I've been putzing around with WPF for a few months and haven't really committed myself to anything worth discussing until recently. I'm really excited about WPF now and what I can do with it, and I'm using this project to learn some more of the GUI-specific WPF stuff from which I've previously balked away. Anyway, I'd like to announce the result of my most recent coding for fun project, TuneTweeter.
My goals were as follows: play with the Twitter API, learn some WPF GUI stuff, and hopefully build something interesting in the process. I'm pretty sure I've accomplished those tasks and have envisioned a few more I'll try to implement (or recruit help) over the coming weeks.
The idea is simple - Monitor iTunes. Whenever the song iTunes is playing changes, post some information about that song to the user's Twitter account. Not too difficult, really, but as usual I assume if I think it might be nifty there's got to be someone else who may think so as well.
The result is the window you see below, when you're running TuneTweeter and iTunes at the same time.
The navigation bar allows you to move through the two [current] views, which gives you the ability to enter your Twitter username and password. In addition, there's a "Now Playing Prefix" field. This field allows you to specify the text that appears right before the name of the song you're playing. A little something extra, I guess.
Requisite Public Service Announcement
Of course, you may generate quite a few tweets using this app, especially if you're like me and you can't work without some tunes. I'm not sure the nice people at Twitter will be huge fans of this whole idea, in fact, because it could generate a heckuva lotta tweets. You might not be either if you're sending your tweets to your phone via SMS and a whole bunch of people like this idea and all the people you're following decide to start TuneTweeting. So just be responsible. The screen shot below shows a snapshot of the Twitter account I've been using for testing, which of course is TuneTweeter. All of those problems are, of course, good ones for an independent software developer like myself to have, and none of this verbiage could possibly be designed to subconsciously suggest that you should be a beta tester for the product because what could be more fun than telling everyone about your music library via your impending tweet flood. No. Of course not.
Feel free to download TuneTweeter and let me know what you think. It's just a pet project right now, but I've got some ideas I think might make it a little more interesting and I'd love some suggestions. Use the comments form below or my contact page. Keep watching this area for updates and news.
Important Note: Make sure you have iTunes running before you open TuneTweeter. Otherwise it'll crash - TuneTweeter, not iTunes, I don't mess with iTunes at all. There might be a few other bugs in there, but that's what beta testers help with, right? [sheepish grin]
Privacy Note: TuneTweeter doesn't save any of your information, either, aside from your tweets into your own Twitter account. I don't get anything from you and I don't infect you with any computer viruses. No data collection of my own at all.
Thank You Note: Thanks to the people at Twitter for adding my application name to the list of source applications. And to you, because you are most certainly compelled to be an excellent TuneTweeter beta tester!