Per Malmberg

Call me crazy if you want, but late evenings/nights are usually a very productive time for me; both kids in bed and the wife too – blissfully quiet

Earlier this evening I started to reinstall my wife’s old laptop to use it as a multimedia box with Spoitfy as the player. At first I was planning to control it though remote desktop, but then I thought “can Spotify be controlled remotely?” Unfortunately there is no API available (at least not a public one that I can find) – but it can be controlled using the keyboard locally, which means that it can be controlled from another application.

So I set out writing some test code, and 10 minutes later I am able to control Spotify from my test application. Nothing fancy, really. The fancy stuff will be the ability to control it from the 10″ touch display I’ve got in the hallway – one button to turn on the stereo and ‘press’ the Play-button in Spotify. Another key for stop, back, next etc.

Controlling other applications are not yet supported in MSure, but I do not see any reason it should not be possible to add. The only issue I see is that a Windows service (like MSure) normally cannot interact with a desktop – but I see three solutions to that problem:

1. Write a small client application that sits in the user’s notification area.
2. Allow the MSure service to interact with the desktop
3. Let MSure start Spotify as a child process.

Solutions two and three are my favourites, but if either one will work remains to be determined.

Now it’s just a matter of finding the time to do this.