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iTunes info plug-inPretty self explanatory- a plugin that delivers the same info that you would need if you were making a iTunes protocol Quartz Composition. The basic idea is to be able to pull the currently running track info from iTunes, and feed it to a standalone (eg., not being run inside of iTunes) QC composition or app.
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... and this is TOTALLY different, in a way, but I also really would love to be able to pull the current url from safari.
I'm scouring, trying to see what method some of the iTunes widgets call upon to make the iTunes info happen.
iTunes interrogation is only possible via applescript, as far as I recall and have seen. Safari interrogation might be similar, or might be impossible -- I've not really looked (I'm not a big safari user, and the thought of having apps having the ability to sniff my urls screams XSS/XSRF exploits aplenty... no yay.)
Ok, point taken on the safari note. The idea behind that was to use web to image to have a qtz that would process the image of the current web page you are on, in a particular way. However, exploits are to be avoided.
Soooo. If you don't use Safari, what do you use anyway? Maybe it's historical, but I'm quite fond of Opera. I do use Safari plenty though.
It's not really possible to put put something in QC that could trigger scripts is it? I can't really think of how it would fit in. Being able to get track info outside of the iTunes environment, and into QC would be ideal.... more so than triggering iTunes from QC (though that would be nice as well, if probably even more impossible).
QC can trigger applescripts by using the command line patch, and invoking the "osascript" command -- I don't know much more about that though. I'm guessing that the current built-in patches wouldn't enough to pull this off (you could use the command to pipe it to a file, and then use String From File or something to load it, but that's about it off the top of my head).
As for browsers, I use Firefox. Mostly because I bounce around between windows and OS X (and used to bounce around Linux desktop too for a while), and having at least 1 consistent program made my life easier. Safari's nice (not a fan of the title-bar-tabs in 4 though), but I only use it for testing purposes. I've not touched opera since 2005-2006 briefly (though if you count the version on the Wii, I use it every now and then), and remember it being really fast and light, but nothing in it stood out enough to really make me stick.
Yeah, I was figuring that the command line patch could probably trigger, but I was wanting to avoid that. It just seems unseemly! And, it would have to write to file, etc., so it would be kinda sketchy to do that, imo.
The thing that got me onto Opera, was that they were the first to implement tabbed browsing that I know of (definitely before IE and Firefox), they have the "speed dial" which is SORTA like spaces for websites, integrated Bit Torrent, a myriad of other features (widgets and such)... and they always seem to be on the cutting edge or the first to implement a new feature.
They are kind of a sleeper in the US. It's cross platform as well. It tends to be most secure, but that could be skewed sample data, and I am always skeptical about those kind of claims.
Ok, there are sorta two threads going about this, because there is the other thread about apple script...
But, I found this, which I should have looked for before I posted here. Bad form on my part:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20011108211802830
There are a couple aspects about this that are making me scratch my head, but this is enough to for me to chomp on for a little bit...