gplayer: Get loud with the cloud

It seems cloud-based or Internet-heavy tools are the choice of the gods of shuf today, since the second title for this sunny Saturday is a CLI-based interface for Grooveshark, the online streaming audio service.

Like I said earlier this week, I’m in favor of any utility that strips away the worthless scum that coats most Internet services, and I list the noxious, fetid remains of Flash technology among that. So from the start, gplayer wins points for allowing me to sidestep the standard Grooveshark player.

That said, gplayer doesn’t reach the same degree of finesse that soundcloud2000 did. It is worth remembering that what you see in the screenshot is accomplished in approximately 60 lines of code … of course, allowing for the fact that mplayer, that seven-headed-ten-horned beast of media playback, is doing all the heavy work.

It’s still impressive though. gplayer gives you a search function that mimics Grooveshark, returns a list of 20 results, and allows you to cue any of the titles that are listed. From there, mplayer takes over, using its keypresses as controls and its frame progress counter as an onscreen display.

I’ve found a few small incongruities in gplayer, and I’ll note them here just as a matter of record. For one, when a song ends either because it’s over or because the listener gave “q” to mplayer, gplayer never recovers its prompt. I get a dull cursor without any text, and short of pressing CTRL+C, gplayer seems to have stalled.

I don’t think that was the way the author intended, since it would make more sense to me, as a casual user, to either get a new search prompt, a prompt to cue another title, a repeat of the previous list, or just be dropped to the shell. As it is, I’m lost somewhere betweem mplayer finishing and gplayer recovering.

Second, it’s fairly easy to send gplayer into a tailspin over the selection. Any non-numeric character will cause an error, and any out-of-range of numbers will cause an error. It’s just an issue of trapping those entries and preventing gplayer from exploding across the screen.

I can stop there since that’s about the limit of gplayer’s functions. If you’re willing to hold its hand for a little bit, and if you can find a way to cue up several songs in a row, and if you’re a fan of Grooveshark in the first place, you’ll probably find a place in your heart for it.

Oh, and I think the author should follow soundcloud2000’s lead, and subtitle gplayer as “Grooveshark without all the stupid css.” Or maybe “without all the stupid Flash.” 😉

sncli: For cloud-based to-do lists, and more

About a month ago, Eric sent me a note about sncli, which works as a command-line interface to Simplenote. I’d never used the site before, and I have some reservations about using cloud services for all but the most mundane of data, but I’ll try anything once. Especially if it has this much color:

 

And true to form, sncli kept the online version up-to-date with my changes. Quite quickly too, I might add. Simplenote had my changes from sncli online before I had clicked on the tab.

And no, I don’t really wash the fish. The fish washes himself, constantly. 😉

As I can see it, from what I’ve learned about Simplenote and from working with sncli, the real value in this is the ability to access to-do lists and reminders from devices other than your old 133Mhz Pentium laptop. I don’t have a smartphone (only dumbphones) but if I did, it would be nice to see those lists update between sncli and the web interface and the mobile phone.

sncli itself has more to love than just the color scheme. Off the bat it’s easy to see how it works, and if you’re a fan of the vi-ish control scheme, navigation will appeal to you immediately. You can add a note with “C”, edit one in your $EDITOR with “e”, sync with your online account with “S”, and so forth. Easy to use and remember.

Provided you have a Simplenote account, you can configure sncli with little more than your account name and password. Add those to .snclirc and you’re ready to go … keeping in mind that those are stored in plain text.

That would be only one of my very few suggestions for sncli at this point: Find a way to manage an encrypted password, perhaps along the lines of how gcalcli handles it. Considering gpg is available on just about every system out there, it should be an easy dependency to fulfill.

My only other observation is that the command to view a note in a pager jumps straight to less, while my $PAGER is set to most. Perhaps that could be an option. Oh, and maybe add arrow keys for navigation. Some people will expect that. 😉

I like sncli a lot — particularly for the easy setup, good use of color, excellent use of screen real estate, near-immediate synchronizing with the online service, intuitive commands and onboard help. … Oh heck, what’s not to like? Well done. Have a K.Mandla gold star: ⭐ 😉 Enjoy!