Getting the iTunes visualizer is one of the coolest things about having a Mac Mini hooked-up to your TV, but it torques me off that I'm stuck with plain ol' desktop for stuff like Pandora.
Now you
can restream your Pandora feed to yourself with something like
Nicecast, and then listen to that stream in iTunes with the visualizer. Suboptimal, to say the least.
With that a dead end, I looked to see if there was some other way to ease the pain. Maybe just a little.
This is
WhiteCap Standalone, by the people who did the original iTunes visualizer. It's nowhere near as deep as the current one (a/k/a Magnetosphere), but it's surprisingly decent. There is a lot of trash you have to root out of it... did I mention it was by the people who did the original iTunes visualizer?
WhiteCap has a fullscreen mode, but it completely takes over the screen, period. Dump out of fullscreen if you need to do anything else is your only choice. Some dude fixed that for you with
Megazoomer, which will let you make (almost) any window fullscreen, with the titlebar and frame
offscreen. If you mouse up to the top of the screen, the menubar pops in. It basically makes the visualizer your fullscreen desktop, which like a desktop should, can have other windows over it.
With WhiteCap "Megazoomed", I have
PandoraBoy visible, and can see the Growl notifications it gives off. Hook this up with
Prowl and have song info pushed to your iPhone for extra credit.
Now, if PandoraBoy was the topmost window, you'd see its menubar, which would wreck the whole "fullscreen" effect. Enter
Afloat, which let's you "float" a window over windows in front of it. WhiteCap is actually the frontmost window here, Afloat is what's making it visible,
and doing the transparency effect. Nifty!
As a finishing touch
Cursorcerer makes the pointer disappear after a set amount of time until you move it again.
Under the hood I've got
Keyboard Maestro automating it and letting me control PandoraBoy from my iPhone... at least when PandoraBoy's global hotkey function doesn't choke. The only blemish in an otherwise awesome little app.
The same setup works for streaming video in VLC. It's perfect for content (like talking head stuff) where you're interested in actually seeing it only 10% of the time. This particular feed is only 480p anyway.
Most of this stuff is free. WhiteCap and Keyboard Maestro are $30-$40 each. Prowl is three bucks I think. Keyboard Maestro and Prowl are worth it for the iPhone integration alone.
Happy viewing of, umm... soundy stuff?
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