Note: Igor requires features from the Sococo application that are not yet released.
Igor is a personal assistant for Sococo virtual offices, offering a handful of favors to make the virtual office experience even better. Igor is a standalone Mac OS X app. It implements behaviors through a combination of ScriptingBridge application control and event observation with NSDistributedNotificationCenter.
The Igor source is provided as a starting point for implementing other great features, and discovering the new scripting interface provided in the Sococo Mac app.
SCOfficeAssistant is responsible for triggering actions based on events that are observed. There are a few behaviors built-in right now, and the code is simple enough that others can be easily added.
When you move to a room with other people, Igor kindly turns the music down on your local computer. This makes it easier to jump in to conversations without having to fumble for the volume controls on your music app. When you're by yourself in a room, Igor will turn your music back up to a comfortable level.
Igor thinks the music you listen to is pretty cool, and wants to share your current jams with the folks in your office space. As the current track changes in your music player, Igor shares the track title and artist in your status message.
Igor is integrated with the following music applications:
- iTunes
- Rdio
- Spotify
These apps all have feature parity within Igor in terms of event and control support. Application control (playback, volume) is implemented through the ScriptingBridge framework. Each app provides an AppleScript dictionary, so scripting interface classes were generated from those dictionaries. Playback status changes are supported through NSDistributedNotificationCenter, which is described further below.
The SBApplication subclasses included for iTunes, Rdio, and Spotify were generated with the sdef and sdp tools. Here's how the SCRdioScriptInterface.h file was generated:
sdef /Applications/Rdio.app | sdp -fh --basename Rdio -o SCRdioScriptInterface.h
The nuances of each application are captured within their respective SCMusicPlayerCommon subclasses.
NSDistributedNotificationCenter is one mechanism for delivering notifications between applications on OS X. Conveniently, iTunes, Rdio, and Spotify all support track notifications this way. The distnote utility makes it easy to discover notifications sent by these apps.
2014-12-12 12:48:17.664 distnote[26479:3587200] com.spotify.client.PlaybackStateChanged
2014-12-12 12:48:17.664 distnote[26479:3587200] object(__NSCFString): com.spotify.client
2014-12-12 12:48:17.664 distnote[26479:3587200] {
Album = "Platinum & Gold Collection";
"Album Artist" = "Rick Astley";
Artist = "Rick Astley";
"Disc Number" = 1;
Duration = 212;
"Has Artwork" = 1;
Name = "Never Gonna Give You Up";
"Play Count" = 1;
"Playback Position" = "85.22799682617188";
"Player State" = Playing;
Popularity = 64;
Starred = 0;
"Track ID" = "spotify:track:0FutrWIUM5Mg3434asiwkp";
"Track Number" = 1;
}