Using the iTunes Integration with SignatureProfiler
Although the iTunes integration into signatures is a rather frivolous need, it's one of the original things that I had wanted to do. After all, we Mac users like to share stuff right? There used to be an even cooler shareware tool that would create an image and upload the image to a server even few minutes of what was playing in iTunes. Then you could link to that image in an email or web site or whatever. I liked that very much and thought it was cool, but they could no longer support the server so the service disappeared. That program (whose name I unfortunately can't remember) was better because it always showed the current status. I had to settle for showing what is playing when the message is sent.
Anyway, below the fold are some examples of how these signatures can be used and a couple of gotchas to look out for and avoid.
The first thing to get straight when using the iTunes functionality is that there are one set of placeholders that strictly fill in data from iTunes whatever its status. The three placeholders:
- {itunes.playing.song}
- {itunes.playing.album}
- {itunes.playing.artist}
will be replaced with empty strings if iTunes is stopped or not running. This is why the {itunes.display.info} placeholder exists. This allows you to choose four different, but complete signatures to use for each of the states of iTunes (the four states are "Playing", "Paused", "Stopped" and "Not Loaded". This way you can decide that for all states but playing, you'll have "None" as the signature for the info placeholder. Then when iTunes is in the three other states that placeholder will be replaced with an empty string.
But it also let's you designate more meaningful signatures for each of the states if you wish. Say, we create four signatures like these:
In the iTunes tab of SignatureProfiler's preference pane, we'll set the different signatures for the four states. Assume that we'll assign the top-left signature, to the iTunes State of "Playing", the top-right to "Paused", the bottom-left to "Stopped" and the bottom-right to "Not Loaded". To set these, choose the state you want to set from the top menu and then pick the signature that you would have created in the bottom menu.
Then once you compose a message and select a signature that uses the {itunes.display.info} placeholder, you'll get the correct version of the iTunes signature displaying in your signature. Here are what my four look like.
Cool, huh?
