1Simple Keyboard triggers
Note: other triggering methods will come soon.
The keyboard triggers rely on Proxi to work, so be sure to install that nifty application before all.
Now, download the blueprint and just drag and drop this in the Proxi Editor. This blueprint currently provides the following keyboard shortcuts:
- ctrl+⌘+page up:get info this will show a small overlay with info about the current playing track,
- alt+ctrl+space:play/pause,
- alt+ctrl+right:next,
- alt+ctrl+left:previous.
Configuring the keyboard shortcuts
If these shortcuts don’t suit you, you can easily change them in Proxi. Go into the Proxi Editor window and select, in the left column, the trigger you want to change, you’ll see something like that:
Now click on the “set” button next to the hotkey definition and type your new keyboard combo. You are done.
Changing the info overlay
It’s quite easy to customize the overlay to display the information differently, etc...
Go into the Proxi Editor, choose the “info” trigger under the “Amarok Keyboard” folder and click on the “Screen Message” task. Be sure to also display the values window (there is a small icon at the bottom of the proxi editor window). You’ll get something like that:
You can move the overlay around in the position box to change it’s position on the screen. You can also change the fonts and style of the fields displayed by right clicking on them and opening the “Fonts” window.
In the “Values” window, you’ll see that you have more values availlable to display. If you want to display one, just drag and drop the value of interest in the “Message” box.
Note: Most of the values are already followed by a line break.
If you don’t use some of the values, just remove them (with the - at the bottom of the screen), it will speed up the display.
2Apple Remote controls
These are straightforward controls for Amarok with the Apple Remote [2], just drag and drop in the Proxi Editor.
3AirClick controls
These are Griffin’s AirClick controls for Amarok. Just drag and drop in the Proxi Editor.
4How does it all work? can I do more?
Amarok is a KDE application and is therefore controllable through the DCOP server. This would be easy if you were under linux, but their is a small trick under OSX.
The DCOP server is bound to the display, and the X11.app has it’s own display on OSX. Therefore, you also need to specify the display before calling a dcop command. So for example, to pause Amarok player, you will make the following command line call:
export DISPLAY=:0.0;/sw/bin/dcop amarok player pause;
You can call that from the terminal, or execute it as as shell script in whatever application you want. So you can use it from AppleScript (which is mostly how it works in the current Proxi blueprint), etc...
This way, you can call other commands of Amarok. See the The Amarok 1.4 DCOP Functions documentation to find more.
To get the track change events, etc... it’s a bit more complex and I am looking into how to do that to get more features out for OSX soon.
