husk.org / blog. chaff. occasional witterings.

On Saturday, I spoke during the "Media Hacking" seminar at stream at Open Tech 2005, the latest conference from the NTK cabal. My talk was called "Hacking iTunes", and you can download the slides as a PDF here.

As I only had ten minutes to speak, it's very much a high-level overview of how to work with iTunes, so I won't be surprised if many people find there's nothing new in it for them. However, I've come across a few things that I'll try and write up on this site to expand on the slides; for example, how to use the XML library from Python; how to optimise searching an iTunes library from AppleScript; and using Perl's DAAP libraries to find tracks across your network.

I haven't seen much of a response to my talk; it was probably one of the more pedestrian in my session, itself somewhat overshadowed by Ewan's iPod Shuffle Shuffle. Perhaps I should have have included more show, and less tell; there are some things you can build on the somewhat obvious platform that are somewhat surprising. I'm also worried the different sections (the split between scripting and iTunes sharing, in particular) weren't clear. Next time, eh?

Overall I found the conference somewhat muted, and as with all conferences, they're terrible at information transfer: pretty much everything has to be quite high level. So I'd have preferred a bit more time for the "corridor track"; I left fairly early in the evening, and would have liked more time to talk to some of the folk I rarely meet during the day, which would have meant missing talks. This seems to be the point that three of the organisers make to this dissenting voice, but then, why did they only have two half-hour breaks amongst seven fifty-minute talk blocks? Not everyone can also hang around for the evening. (At this rate, next time I'll skip the conference and show up at the end.)