Tag: app

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Displaying currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac menu bar

In an attempt to teach myself Objective C, and because I couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted, I wrote a little utility to display the currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac taskbar. Originally I had it display the full track name right in the taskbar but it was too much text for such a small space (especially on a 1440×900 screen), so now you click a little musical note and it shows you the info in a menu.

Here’s a screenshot:

The code is all in github. If you’re looking for a similar utility, and are brave enough to try my first-ever Obj-C app, you can download it here. But the freshest version will probably be in the github project.

As an aside, I was surprised at how easy it was to cobble this together having never written ObjC before. I found some good examples that I mostly ripped off, but it was still remarkably easy to have the app listen to iTunes for track changes, etc.

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Vonage iPhone App Calls Facebook Friends Free, So What?

Lots of outlets seem to have picked up the story about the new Vonage iPhone app that lets you call your Facebook friends free. I don’t understand why this is even newsworthy. There are a bunch of free VOIP apps for iPhone already, with Skype being the one that comes to mind first. But a couple of other things have me scratching my head about this story:

  • AT&T doesn’t offer the unlimited data plan for iPhone anymore, so this “free” call could end up being pretty expensive over 3G.
  • If you’re making a call to another friend with the iPhone app, then your friend probably has an iPhone. They’re also probably also on AT&T, so a regular voice call to them would be free anyway. So just call them?

This might make more sense to me if your friend is outside the US, or they come out with a similar app for other platforms, but even then… so what? Free VOIP calls aren’t new. Is it just the Facebook tie-in? I don’t get the buzz. Maybe it’s because I have 5,000 rollover minutes with AT&T.