###eyetunes

eyetunes is a system for displaying the current iTunes track information on a secondary monitor or other small window. It shows the track name (scrolling it when it's too long), artist, album, star rating, and album art. The entire window fades darker when iTunes is paused.

It is optimized for an 800x600 resolution screen, like a MiMo USB monitor.

####Usage

0. Install the rb-appscript gem.

   $ sudo gem install rb-appscript

1. Run the eyetunes.rb script to start the web server.

   $ ruby eyetunes.rb &

2. Start the GUI/browser with the specified geometry of your secondary display:

   $ ./eyetunesgui -x 1920 -y 0 -w 800 -h 600 &

####How it works

eyetunes.rb is a Ruby script that uses the rb-appscript gem to talk to iTunes via AppleScript. It also runs a WEBrick web server on 127.0.0.1 port 2000 where it serves a simple HTML page with some JavaScript.

Pointing a web browser at http://127.0.0.1:2000/ will load a basic black page and position the text labels that will hold the track information. An Ajax loop starts and polls back to the web server every 500 milliseconds, which retrieves the current track information from iTunes and displays it on the page.

• If the track id is the same as what was passed by the browser, a null response is returned so the browser doesn't have to do anything.

• Otherwise, the current track, artist, and album name, with the album art and rating are retrieved. Because iTunes sends back album art wrapped in a PICT file, the data blob has to be searched through to pull out the JPEG or PNG data that the browser can understand. That blob is base64-encoded and returned to the browser as a data: URI to avoid another round-trip to fetch a separate image.

####Standalone browser

While eyetunes will work in any standard web browser, displaying it on a separate monitor without any window chrome, in full-screen mode while not causing problems with other full-screen apps, is more complicated than it probably should be.

Previous versions were using a Fluid browser configured to load http://127.0.0.1:2000/ in full-screen, but this required manually positioning the browser, adjusting the settings, and then having to re-do it if it ever failed to load the eyetunes page for some reason. Fluid also seems to be broken on OS X Mavericks.

Now a standalone browser is included which creates a small Cocoa window with a WebKit frame hard-coded to load http://127.0.0.1:2000/ at the specified screen geometry.

To re-compile the browser, install XCode and execute xcodebuild in the gui directory.