XM Radio Online v2.0 is up. This was a complete rebuild of the UI and a nice overhaul to the back-end as well. Unlike the previous version, the UI is now mostly Javascript using xmlHttpRequest (that’s AJAX if you follow the trendy names for these things) for the channel/song data updates. There’s still a few small Flash movies for displaying the presets and the current song data.

Here’s a screenshot of the new player:

This new version should be much more accessible and easier to use, and also takes up fewer system resources, so people who want to tune in a channel and leave it playing in the background while they work should be happier.

This was an excellent project to work on – while I’ve done quite a bit of DHTML/Javascript work in the past, I’ve never used it as a base for an entire application. This was also the first time I used xmlHttpRequest, but I found that applying my Flash knowledge to the AJAX model worked out great – the only tricky part was figuring out a few browser inconsistencies and working around those.

If you want to check it out, you can sign up for a free 3 day trial.