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Controlling iTunes remotely

So I just got this shiny new MacBook Pro. Absolutely love the thing. I’ve been away from the Macintosh platform for far too long…

Anyway – I’m sitting in my office listening to music and realized that the speakers, while okay for what they are, suck by most standards. So I pop over to my PC and fire up iTunes, hit play, and use my sound system that’s hooked up to it. Sounds great. But, I’m lazy and I got tired of switching over to it change tracks, stop, pause, etc. I figured there had to be a way to control iTunes remotely from the Mac. Doing a bit of research, I found some stuff for the Mac and a PHP script that did me no good.

Finally I came across a Perl script (can’t remember where…) that simply runs a Daemon. Everything that I needed was already there! All I needed to do, was point a browser at the box and it had a nice simple stripped down interface for play, pause, stop, next, etc…

After some time, I realized I hated having to keep the browser window open. Enter MacOS dashboard widgets.

After some quick fiddling with Dashcode, I came up with this little dashboard widget to send the requests to the PC. The current track name only updates after a command is sent, so it isn’t updated dynamically.

Now my iTunes controls are at my fingertips, and I don’t have to spend the time moving my hands the whole 24 some inches to the right to do it on the PC.

Force directed node interface 2

Here’s an example of the force directed node interface that I’ve been talking about. It’s not complete. It’s just a working prototype. You still cannot load project details, but I’m waiting to add that if I decide I want to take this any further.

Since the dimensions of the interface have been reduced to fit in this blog post, things might be a bit small (try zooming in). You can also drag nodes around. Helpful when things get pushed off the screen. Nodes can be opened and closed by clicking on them.

Force directed node interface

I’ve been working on the experimental Flash front-end I spoke about in the last post. The idea is to use a force directed or force based system for displaying categories, keywords, projects and their relationships. I was curious about what kind of user experience that would create.

Here’s a video of the force directed layout interface in action.

So, what is a force directed layout?

It is a method for positioning nodes of a graph in a way that is aesthetically pleasing as well as easy to digest. This is accomplished by creating a simulated physical system where all nodes are like electrically charged particles (Coulomb’s law) and the connections or associations are like springs (Hooke’s law). After running through thousands of iterations, the entire system begins to become stable until all the forces are in somewhat of an equilibrium.

Fig. 1 Interface with only the category and technology nodes expanded.

Fig. 1 is a screenshot of the layout. In this example there are only a few nodes expanded, but it gives you an idea of how things end up looking. There are two base nodes: “Category” and “Technology”. Clicking these returns the appropriate set of subnodes. The association of these subnodes is shown with a line connecting the child and parent node. When clicking on a specific technology keyword or category, that category/keyword subnode expands into another set of nodes which are projects.

Fig. 2 Interface with more nodes expanded

Fig. 2 shows the cross associations between categories and keywords.

So far it’s been a cool and somewhat successful little experiment. I’m not sure it would work as an interface as the node labels overlap too much and when there a lot of cross associations, things don’t look as organized and it’s much harder to read.

I still need to add node collapsing and make it so projects can be viewed. I’ll try to post a working example soon.