Posted on Sunday 24 July 2005 - Popularity: 4%
Today you have to do a bit more than just download and launch a Mac application, so be warned, it will not be as easy as usual.
The image you see above dynamicaly shows the current song played on one of my Macs and the uptime of the Mac I’m currently using. You can get the same with macsig. Before you download the app, there’s an other thing you need, a server script that generates the image. What we use here is a PHP script by the name ampsig, so you need a server able to parse PHP scripts. Additionaly your server has to support the GD lib to dynamicaly create the image (part of most PHP installations). After you’ve uploaded the PHP script to your server, make sure to set the username and password in the file amp.php to something only you know and finaly, set the permissions of the file /data/amp.ini to 777 so macsig can update the informations displayed with your sig.
Now as we have the server prepared, we need to download the Mac application that sends the informations to the server, so download macsig and launch the app. Set the username and password to those you previously defined in amp.php and change the url to the script on your server. Click the “update now” button and if you did everything right, your sig (amp.php) should now show the song you’re currently playing in iTunes (of course only if iTunes is open and running). The server script has different schemes to choose from if you don’t like the default one and of course you can create your very own schemes as I did with the above pic.
I hope you’ve been successful with the instructions and are now the owner of a nice dynamic sig showing your currently played song in iTunes. Btw, the above image is a live sig, so if I don’t play a song, no song informations will be displayed.
Fredi
August 6th, 2005 at 3:36 pm
If you don’t have a server to run the script on, never fear! Check back at http://www.ampsig.com from time to time; I’m currently writing a tutorial on how to run ampsig from your own Mac OS X computer (enabling Apache, PHP, and GD).
October 24th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
We recently sold several JVC DRDX X5 to a school to be used in conjunction with their Macs. The JVC kit was to be used as an editting suite so that the students could make professional style films. Unfortunately, according to JVC, their kit has no Mac or PC signature and therefore the two machines are not compatable. As these are not cheap machines, and the school ordered 6, is there a way of writing a signature? Help !!!