SynchStep is public!

A little while ago, we pointed you to SynchStep, which back then was still in private beta. As of yesterday, SynchStep is public.

From the press release:

"SynchStep is a fun and easy experimental way to plays songs from your music library that match your pace. That means when you're out struttin your stuff down "My Favorite Street", every step you take lands in-time with a drum hit, a bass slap, a piano chord. It's kind of like being in your own music video, where your your music becomes the soundtrack to your life. Ya, it's just like a your own music video, except you don't have to pay 3 hundo to some smug director and let his smarmy crew use your bathroom."

To support this special project, tagtraum industries has created a nifty little plugin for beaTunes, which automatically writes the BPM information into the comment field, so that it can be easily read by the SynchStep application on your iPhone or iPod Touch. You can get a special version of beaTunes from the SynchStep site that has the plugin already installed.

For those of you interested in how to write a plugin for beaTunes, check out the source code and email us any question you might have.

Creating beaTunes UI Themes

Most of you know that with beaTunes 1.1 we introduced UI themes. This bit of functionality lets you change the background tile of the main beaTunes window - giving you a little bit of power over the look and feel of beaTunes as a whole.

Now, what most people don't know, is that you can even register your own tile images and have beaTunes load them. This is done through a plugin.

So for the geeks amongst you, this is how you create a background image plugin:

• Create a working directory
• Create a background tile image, save it in PNG format and place it into the working directory
• Create a subdirectory called META-INF
• In META-INF, create a file called plugin.xml
• This is what the content of plugin.xml should look like:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
  <plugins>
      <plugin class="com.tagtraum.beatunes.plaf.TiledBackgroundTheme">
          <property name="imagePath" value="YOUR_IMAGE.png"/>
          <property name="description" value="YOUR DESCRIPTION"/>
      </plugin>
      <!-- add more plugins here -->
  </plugins>

• Make sure you replace YOUR_IMAGE.png with the actual image name and YOUR DESCRIPTION with a fitting description
• In a terminal or shell window, cd to the working directory and execute the following command:
  

  jar cvf plugin.jar .

  This zips the files up into the file plugin.jar
• Place the newly created file plugin.jar into the plugin directory:
  Windows: c:\Documents and Settings\<username>\.beaTunes\plugins
  OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/beaTunes/Plug-Ins/
  
• Restart beaTunes - the new theme should now show up in the general preferences

Please note that these instructions require the jar command to be properly installed, i.e. you have a Java Development Kit on your system with the PATH environment variable set, so that jar can be found. This is pretty much always the case on OS X - on Windows you might have to add jar manually to the PATH or simply use some Zip software like Winzip instead of jar to zip up the plugin.jar.

Inspired to create your own tile? We'd love to hear from you!