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It would be great if you could be alerted in Notification Center when your Automator workflow is done. Here is an Automator action I created for displaying notification center alerts. It can be set to display a title, subtitle, and message. See the website linked above for screenshots.
Finally, popular P2P streaming player Sopcast is available for OS X. Some may prefer using an external video player like MplayerX or VLC instead of the embedded mplayer; here's how you can do that.
The Sopcast OS X application is basically a package of the streaming server (sp-sc-auth) and a video player (mplayer) together with a simple GUI. The mplayer part is a very basic instance without keyboard shortcuts, so some functions like setting aspect ratio are missing. One may prefer to use the full MPlayerX application or VLC as the video player. Using Terminal it's possible, the only drawback is the missing convenience of clicking on sopcast: links in browsers. The link should be copied into a terminal command: $ /Applications/SopCast.app/Contents/Resources/binaries/m32/sp-sc-auth sop://broker.sopcast.com:3912/xxxxx 3908 8902 > /dev/null http://localhost:8902Sometimes for some reason the video players can't pick up the video stream, they need to be restarted. To stop the streaming server, press Ctrl-C in Terminal. [kirkmc adds: I didn't test this. I had never heard of Sopcast before either.]
Following a discussion on Twitter a few weeks ago, Jeff Porten shared with me an AppleScript he uses to listen to podcasts on his Mac at faster or slower speed. The script lets you choose a playlist, then choose whether you want to listen at 75% or 150% of the normal speed. It then opens the podcasts in QuickTime Player and plays them.
It's a nifty script, and if you like to speed up podcasts on your Mac, as you may do on an iOS device, this makes it easier to do so. It's a bit more sophisticated than the script in this hint from 2006, as it can keep going through a playlist.
(*
iTunes FastPodcast 1.2, by Jeff Porten
jporten@gmail.com
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
*)
tell application "iTunes"
set setupNeeded to false
--fetch prior selected playlist name and playback rate
try
set targetPlaylistName to do shell script "defaults read com.jeffporten.fastpodcast SelectedPlaylist"
set playbackRate to do shell script "defaults read com.jeffporten.fastpodcast PlaybackRate"
on error -- probably first run of script
set setupNeeded to true
end try
if setupNeeded is false then -- confirm using last settings
set userReply to button returned of (display dialog "Play playlist \"" & targetPlaylistName & "\" at " & playbackRate & " speed?" buttons {"Cancel", "Change...", "OK"} default button "OK")
if userReply is "Change..." then set setupNeeded to true
end if
if setupNeeded is true then -- set up new settings
set listPlaylists to the name of every playlist
set targetPlaylistName to (choose from list listPlaylists with prompt "Which playlist to play?" without multiple selections allowed and empty selection allowed) as text
set selectedSpeed to button returned of (display dialog "Playback rate to use?" & return & return & "(½X and 2X correspond to iPod playback speeds, actually 75% and 150%)" buttons {"Custom", "½X", "2X"})
if selectedSpeed is "2X" then
set playbackRate to 1.5
else if selectedSpeed is "½X" then
set playbackRate to 0.75
else
set playbackRate to text returned of (display dialog "Enter a playback speed. (1.0 is normal speed, 2.0 is true double-speed, 0.5 is true half-speed.)" default answer "1.0")
end if
end if
--store settings in a non-AppleScripty way
do shell script "defaults write com.jeffporten.fastpodcast SelectedPlaylist " & (quoted form of targetPlaylistName)
do shell script "defaults write com.jeffporten.fastpodcast PlaybackRate " & (quoted form of (playbackRate as text))
--actually do the playback in QuickTime Player
set targetPlaylist to playlist targetPlaylistName
set trackList to tracks of targetPlaylist
repeat with i from 1 to count trackList
set thisTrack to item i of trackList
set podcastName to album of thisTrack
set thisLoc to location of thisTrack
set thisDuration to duration of thisTrack
tell application "QuickTime Player"
activate
open thisLoc
play document 1
set rate of document 1 to playbackRate
--if some podcasts should never be rate-altered, delete last line and use this instead
--if (podcastName does not contain "Onion") then set rate of document 1 to 1.5
--or for multiple podcasts, add as many of these as you like before "then set rate":
--and (podcastName does not contain "someOtherPodcast")
set nextTrack to false
set j to 0
--if the QTP player is manually ended by dragging the slider to the end, automatically starts next podcast
--if QTP player is closed, script errors out of existence
--otherwise, when playback is finished, script will close the QuickTime Player document and open the next track in the playlist
repeat until nextTrack is true
delay 2
if current time of document 1 ≥ duration of document 1 then set nextTrack to true
end repeat
close document 1
end tell
--mark the track as played
set played count of thisTrack to (played count of thisTrack) + 1
--I use this AppleScript line to set the rating of the podcast track to one star, which I delete later from a smart playlist
--set rating of thisTrack to 20
end repeat
end tell
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If you are using Mountain Lion, you've probably seen the banner style notifications and wondered how to get them away quickly. Yet there is no close button.
The solution is simple: If you use a trackpad, use two fingers to swipe them away to the right; on the Magic Mouse, it's one finger swipe to the right. Of course, hover over it with the cursor and then swipe. [kirkmc adds: Well, I wasn't sure whether to post this. The banners go away on their own after five seconds, so you'd need to be mighty impatient to want to go to the trouble of manually removing them. But there may be cases where you do want to do this. I'll let you discuss this in the comments below.]
Mountain Lion's new Share menu is handy, but not smart enough not to propose you services you haven’t signed for in the “Mail, Contacts & Calendar” Preferences pane. Here’s a way to remove from it the items you don’t use.
Copy the file /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ShareKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/SHKServicesOrder.plist to a folder where you have write permissions. Duplicate it and keep a copy of the original in case you want to revert to the standard Share menu, as we’ll have to overwrite the system version. Open the file with any text editor and erase the lines corresponding to services you don’t use. I’ve erased Twitter, Facebook, and all the video services. Save the file and copy it back to the folder mentioned above. When asked if you want to overwrite the file, click on Yes and enter an admin password. You may have to log out and back in for the changes to take effect. [kirkmc adds: Note that this change may not survive a system update. I agree that this should be user-configurable, and basing it on accounts defined in the Mail, Contacts & Calendar preference pane - whose more appropriate name would be Accounts - would make sense. It would also be great if there were a way to add accounts that aren't hard-coded into the system. Could this be a challenge to hinters to try and figure out how to do that?]
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As mentioned in this hint, Mountain Lion removed the setting in the Sharing preference pane to turn Web Sharing on and off, even though Apache Web Server is still installed by default. That hint also mentions a third-party preference pane that you can install to toggle Web Sharing in Mountain Lion. Here's another solution in the form of an AppleScript. If you copy the script to a .scpt file in ~/Library/Scripts, you can conveniently toggle Web Sharing by selecting the script in the Scripts menu. Here's the AppleScript: display dialog "Enter your password:" with title "AppleScript" ¬ default answer "" with hidden answer set pw to text returned of result set resultMsg to do shell script " listResult=`launchctl list | grep org.apache.httpd`; if [[ $listResult ]]; then apachectl stop; echo 'Apache Web Server stopped.'; else apachectl start; echo 'Apache Web Server started.'; fi" password pw with administrator privileges tell application "Finder" set notifier to POSIX file "/Applications/Terminal-Notifier.app" if exists notifier then do shell script POSIX path of notifier ¬ & "/Contents/MacOS/terminal-notifier -message '" ¬ & resultMsg & "'" else display alert resultMsg end if end tell The script uses the free Terminal-Notifier app by Eloy Durán, if installed, to notify you that Apache Web Server has been started or stopped. If you have the app installed somewhere other than /Applications, be sure to edit the app's path in the script. Note that the state of Web Sharing is persistent across reboots, whether you use this method to control it or the aforementioned preference pane.
If you use Growl, you might find it a bit overkill to have some notifications come through Growl and others to Notification Center. Mountain Growl pipes notifications from Growl to Notification Center, but there is one caveat: all these notifications will have the Growl icon, and not the icon of the application that sent the notification.
This is just a stop-gap, as Growl 2, to be released soon, will support Notification Center directly, but in the meantime, you might find this a useful solution to group all notifications in one place.
If you like getting those little Notification Center alerts when things happen, here's a way to get even more. iTunification gets information from iTunes when tracks change, and funnels this into Notification Center, so you can get a banner to see what the next track is.
This certainly isn't new, as GrowlTunes has been able to do this for a while (if you use Growl), and I get notifications from CoverSutra, an iTunes controller. On top of that, I'd be willing to bet pretty much anything that the next major update to iTunes has Notification Center support. But in the meantime, if you want simple banners to tell you what's playing, this is a good solution, and it's free.
If you use Launchpad, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to open it. Go to the Keyboard preference pane in System Preferences, then Keyboard Shortcuts, then Launchpad & Dock. Select Show Launchpad, press Enter or Return, and enter your shortcut.
[kirkmc adds: It's worth mentioning this because, oddly, there is no default shortcut for Launchpad. (This is the case for both Lion and Mountain Lion.) While we're at it, here are some keyboard controls you can use when in Launchpad. Command-right/left-arrow moves to a different page, and Command-down-arrow goes into a folder.]
Up until Mountain Lion, you could hover over the Install or Download button in the App Store Purchases list and an x would appear. Clicking this x would hide the app, removing it from the purchases list.
Now, in Mountain Lion, you need to right-click or Control-click and choose Hide Purchase from the one-item contextual menu that displays. To unhide an item, click on the Account link on the main page of the App Store, then go to iTunes in the Cloud > View Hidden Purchases. |
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