Personalised Radio, and all the whining and grumbling that comes with it....

2:44p.m., Tue 9 Oct 2007

Version 2 of Mi-Xfm Personalised Radio launched this week.

www.xfm.co.uk/mixfm

I contributed the interface design - which I'm proud of, but, much to my chagrin, the live player is only supported for Internet Explorer 6 & 7 on Windows. That's mainly because it's based on technology that was developed by RCS, a company who specialise in scheduling software for the radio industry, not web-based, public-facing product.

You could argue that given the piss-poor level of browser support it shouldn't be a published, promoted product. I'd be tempted to agree with you. It leaves me feeling uneasy, but there's commercial pressure to launch.

I am happy with the design and the work we managed to do given the limitations of the third-party software. It behaves beautifully in IE - even skipping tracks is nice xp - no re-buffering!

I would have liked to illustrate the work of which I'm proud with a screengrab to accompany this post. But given that I'm writing this on my MacBook, that's not possible (without booting up Parallels Desktop which is *STRICTLY* for testing).

Annoyingly, it doesn't look like wider browser support is in the pipeline either.

So it's a weird feeling at this moment in time. A mix of pride, a little disappointment and a dash of shame.