What is iTunesCheck?
iTunesCheck is a program that I wrote after checking out several other programs and not finding exactly what I wanted. It provides global hot keys for controlling iTunes without switching to it, it provides a hotkeyable floating window that shows the currently playing song, and it provides a hotkey for quickly finding a song without switching to iTunes.
Yes, all of these things are, of course, available directly in the iTunes interface. But I find it cumbersome to have to switch to iTunes just to figure out what song is playing. This is faster.
iTunesCheck is freeware.
What is the status of iTunesCheck?
With version 0.91 iTC finally reached a stage where it was stable enough and had a complete enough feature set that people stopped emailing me about it. And since I've become rather busy recently what with school and work, I've had no time to work on it. So it hasn't received much work as of late; however, I still use the program daily and have a list of things I'd like to do when I get some time.
One of the major complaints about iTC is that, while the info window is customizable enough to be useful, it's not customizable enough to be awesome in the way that Mac software should be. As I learned more and more about programming (especially in the web arena, id est AJAX), I realized that using web pages to draw the info window would be perfect. It's fortunate, then, that Apple happens to have the best HTML renderer available right now and has made it open to the public to build against. Future versions of iTC will use WebKit to draw things. In fact, the version in source:trunk already does this and just needs the rest of the features moved over to it, since in addition to rebuilding atop WebKit I also initiated a complete rewrite of the codebase.
A Few Notes
Several people have noticed a similarity to the old PTHiTunesNotifier (which then became You Control). Yes, I modeled my software after that fine, fine application.
Several people have noticed a striking similarity to SizzlingKeys by Yellow Mug Software. No, we're not the same people, but I feel good that somebody would mistake my stuff for actual, high-quality software. I actually used to use SizzlingKeys (back when it was SizzlingKeys?4iTunes), but at that point it didn't have a floating window, so I took it upon myself to write my own floater. Then I thought, "Well, why not just include the hotkeys with the floater? Then I won't need two programs." Then SizzlingKeys got a floater, and, yes, it does look better than mine. Then they got a search feature which is really similar to QuickPlay?. I'm pretty sure they ganked the idea from me. :P That's cool though, that's what this game is all about!
Somebody has accused me of ripping off Synergy by Wincent Colaiuta. No, I didn't even know Synergy existed until I had already released a couple of versions. I'm sorry that multiple people have similar solutions to the same problem.
Notes for Developers
- Definitely get the source code.
- All about WebKit
- You might find InternalNotes to be useful. Really it's just notes I'm writing to myself but... who knows?
- What will Leopard mean?
