Merlin Update!

Hey guys,

Just thought that I would try to keep you all updated as opposed to making promises that never seem to be fulfilled. I know that you are all wondering about Merlin and the progress of it and when it will ever be released. One reason that it has not been released is because it keeps breaking.

Many of the channels that Merlin uses are powered by a method called HTML scraping. What that does is when you for example want to check movie times and enter in your zip code. Merlin downloads the HTML of the page delivered, sorts it into your results, and presents them to you. However, if the company (in this case moviefone.com) desides to change the layout of their results page, the entire scraping method breaks.

So the one dellima that I am having right now, is trying to find 1 of 2 things.

1. Many of Merlin's channels are now powered by XML engines. For those of you that know what XML is, it is a standard library of syntax that websites offer to deliver their services to RSS readers and developers like myself. It makes it extremely easy to implement things into Merlin with an XML/RSS feed. So I need to find some sort of website that allows custom XML output of movie times and other things that may be useful to Merlin.

2. Merlin's Google channel is now built using Google's Web API. This API is built off of a SOAP protocol which delivers XML like results directly back to the application. SOAP is even better than XML because you can customize the message that is sent and get custom results back that can easily be incorporated into the applications feedback. So we need to find a website for movie times and other things that may be useful to Merlin.

It is the little things like this that have been keeping Merlin on the back burner. It is hard work having to hard-code the actual scraping method and can be a huge moral killer when youve spent 3 days coding something, it works perfect, and in 2 days it stops working.

In NO WAY has developement stopped on Merlin. As far as a release date... Can't say... I can use everyone's help here to find these special feeds or services that I can implement into Merlin. Even if you find some random service that you think might be useful in Merlin, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE post it here. I would love to be able to incorporate it into the build.

Thanks for all of your support guys, I know I have let alot of people down with this one and I am really trying my hardest to make it up to you all.

TiG4

#266934

aw, man. you didn't let me down but i feel bad that that you feel bad. i'm anxiously awaiting like the rest of the folks here and am glad that the work continues. thx for the update and keep up the good work!

#266937

Don't forget Aqua-Soft feeds .

I'm sure Merlin will be great no matter how long it takes.

-NC

#266951

Have you thought about incorporating an RSS feed reader into a merlin plugin/page? Might be interesting if implemented.

#267214

this is a question just because i don't know the answer - how does apple do it? do they access thier own feeds or do they use other people's feeds themselves?

and the natural follow up would be to find out if there is any way to access those...i'm sure you have already thought of this, but i was just wondering for my own self.

#267223