Post-Modern Drunk: Saving Time Can Be A Real Waste of Time
I spent over an hour tonight trying to set up a keyboard shortcut to save me, at the most, five minutes of time. Five minutes spread over the rest of my life, even.

I have become obsessed with Quicksilver, a Mac program designed to set-up keyboard shortcuts and key combinations in order to handle processes that would otherwise take valuable seconds for me to switch to other programs to perform. Quicksilver is undeniably an awesome program. It would be even more awesome if I used my Mac to do anything beyond web browsing or listen to iTunes. I can see how it would be amazing and insanely useful for someone who uses their Mac as their primary work computer.

I just use it to run iTunes, though. It is insanely robust for iTunes, and I now use it essentially to program and re-program on the fly what I'm listening to on iTunes. If you are interested, I could go into a full detailing of how I do this and why it's great, but just for now, know that I almost never have to look at iTunes itself, and I have keyboard shortcuts to go from one song to another, to loading up further songs, to skipping to another album, to pausing, and more.

I can even rate songs as I'm going, without having to switch to iTunes. And since I am insane about ratings, and even more insane about creating Smart Playlists to capture, say, Four and Five Star Songs on Three Star and Higher Albums, added in the last three months...the ability to rate without switching back and forth between the program I'm working in (like Firefox, say while I"m writing a LiveJoural Post) is insanely cool.

I'm a bit embarassed about how excited I am about this. This is all part of my desperate need to go through my music and evaluate it and hopefully get rid of the stuff that isn't any good and discover even more stuff that is good. I've been on a three month long experiment with going through my music to try to prune it down--up until last week, I hadn't accumulated any new music for all of 2008, in an attempt to triage my music experience.

So.

I spent over an hour today trying to figure out how to set it up so that I could get a little pop-up window whenever I wanted it to see what song I am listening to--with song title, artist, and rating on it--without having to go to iTunes to see that. Quicksilver has an out-of-box ability to do that. It pops up in the exact middle of the screen, and stays there for five seconds. It is one of the most irritating things I've ever seen in a non-Microsoft program.

So. That doesn't work. Second possibility is Growl. Growl is a notifier program that works with pretty much everything Mac, and is fairly customizable about location and type of notification. I fooled around with that, and got an unobtrusive notification that would pop up in the upper right corner when I wanted it to. It would also pop up at the start of every song, which doesn't sound terribly distracting, but is.

So I downloaded some Applescripts. And a program, called FastScripts Lite, which integrates with Growl, to process iTunes requests via Quicksilver. And that allows me to pull up the song listings when I want it, and only when I want it.

This is insane. But it works.

So. I have:
iTunes
Quicksilver
Growl
FastScripts Lite

So when I want to know what I'm listening to, I do a keyboard combination, and it goes like this.
FastScripts Lite --> Growl --> Quicksilver --> iTunes --> Quicksilver --> Growl --> Hey, that's what song I"m listening to! I should rate that 4 stars --> Quicksilver --> iTunes --> Quicksilver --> Growl.

All automatically, behind the scenes. The info bouncing back and forth between these programs, in a way that doesn't get in my way.

It's great. I really mean it. And easy enough to do, once you know how to do it, but the more I actually think about what I just did, the more insane I feel.

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