I couldn't find any Übersicht widgets for Spotify that included the album's artwork so I decided to make one.
Inspired by long abandoned apps like Bowtie and CoverSutra, but focused solely on track information display, not control (I never really used those apps to control my media player).
Download ZIP archive to your Übersicht widgets folder (i.e. ~/Library/Application Support/Übersicht/widgets
).
For alternate layout (pinned to the bottom of the screen, as seen in the third screenshot above), edit now-playing.coffee
and just below style:
, in line 59, change the alt-layout
variable value to true
(default is false
).
This is basically polling Spotify's API every time it updates so be gentle. I've set the default refresh rate to 5 seconds but I don't know how nice Spotify is with folks pulling a 640px cover every 5 seconds. I have definitely thought of implementing some sort of caching system but haven't decided how to tackle that issue... yet. :)
I'm a hacker not a legit programmer (whatever that means). I reused & remixed bits and pieces from several sources. I have some experience with Bash and Javascript, but had never ventured into Coffeescript (though I use and love Ruby). I was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed using it but I might've made some crude mistakes in syntax or logic. Use this at your own risk... :P
I initially started by customizing Patrick Pan's Last.FM widget but then decided to move away from using Last.FM and finding ways to pull the information directly from the Spotify app and Spotify's API. But I definitely think Patrick deserves the above acknowledgement for having designed the structure that I reused and remixed in the making of this widget.
If you have ideas for improvements and, especially, fixes, please open a PR and I'll definitely consider them. I do appreciate your help in advance.
- CACHING, CACHING, CACHING
- iTunes support
- Better error handling