So it’s been awhile since I’ve written. In that time, my girlfriend has moved in
here with me in Huntsville and, as always, dealnews has
kept me very busy. However, it has not prevented me from occasionally trying my
hand at something new.
A week or so ago I decided that I was going to learn
Python. However, as part of my nature, I simply can’t
“learn” a language without having a purpose. For instance, I have never been
able to simply read a book on programming - I needed a reason. So I’ve been
giving myself reasons to do little tasks here and there in Python. One of them
came to me just today.
I have recently moved all of my development at dealnews from the PC to a
Macbook. I’ve never been an OS-bigot - always use the right tool for the job,
and the Mac - which in many ways is just Unix with pretty make-up - is the
perfect platform. However, I still use many of the peripherals I purchased for
my PC, including my Microsoft Natural Egronomic
Keyboard
that I adore. At home, I still use a PC (until I can afford a new Mac Pro),
albeit with the same keyboard.
One of the things I really love about the keyboard is that it has various
buttons that are just … buttons. They can be mapped to do anything you want
them to. There are five multi-function buttons at the top that can be mapped to
run programs. So I’m sitting here thinking, “self” (because that is what I call
myself), “why not write a little program to run on the click of that button and
go to the next or previous track in iTunes, so that changing the music doesn’t
involve any more effort out of my busy programming day than hitting an
additional keystroke”. But, it must work both at home and at work, meaning that
it must run in Windows and Mac.
Enter Python
I knew from previous experimenting in .NET that iTunes exposes a COM object on
Windows. With that in mind, I quickly found this
page that
described almost exactly what I wanted to do in Windows. So that left the
Macintosh. After an hour or so of digging on Apple’s website, I found this
page
that described how to access the COM on the Mac - and wouldn’t you know, the
functions are slightly different.
After that, it was pretty easy:
import sys from optparse import OptionParser
platform = sys.platform
if platform == "win32":
import win32com.client
iTunes = win32com.client.gencache.EnsureDispatch("iTunes.Application")
if platform == "darwin":
from Foundation import *
from ScriptingBridge import *
iTunes = SBApplication.applicationWithBundleIdentifier_("com.apple.iTunes")
def previousTrack():
if platform == "win32":
iTunes.PreviousTrack()
if platform == "darwin":
iTunes.previousTrack()
def nextTrack():
if platform == "win32":
iTunes.NextTrack()
if platform == "darwin":
iTunes.nextTrack()
def main():
parser = OptionParser()
parser.add_option("-n", "--next-track", action="store_true", dest="next")
parser.add_option("-p", "--prev-track", action="store_true", dest="prev")
(options, args) = parser.parse_args()
if options.next == True:
nextTrack()
if options.prev == True:
previousTrack()
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
So yeah. It’s kind of code monkeyed together, but not bad for someone who’s only
been doing Python for a week in the evenings. Passing either a -n or -p to the
script causes it to command iTunes to go forward or back. Of note, to work on
Windows, it does need the COM components from the Python for Windows
extensions.
I’m gonna expand this script some more in the future, but for now it does what I
need.
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