Christoph asked me for some advice on how to get notification on iTunes track changes in a comment, I said I would write a bit of a tutorial on how I got it to work. First thing was to create an AppleScript Studio program - you will need to have the Developer Tools installed for this. Now, open the main.m file. It should look something like the following:
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#import <mach-o/dyld.h>
extern int _NSApplicationMain_(int argc, const char *argv[]);
int main(int argc, const char *argv[])
{
if (NSIsSymbolNameDefined("_ASKInitialize"))
{
NSSymbol *symbol = NSLookupAndBindSymbol("_ASKInitialize");
if (symbol)
{
void (*initializeASKFunc)(void) = NSAddressOfSymbol(symbol);
if (initializeASKFunc)
{
initializeASKFunc();
}
}
}
return _NSApplicationMain_(argc, argv);
}
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The file needs to have the following elements. At the start, the following imports are required:
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#import <Foundation/NSDistributedNotificationCenter.h>
#import <Foundation/NSString.h>
#import <AppKit/NSAppleScriptExtensions.h>
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This should be all of the imports that are required - although I also had stdio.h for a while for testing. After the declaration of the NSApplicationMain, I put the following in:
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@interface iTunesConnection : NSObject
- (id) init;
@end
@implementation iTunesConnection
- (id) init {
NSDistributedNotificationCenter *nc = [NSDistributedNotificationCenter defaultCenter];
[nc addObserver:self
selector:@selector(updateNow:)
name:@"com.apple.iTunes.playerInfo"
object:nil];
return self;
}
- (void) updateNow:(NSNotification *)notification {
NSString *updateScript = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"tell application \nend tell"];
NSAppleScript *as = [[[NSAppleScript alloc] initWithSource:updateScript] autorelease];
[as executeAndReturnError:nil];
}
@end
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Copy and paste the stuff above - there is some that goes over the line in my browser, but it’s all there if you drag out the selection. You may need to change a couple of things depending on what you want to do. For instance, the @"tell application \nend tell" section needs to be the applescript code that is run whenever a new iTunes track is started, or iTunes is paused. You could fit the entire application into this place, but what I did was have a hidden button that this script “presses”, triggering the update process. Finally, I added the following declaration just after the first brace in the main function declaration:
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iTunesConnection *connection;
connection = [[iTunesConnection **alloc**] init];
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This gets everything running. I would suggest putting the following into the applescript string to test it and see that it works:
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@"tell application \"Finder\"\ndisplay dialog \"iTunes Changed\"\nend tell"
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You need to have \" whenever your script would have a ", and \n wherever it would have a newline.
