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nickharambee

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 20, 2009
6
0
Hi

I have recently developed a simple app that sits on my desktop and allows me to add specific tags/text to the 'comment' field of the currently playing track in my iTunes library, the text added depending on the item clicked in some drop-down menus.

This is fine for when I am sitting at my Mac, but most of the time I would like to be able to add tags from a distance, i.e. remotely, using the iPhone, so I started to develop my first iPhone app for this purpose.

I have succesfully designed a simple Tab Bar Application, with two views, which have all the buttons I need, but now I am stumped as to how to set up the remote part of the app. On the Desktop version I simply wrote some applescript with sections for each of the menu items. On the iPhone I am not sure how I would go about this.

Any help with this, either with the procedure I need to follow, or pointing me in the right direction of a tutorial or some such thing, would be gratefully received.

thanks

nick.
 

PhoneyDeveloper

macrumors 68040
Sep 2, 2008
3,114
93
So what you want is that if you're sitting in a coffee shop listening to some tune on your phone you can then save some comments and then later have these comments show up in iTunes on your desktop mac?

This is basically a syncing problem and apple hasn't made it very easy to implement this.

Your structure will include your app on the phone, your app on your desktop, and the ability to connect the two. Your app on the desktop will probably work the same as it does now. It's just that it will get its data from the app on the phone. Probably you want the app to sync when you tell it to but it could always look for the desktop computer that it's supposed to sync to and then sync with it if it finds it. You could also initiate the sync from a menu item in your desktop app, in which case it will look for the device and sync from it.

I'm not sure if an app can tell what music is currently playing on the device. Look into the mediaplayer framework and the iPod Library Access Programming Guide. Look at the WiTap example for a way to discover and connect two machines.

You should also look up descriptions of syncing as this is a moderately complicated process, depending on how you want to implement it.
 
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