Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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SkipTunes

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The other day I wrote about Steffen’s great hack Quartz Composer in Sudden Motion that provides acceleration data from your *Book’s sudden motion sensor as an source patch for Quartz Composer. And it has impressed people a lot since. I showed it to Dan last week and he liked it, making me show it to about everybody else who came along.

While it’s absolutely useless from a reasonable point of view, I suppose that the fact of seeing the computer react to the way it is moved is what impresses people. It give a whole new feel of interactivity to the machine. While playing around with it, Dan’s flatmate asked whether this could also be used to control iTunes. I.e. when you hear a song that upsets you, you should just be able to slap the computer to make it skip to the next track. I thought that was a very cool idea. And so I put Steffen’s code into a separate app doing just that.

It’s not very pretty to look at consists mostly of code that I nicked from Steffen’s Quartz Composer project which enhanced what had been done by Christian Klein and Pall Thayer to work with current editions of the *Books. So it’s not much, but after all these disclaimers you might still enjoy it. Update: SkipTunes has been seriously updated over time and is now called Skip Checker.

November 6, 2005, 1:42

Tagged as earthlingsoft, Skip Checker, sudden motion sensor.

Comments

Comment by Sören Kuklau: User icon

Sadly, MacOrama reports that the Sudden Motion Sensor is no longer an open API in 10.4.3. Someone at Apple either is lacking humor, or determined that it was too risky and unstable at this point (liabilities?).

November 6, 2005, 4:47

Comment by ssp: User icon

Our toys do work in X.4.3. I can’t say much about the ‘competence’ of Mac websites. But the link suggests that they may already fail at reading things when interpreting a ‘not available for public use’ statement as a ‘we closed the API’ not.

I doubt that the SMS stuff has ever had an ‘open’ API, we’re just grabbing the numbers. There has been some renaming of the hardware in newer machines, which broke Singh’s applications on the latest revision of i- and PowerBooks. I’m pretty sure he could fix that within a few minutes if he was inclined to do so.

November 6, 2005, 13:32

Comment by Paul Mison: User icon

I’m sure I must have mentioned bumptunes on the spool when it came out, but then SkipTunes wins points for being a standalone app.

November 7, 2005, 11:11

Comment by ssp: User icon

Paul, I must’ve missed that… probably because it was in a time before I had a computer with a SMS myself… which made me ignore that topic to avoid me wanting toys I don’t need.

Somehow the tools provided by the kernelthread guy don’t seem to work on the latest generation of *Books. I haven’t had access to older ones, but as far as I can tell that should be due to some renaming of the hardware components. That’s why we tried to come up with (i.e. steal together) our own solution for this in the first place.

November 7, 2005, 11:27

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