Comments on: Toggle iTunes 11 MiniPlayer

By: Vernon Richter

Vernon Richter — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 22:46:50 +0000

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Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:16:08 +0000

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By: William Bowles

William Bowles — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 15:02:52 +0000

Hmmm… a giant step backward if you ask me. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? Now my mini-player window no longer updates the titles of the music stream I listen to.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 14:54:23 +0000

Doug: OK – it got me thinking and I was able to modify the script to be completely language-independent. It only requires that the target item expose Cmd-Opt-M as the shortcut. In my brief tests I confirmed this worked in several languages so I am guessing iTunes never localizes the shortcut.

Download the script again to check out the changes.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 14:40:52 +0000

Doug: there seem to be a variety of “mystery” accessibility attributes, besides the obvious ones like “title” etc. I see from Accessibility Inspector that the menu item exposes a kAXMenuItemCmdCharAttribute of “M” so it might be possible to interrogate the items for this attribute and choose the menu item to “click” based on that.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 14:34:01 +0000

Doug: I considered that first but the problem there is you have to accept activating iTunes as part of the script execution. Another worry I have about that method is I have observed problems with UI scripting where, unless a delay is imposed after activation, the keyboard shortcut may not yet be “wired up” to the system by the time the keystroke event fires.

By: Doug Adams

Doug Adams — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 13:39:09 +0000

tell application “System Events”
tell application “iTunes” to activate
keystroke “m” using {command down, option down}
end tell

By: Doug Adams

Doug Adams — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:40:50 +0000

Pity can’t use numbered menu item so non-English users don’t have to translate.

By: Eurobubba

Eurobubba — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 22:03:39 +0000

Someday someone will develop a monster utility that grafts the menubars from every active application into one unholy, system-wide, hotkey-activated pop-up menu. And I will be the first to buy it. (Not from the App Store, presumably.)

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:51:24 +0000

Eurobubba: it’s not “just a hotkey.” This is a general purpose script for achieving the toggling. Some people will use it to tie to a hotkey, others will find other creative uses for it. The main point here is iTunes lost scripting functionality and this replaces it with a workaround.

To the point you’re getting at (clarified by your tweet), the specific example here of using e.g. FastScripts to assign a hotkey is more than just changing the hotkey for the menu item in iTunes. The hotkey via FastScripts would be accessible globally on the system regardless of whether iTunes is front-most. That’s often the use case for this kind of scrip to be able to toggle something about iTunes regardless of whether it’s focused or not.