As we noted the other day, we’ve seen an increase in the rate of new APIs added to our API directory. Some of the latest entries include a new job search API, an API for accessing book metadata in RDF, a movie clip API (our recent coverage), and an API for researchers in archaeology, museum collections, and other field sciences. More details on each of these below:
LinkUp Job Search Engine API: LinkUp is a job search engine that only lists jobs taken directly from over 20,000 company websites. Developers can use the API to develop their own custom job searching solutions. Access the data directly in both XML and JSON formats. Full documentation is not publicly available.
Movieclips.com API: Movieclips.com is a site that has collected movie clips and made them completely searchable by actor, title, genre, occasion, action, mood, character, theme, setting, prop, and even dialogue. The Movieclips API allows approved partners to interact with the movieclips.com search engine, clips, and metadata. Some of the data returned include duration, movie title, dialogue and more. The API allows developers to integrate movie clips into their applications. Full documentation is not publicly available. Developers may submit a proposal which is reviewed and granted.
O’Reilly Product Metadata Interface API: This experimental O’Reilly Product Metadata Interface (OPMI) exposes RDF for all of O’Reilly’s titles, organized by ISBN. The OPMI is a REST API and supports the following data formats: XML, RDF, FOAF, MODS, MARC.
Open Context API: Open Context is a free, open access resource for the electronic publication of primary field research from archaeology, museum collections, and other field science datasets. Open Context provides a simple RESTful web service to get content expressed in XHTML (for human use in browsers), the supported Atom Syndication Format (plus GeoRSS extensions), JSON (Javascript Object Notation), and KML (the format used by GoogleEarth). The Atom-based web services provide a set of query options to request items from a collection.
The iPhone offers a couple of different options when it comes to viewing media. You can search video using the YouTube app, download and sync your own movies using iTunes or browse for video on compatible websites with Safari. A new app called FirstClip is aiming to integrate each of those three options into one app to enable video searching, streaming and downloading of internet video straight to your iPhone.
Searching for video on FirstClip is like any other search engine. Enter the keywords of your search and FirstClip will scan the web for iPhone compatible video encoded in MPEG or H.264 format. By default, the search engine will look through YouTube and Google Videos for media but you have the option of adding your own compatible websites in the settings tab. Searched videos can then be streamed and viewed immediately or downloaded straight to the app for offline viewing.
The app works fairly well and having the ability to save videos for viewing any time is a nice convenience, especially if you have an iPod Touch or find yourself in an area with limited data service.
FirstClip is priced at $4.99 which may be a costly amount for some to have the ability of being able to download short internet clips. The developers do offer a Lite version to give you a chance to see how the app works but it does come with some limitations. For instance, the search engine will only scan from two sources at a time and you’ll only be able to download 10 total videos for offline viewing.
If you’re looking for a fast and simple way to take internet video with you without having to convert video files or sync your device to a computer, FirstClip does the job as advertised. It’ll just be a matter if you can justify the $4.99 asking price.
FirstClip and FirstClip lite are available now on the App Store.
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