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Hi, count me as another HUGE fan of Remote Buddy. I have been looking for a product that would simply allow me to display a "Now Playing" window with artwork to show what is playing in iTunes and had nearly given up on remote control ability. Anyhow, I purchased RB primarily because of the iPhone functionality but have discovered enough uses for it to dust off my Apple remote. Anyhow, here are some questions that I could not find answers to in the forums or online help:
1. I love the ability to change to CoverFlow in iTunes and have the ability to scroll through albums, change songs etc. However, I would like to be able to access the RB menu without going OUT of CoverFlow mode. I can't find a behaviour for CoverFlow and thus don't see any way to modify this.
2. Hide Menu: I saw a thread on the forums here regarding hiding the menu immediately after an action is performed - but I couldn't decipher whether there was a solution or not. In that thread where you had mentioned that The "Hide menu" item in fact is the same item as "Activate Behaviour" and "Deactivate Behaviour" so I thought perhaps adding behaviour action in a customized action to Activate iTunes Behaviour may do it but that didn't work. Neither did various combinations of activating/deactivating other behaviours. Activating Expose Behaviour seemed to partially work; it did hide the RB menu but then I was not able to deactivate Expose / activate iTunes without using the remote. If there is an easy - or even a difficult - way to do this, it would be very helpful.
Suggestions, humble:
A. Button sizes in Now Playing - Ajax Remote. I think I saw this mentioned elsewhere in the forums but the buttons are very small on the iPhone (or perhaps my fingers are too fat). I ended up modifying the .png files for previous, next and playpause - making them about twice the size and it made a huge difference.
B. On a related note (and I realize this may be out of the realm of RB's intended purpose) - I also temporarily changed the display size of the album artwork so it would display better in browser window on a pc/Mac. I have to say, it looked fantastic - but of course it screwed up the iPhone display. There are other products that have this functionality - but I haven't found any that function as well as RB - so it would be cool if there were different display modes for iPhone and full size screens. Even cooler if it worked automatically. I tried to modify the code to do this....but I don't have the skills ;-)
C. Again I think I saw this mentioned elsewhere - but I am curious if there is any plans to make any changes to the Now Playing window that will allow you to perform other actions without having to change to another menu? Since is the screen that is active almost all the time for me, it takes several steps to perform any other iTunes functions and then return to the Now Playing screen.
D. I added some "Actions" to perform some of the functions that I use often in iTunes. They were all pretty easy to do and I love that RB lets you create add and remove menu items. I thought you might want to consider adding them to future versions. Also, they may help explain exactly what I am trying to do ;-). These are all added to my iTunes menu:
- Current Song: Displays current album/song. (this is one of the places where I wish the menu would hide automatically).
- "Jump To (A,D,M,R,Z)" - I have a large collection (35K+ songs), so it can be tedious to find an album / artist I am looking for. This just jumps to various letters in the alphabet and I can easily scroll to what I am looking for from there.
- Next Album: Since I like to listen to a lot of Albums as opposed to individual songs it makes it easy to skip over an entire album.
- Search: I am playing with this right now but it doesn't seem to be working. I have an action with 2 steps: 1. Go to the search window (can't recall the keystroke combination but this works fine. 2. Behaviour Action: Show/Hide Virtual Keyboard. (that doesn't seem to be working - but I just started messing with it).
- Hide Cursor: I installed Cursorcerer which lets you hide the cursor automatically after a set period of time. It also lets you do so with a keystroke, so I added that to a lot of the behaviour actions.
...if anyone is wondering, yes I know that Front Row can do a lot of what I am trying to do and that's what I used before they added CoverFlow to iTunes. Since I use my HTPC primarily for music, I prefer iTunes to FR for a lot of reasons. Anyhow, I will quit babbling for now and go back to fiddling with RB. Thanks again for a very cool product and keep up the good work!
eTip
