Shout out to this project and all the others mentioned in this thread that are adding the niceties that seem to be missing.
Why is the OS not handle states and events globally? If I turn on do not disturb, it show show me as unavailable on Outlook/Teams/Google Workplace. Yet the "official" method is to go into individual apps and switch it. And god help you if you turned on DND but forgot you had an alarm, instead of vibrating first it's just going to ring loudly in the middle of wherever you are (talking of iOS, I know android has a few options but it's still messy).
Scrolling is still "viewing" as if the screen was an A4 (or similar) paper. You could have dynamic vision tracking with a magnifier to boost ergonomics, but no, the button for "close window" that is used once in 10 minutes is as big as the start menu or the right click button and is the same px size as the text you're reading.
Context awareness is absolutely crap on EVERY major OS, be it android or iOS or Windows, and I'm pretty sure MacOS and Linux too. Everything is a silo (fine) but does not integrate together. (Side note, if anyone wants to fix this feel free to contact me via my email in my profile. I'm not really a coder but I know a bit about systems engineering.)
The very old native Spotify desktop client was objectively better than what we have now.
A significant portion of the code was written with Claude Opus. I was very impressed with its abilities.
Had a lot of the same features (like the scrolling marquee), but I just built it as a personal project, never put it on the app store or anything like that. I don’t even know if it’ll build or run on modern macOS, but it’s still on github if you want to see some fossilized Objective-C code :p
I deliberately chose not to use marquee because of CPU usage, but if there's a more efficient way, I can definitely integrate that.
It's always surprising to me that Spotify/Apple Music/etc. don't seem to want to natively add functionality like this to their UX.
Does what it says on the tin. Doesn't provide controls, but I usually have the spotify app open somewhere underneath other windows, so the play/pause/forward/back work.
> This project has been unmaintained for a while now.
> Here is a link to an updated and currently maintained fork
The link points to https://github.com/AudioBand/AudioBand for the curious
Just curious, how long did the API extension approval take? (been waiting for almost 3 months on mine)
The Spotify Web API actually required no approval, because it does not integrate with the user's account.
The current version of my app uses AppleScript, and was approved by the App Store within 24 hours. The next version will use Scripting Bridge, but I don't anticipate that will be an issue.
In the most technical sense, my app is not really an extension to the Spotify app, it is a standalone app that communicates with the Spotify app using Apple Events.
Hope this helps :-)
Unfortunately, that particular feature will require Spotify to give me additional approval, which requires 6 weeks (or more, unfortunately). I will try my best to add this as soon as possible.
Some more advanced integration with Spotify (Liking songs, for example) requires approval by the Spotify team which can take up to 6 weeks. I can gate this and additional cool stuff behind payment. Right now I am considering $2, but frankly, I am new to this so I am not sure how to price it. Any additional thoughts are welcome.
