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If you are anything like me you have probably amassed an iTunes library that would take a nice holiday to wade through. With your iTunes on shuffle you might even run into some tracks you downloaded eons ago, after reading rave reviews on some weird blog, that on second thought sound pretty damn lame. I have always been bothered with iTunes’s lack of a quick way to ‘kill’ tracks. When you are in your library and the track you are listening to is selected you need to hit a key combo and click an ok button just to get rid of it. And when listening to a playlist the delete option is completely missing. So i set out to fix that.

What i came up with is a simple applescript that you can assign to a keyboard shortcut so killing that track is always just a keystroke away. Think that’s neat? Please follow along…

step 1

Download and unzip the Kill Track Applescript file.

step 2

Enable the script menu with the Applescript utility located in the Applescript folder in the Applications folder.

step 3

Copy the script to your ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder. (create the Scripts folder if it does not yet exist).

step 4

Open System Preferences and go to the Keyboard & Mouse preferences panel. Go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and add the Kill Track menu option for iTunes and pick a shortcut.

step 5

That’s it! The next time you’ll open iTunes you’ll see the little scripting menu icon in the top and it’ll have the Kill Track option there together with the keyboard shortcut. Next time you feel like hatin’ a track; hit the shortcut and kill it. I promise you’ll feel better afterwards.

The script automatically removes the track from your library and removes the file from disk.

Disclaimer: this script comes with no warranty whatsoever, use at your own risk. Your computer might turn green and go poof if you use it.

Today i finished the Jaiku Quicksilver plugin i have been using for a while but never got ready for general distribution. The script works in mysterious ways, or better put; it uses not only Quicksilver but also Plazes to do an update so you don’t have to set the location by hand and can simply type a message and be done with it. This of course comes with a price; you will have to have the Plazes plazer installed to actually use the script. This makes the potential group of users rather small but there are bound to be at least four people out there who find this useful

Install guide!

1. Download the Applescript file
2. Make a folder called Actions in the folder ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver
3. Copy the Jaiku Applescript into the Actions folder
4. Restart Quicksilver (sometimes it is hard to get it to refresh)
5. Add your plazes username and password to the keychain using the name http://beta.plazes.com (if it’s not already in there)
6. Add your jaiku username and personal key (as the password) to the keychain using the name http://api.jaiku.com (you can get your personal key here). Use the application called Keychain Access for this and the previous step.
7. You’ll have to click yes a bunch to allow the keychain to be used

There is a plazeless version too, follow the same steps as above only leave out the ones where it invloves Plazes.

User guide!

1. Open Quicksilver (command-space)
2. Hit . (period) to open text mode
3. Type your message
4. Hit tab
5. Start typing Jaiku
6. When you see Jaiku appear as the action, hit enter
7. Go check you Jaiku stream to see if it worked!

Version history

• v0.1, 14-3-2007, initial release
• v0.2, 14-3-2007, removed default icon since it can’t be changed yet anyway

Roadmap

• Icon selection
• Maybe get Plazes data from feed (no need for a password)
• Maybe release a plazeless and/or a standalone version (if anyone needs it)
• …

p.s.
The script is ‘run only’ for now since not all of the stuff it uses is public yet. Full code should be available soon so you can go build your own versions. changed files to full source, adapt and multiply!