Just recently, I have gotten back into some OS X programing and decided to port over the existing source code to work with Hummingbird.me, which is another Anime list managing site that sprung up. While it’s not as comprehensive as the more established site, I didn’t have any problem with their official API, which is rather comprehensive. However, there doesn’t seem to be an API that you can view the Anime information along with the current watch status, so I had to change how the program determines if the title exists on the list and get the current status. But in three hours or so, I got it working.
While the APIs are good, it seems that the search APIs don’t give relevant titles first and just spit out all the titles, leaving me having to develop another algorithm of some sort to get the relevant results before searching through them. Using Parsekit or some work around might fix it, however I don’t have much knowledge in lexical analysis since I’m not a Computer Science major, I major in Information Technology for my Masters) , but hopefully the developers will improve the search APIs. Either way, I plan on adding search exception (tying detected title to the correct title) and correction features to alleviate this drawback (and these lists will be exportable to JSON).
With that, Hachidori is based on MAL Updater OS X and has the same features such as automatic scrobbling, showing basic information about updated title on the status screen, Share Service support, scrobble history and on demand scrobbling. While streaming support is being worked on, what is different from the closed-source HAPU besides my program being open source is that I will only focus on the core features instead of jamming bunch of features and have a buggy product. Plus, I think having an open source alternative encourages developers woho are interested in the platform learn how to interact with the APIs and make their own programs in the language they choose.
So why name it Hachidori instead of Hummingbird Updater OS X? Simply put, shorter names are better and I know a good amount of Japanese.
With that, Hachidori 1.0 Alpha 1 is released. While the basic scrobbling feature works and it will detect most titles correctly, there might be a few bugs and imperfections. If you encounter a bug, report them to the forum post or on Github. I plan on adding Hummingbird specific features in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Download 1.0 Alpha 1 (Requires OS X 10.8 or later)
There is also a development blog for this client on Tumblr as well.