Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

radio, radio

One of the projects I’ve worked on this month has been a redesign of the homepage for Washington Post Radio. The new design forgoes the schedule grid in favor of a stopwatch motif, as the station’s format for most of the day follows a fairly consistent hourly schedule.

I’m particularly happy with how the schedule widget on the page turned out, as it afforded a fun programming challenge in Flash. This is how it works:

1. The Flash player loads in an XML file which contains the schedule information.
2. The Flash player then compares the user’s time versus the schedule (correcting for time zones). If a special program is airing at this time (e.g., a Washington Nationals baseball game), that program will be highlighted in the “On the Air” textbox; otherwise, a promo for the current regularly scheduled program will appear instead.
3. Every minute or so, the Flash player re-checks the time and, if necessary, updates the “On the Air” textbox and stopwatch highlight.

One point of potential error here is relying on the user’s computer clock time, which may or may not be accurate, to display time-sensitive information. I don’t think it’s a huge issue, though at some point I’d like to figure out a way around it.