Inspirational Technology

Using Spring to Build a Better eMusic Stash

I'm a huge fan of eMusic and recently they introduced a new feature to the service called My Stash. This allows you to track albums that you want to download in the future. For heavy eMusic users it's very useful, but being a web based app the user experience isn't what I'd like. I'm definitely a big believer in the beyond the browser idea and being the eMusic nut that I am, I wanted a better solution.

I found most of what I wanted in the Spring Desktop which I already had a license for. Unfortunately Spring is early in its life and is pretty immature right now. In particular there's no way to have it create custom objects from dragged URLs. After talking with Robb Beal (the creator of Spring) about this. I set out to find another way to drag links from the browser, create spring objects from them and then place them on a canvas. I knew it would be easy to do this as a multi-step process, but the usability of that kind of solution, well to put it simply, stinks. I wanted to be able to drag from the browser and into Spring in one motion so I came up with what I'm calling the "Magic Wand" approach.

I created a small Cocoa app that sits innocently in the corner and doesn't do anything until you drag something over it. When you do this it looks at what's being dragged and sees if it can create a spring object from it. If it can it creates the object and then swaps the pasteboard contents so that when you continue your drag and drop it on a Spring canvas the object gets added automatically. Pretty cool and works great. So now I can drag album links from eMusic and easily create Spring objects from them that enable some really useful functionality. Here's a screen shot of what you can do with the objects once they're created.

Overall a very handy application and for eMusic fans at least, a great use for Spring. If you're an eMusic subscriber and Mac OS X user it might be worth checking out. Spring is commercial software, but a license is fairly cheap at $21.95 and there's potential to use it for more then just a better eMusic stash.

Here's the download for the Album Magic Wand application. This requires Spring, and if you want to download you have to have an eMusic subscription and a copy of Pickup configured to manage your downloads.