BlogTunes
There are not many of you that read this site on Macs, but for those few, I figured I would post the application I have been working on. I’ll admit, it doesn’t do a whole lot yet, but the plan is that it will drive one of those “what I am listening to right now…” sections on blogs. (Yeah, I know, mine has not been updated in MONTHS.)
Well, the main reason was I didn’t like how any of them worked. The biggest problem was that they posted to the website immediately when iTunes played a new song. Which means all that odd crap that I skipped got posted to the site anyway. That just drove me nuts. So I decided to see if I could write my own Cocoa app. This is the first result.
So what does it do so far?
- It installs a menu in the upper right, near your system clock.
- It has a tabbed preferences box, and they save from session to session. Currently, only the “Polling” tab has any useful preferences.
- As you listen to iTunes, the menu will build a list of the recent tracks you have listened to. The number of songs you would like to track, how often you want BlogTunes to check, and how log you have to listen to a song before it gets added can all be adjusted.
- It provides on screen notifications of track changes via Growl.
- If you select any song from the menu, iTunes will go back and play that song.
What is it going to do (hopefully soon)?
- Save text files of what you are listening to (with user adjustable templates) for uploading to your website.
- Add images to the Growl notifications, and maybe even have it upload image artwork for display on your website.
With the warning that this is very rough software, you are welcome to download it and play with it. Bug reports would be appreciated, but I’m not really ready for feature requests yet. When I get done with the list of things I want it to do, then I’ll start adding other folks’ ideas.
Suggestions to make the preferences more clear (labeling, layout, etc.) are certainly welcome. If anyone wants to draw an icon (the one I’m using now is just taken out of some library I downloaded) that would also be appreciated.
Download BlogTunes.zip, 68K. (Requires OS X 10.2 or greater)
UPDATE I have a newer version that now displays the album artwork in the Growl notifications. The menu itself is much more organized and attractive, and there is now a third preferences panel where you can specify the name of the text files that get written (for uploading to your website). (Another update while on a plane to Tampa) It’s now writing those text files out to the drive as formatted HTML, as soon as I can get it uploading (and a prefs panel done so you can specify where to upload) I’ll make a new copy available.