Ship Some Code

I am so sick of GrowlTunes. When it tries to find album art for a song that doesn’t have an ‘Album’ tag set it goes ahead and queries Amazon for the album art anyway, this results in a terribly ugly looking ‘Unter Null’ picture displaying in the Growl notification, presumably because it is querying Amazon for ‘Null’.

I tried downloading a fresh version from the Growl site and the version available currently (1.1.2) doesn’t seem to suffer the ugliness and instead displays a much more sensible iTunes icon.

Great, I thought. That’s the end of my troubles with GrowlTunes.

Not so.

It seems that this version has a new problem - if a song is played that has no ‘Track Number’ field set then GrowlTunes displays an ugly (null). where the track name should appear.

At this point I’m more than a little peeved. Would it really have killed them to add a simple check to see if the Track Number is null and if so, don’t try and display it. This is an application used by hundreds of thousands of people, I just can’t understand it. Mac software is meant to be built better than this.

A quick Google search shows I am not the only one complaining about this problem and the standard reply seems to be that a replacement version of GrowlTunes is currently being developed and we are meant to wait for that to fix the stupidness.

Since the source for GrowlTunes is freely available I figured I’d download it and fix it. It only took me 10 minutes and 2 lines of code to make it only try and display the track number if a track number is actually set. You can download the version I have fixed here.

Close your current version of GrowlTunes, unzip my one, drag it to your applications folder and replace the existing version. From now on GrowlTunes will only try and display a track number if there is one available to display.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Software.