch Guide"; well I had been off programming for a long long time, having return early this year I wanted to test my mantle with WPF and C# (I used to be a VB guy). In hand I had a practical problem, which was that the cable I have at home has a lot of good channels, but I used to just keep missing what I wanted to see time and again.
Now, the problem was with one our, cable provider doesn't have EPG, their are lot of channels to keep track off, and and obviously partly me forgetting. Plus, in some cases even though the content is in English, the introductions and timing information were in other languages - like we have a fabulous channels bouquet from Turkey (DigiTurk) that uses Turkish for it's non-content info but unfortunately I can't get the head or tail what they are saying. Further, if you look hard all the channels info is online, but to keep tabs of 40-50 websites for schedules is crazy if not impractical. Anyway so having decided this is an "information problem", paved the way for Couch Guide as an aggregator of schedules.
This a great channel from Turkey, but see the movie "Poor Boys Game" becomes "Hayatla Mac" in Turkish.. at least the album art helps..
After a couple of day I got it working but the thing was very inelastic for a lack of a better word, so I created a provider model to dynamically look for the providers and hook in the channels. And slowly by slowly refactored the thing to a clean, mean model. And it is quite alright, I have written 5 providers than give me 630 channels from all over the world. Some providers are just 100 lines, using a base class. The main thing is to parse into the required model, the rest is taken care of for you.
You can bookmark your favourite channels, and for those channels it keeps seven days of schedules ahead of time.
Now I want to open the provider model and the code for everyone, but as of now I think the model needs a bit of work. There are a lot of bits and pieces that come with schedules' information (which I never knew or considered), and I want to encapsulate it properly so that we don't have to tinker it time and again. Also, I am integrating it with twitter, facebook, and other social media so that we can have a rich consumption of a somewhat pretty generic data. Look forward to reading twitters from your friends how cool 24 was this week or not.
Here you can get an overview of your favourite channels schedules for a given day; also hit the play button and the needle tracks what's playing now through the day, radio style - pretty old school..
Also, I've tried to give the program a visual flair, and as you can see Aero Glass works wonders (be sure to click on the pictures). What I love is that the glass see through effect gives the program a non-static texture and tonal quality - which to me is very engaging and visually refreshing. Anyone with Windows 7 will enjoy this even more with the rotating backgrounds, the tinted-glass, and personalization themes.
Hope you guys like it, and I'll try to have it out asap.