GrowlTunes: Add song into into menu

[Scott H]

It would be nice if the song information was also maintained inside
the menu when clicking on it. I can set the rating and such there, but
can't see the song info. If I miss the growl notification, it'd be
nice to see that info in the menu about what's playing now.

Could even go a step further and store some song history, but that
isn't totally necessary.

[Travis Tilley]

I started working on a feature where there'd be a history rollup via the status item with custom views. The idea was to display similarly to a growl notification in miniature (and clipped text if too long): image on the left, aligned text on the right.

This is the point where I give the disclaimer of being new to cocoa in general and having NO idea what i'm doing. ^_^b

Anyways, I actually started out doing a custom panel and emulating menus in that. So... not the best idea I've ever had. Scrapped. Killed a lot of time re-implementing functionality that already existed if I had only been using a plain old menu instead of aiming for an extremely specific look and feel (a menu item can only live inside of a menu, and they're not abstracted out in a way that allows for their reuse elsewhere). This is far as I got before getting frustrated and deciding it was a bad idea (I actually filled that blank area with a tableview of history items but I can't seem to find that screen): http://imgur.com/PIC8n

Long story short: I'm rewriting GrowlTunes from scratch to nuke all of the applescript cruft and hacks, as well as attempt to make the code a bit more DRY and maintainable. Along the way I'm re-architecting small pieces to fit within the code signing and entitlement requirements of the mac app store. When that is complete I have a variety of ideas I'd like to throw in, including the one you just mentioned. ;)

...getting the formatting of a notification's text to look smooth and be useful is an interesting problem. Did you know that when a stream sends you a new song, it fires the song change event but technically the track doesn't change? The method for getting metadata for every other type of playlist item is the same except for streaming radio. Hrumph. ANYWAYS, I'd also like to introduce a preference for customizing your own damn notification text for each subtype of item you can play. I'm not, however, sure how to cleanly handle alternates via a template (like... if composer is set, use that, otherwise do blahdidah). Again, just an idle thought about something that might be neat.

updating album art via Last.fm when it's missing won't be all that painful and might be the first bonus goodie i actually finish. the API for this just requires a developer token and key. a user need not authenticate with their personal Last.fm account to get access.

...scrobbling can come later. much later. not a priority, but it'll happen eventually.

visually appealing controls in a custom view within a menu item would be nice... rather than menu items for previous/next/pause/etc that are plain text. Think the chrome wrench menu. Their "zoom" menu item actually has zoom in, zoom out, and switch to fullscreen as buttons as well as a readout of what percentage of zoom you are currently at. this would be a nice effect i think. a volume menu item with a slider would be neat.

Again, these are all just random thoughts about things that might be cool and i'm probably going to work on. At some point. Maybe. I have problems committing.