[Enhancement] Touchbar support

[bmehling]

It would be cool to see the newer MBPs w/ Touchbars gain some Hermes goodness!

• display current station name
• display song artist/album/artist
• display 'now playing' album art
• display song time/progress scrubber (w/ min:secs)
• ability to thumb-up/down; skip ahead
• switch stations 'pop-up' (it's a thing)

I haven't looked into the API at all, but there is a bit of a UX issue for apps like Hermes that would typically be run in the "background". Namely, the running app can push app-specific buttons on to the bar, but as soon as the focus is gone, the app buttons are gone. I'm wondering if there's a way to override that so that Hermes can always be present while playing.

Anyway, just a suggestion. Love this app.

[akiss20]

Something much smaller. The touchbar play/pause button works with Hermes (which is awesome!) but it doesn't switch between the play and pause icons like iTunes or other media does. It would be awesome if it could!

Also I just discovered Hermes. It is amazingly good. Orders of magnitude better than the desktop client that Pandora puts out with Pandora One (which isn't even Retina!). Thanks so much for a great, and free, app!

[bmehling]

For posterity, in case this ticket ever gets interest, as an example iTunes behaves as such:

When the app is open, a 'music player' icon appears (it's not an iTunes icon, but I'm not sure if it's generic to represent any music player):

When you tap the icon, the control bar opens:

From left to right:

• Close control bar icon (tap to close bar)
• iTune icon (tap to switch to app)
• Song scrubber (tap and drag to scrub back/forward through song)
• track back, play/pause (toggles between icons depending on state), fwd

I think Hermes could actually do much better than what iTunes has implemented.

[akiss20]

Unrelated but you can take screenshots of the touchbar with cmd+shift+6

[nriley]

I've done a first pass at the 'background' pieces. Play/pause works at least; will need to keep digging as to why the scrubber doesn't but right now I've got bigger fish to fry (#285).

Update: I got the progress indicator working (Apple forgot to expose a necessary constant in the SDK — oops). Unfortunately it seems I either have a choice of having a previous track button or no next track button; the Touch Bar won't display just the play/pause and next track buttons the way Hermes needs. There are commands for liking/disliking a song but they don't seem to be exposed on the Mac the way they are on iOS.

Not much to look at, but here's a screenshot (don't have a Touch Bar Mac but I had good luck testing with Duet Display and my iPad).

[bmehling]

I've been using this touchbar enhancement (honestly, one of the only touchbar integrations I've found useful) for a bit. Figured I'd throw my two cents in here in case anyone comes back to it... I also understand there's limitations due to the touchbar SDK/Pandora API -- just getting it all down here in case Apple/Pandora improve their support in the future.

• The hermes icon is nice because it will raise the app (even switching spaces as necessary) -- my personal preference would be to overload the app icon w/ the album art as Hermes does on the Dock or in the Menu bar.
• Artist, Album, and Track titles would be more useful (to me) than the scrubber bar
• although, the "play head" and total track time values are nice to see (e.g., 2:21/3:50)
• thumbs up/down would be nice, including an indication if one is already pressed
• play/pause button is cool -- you can see I have that same button on right permanently exposed
• skip track would be cool too.

Really awesome app.

[bpholt]

I discovered this feature "accidentally" today and was delighted. Well done!