The Right Stuff

It has taken some time but yesterday Now Playing 2.0 has been published on the Windows Live Gallery. I even received an e-mail from the Live Gallery team apologizing for the delay.

A note to my non-English readers: If you want to take a look at the Live Writer gallery, set your browser language to English unless you want to see a generic error message telling you that your request could not be served at this time. Because Live Writer is currently available in English only, Microsoft believes nobody uses it here and thus has no interest in browsing the plugin gallery.

The first review about Now Playing is really, um, sobering. No support for crapiTunes, resulting in a lousy 1-star rating. There could definitely be done something about that!

So I installed iTunes in a Virtual PC (this thing will never touch my main machine!) and downloaded the iTunes Windows COM SDK. Implementing a media player plugin supporting iTunes was actually as simple as creating a runtime callable wrapper for the iTunes COM object and writing a single class with three lines of code doing the work (the rest is error handling and two simple getter properties).

During my submission of Now Playing to the Windows Live Gallery I was urged to create a setup program as well. I'll keep the zipped DLLs here in case you want to work around the hassle of a MSI-based setup.

New features in Now Playing 2.1

The new features in version 2.1 include:

• Support for iTunes
• Now Playing now opens the configuration dialog if the selected media player could not be found when inserting the content. This happens usually the first time you start Windows Live Writer and insert content without configuring Now Playing first.
• Some interface text changes
• Minor internal changes

Let me know if there's anything else that could be included and/or changed.

Download

Now Playing [?]: Wax Tailor – Tales of the forgotten melodies – Ungodly fruit