Posts Tagged ‘Dashcode’
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.