Should Notification Centre in iOS and OS X have a "Now Playing" widget?

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DaveBinM August 06, 2012

Should Notification Centre in iOS and OS X have a "Now Playing" widget?

Firstly notification centre is great for, well, notifications, but the iOS version also has "widgets", such as stocks and weather. I think a new widget addition should be "now playing" which would show you the album art, title, artist and album of the currently playing track. Given how quickly you can check the weather, or how your stocks are doing, it seems ridiculous that in order to see all that information, you need to swap to either iTunes or Music, to see that. Sure, you can see the track name from double clicking the "Home" button and swiping to the right on iOS, or lock the screen and turn it back on again. On your Mac though, there's no option but to check iTunes, (or whatever music player you use), to see what's playing. What do you guys think?

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7 replies

cass 2012-08-06 20:27:51

I think that's a pretty great idea. I have Mountain Lion installed, so I do use notification center, but I also still have Growl installed because I have a ton of apps that don't support notification center. I use Spotify to listen to music and I really like to see the little pop up when the song changes. If Spotify could add that to notification center as a persistent notification with the player controls, that would be awesome. Only issue is that I haven't seen any apps, not even iTunes that has that capability, so we can only hope that Apple decides to extend the functionality of notification center.

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DaveBinM 2012-08-06 20:33:20

The controls I can mostly live without, as there's the hardware buttons on the keyboard for iTunes, and the controls are pretty easily accessible on iOS. Given that I can pull this data from iTunes to use with GeekTool, I can't imagine it would be more than an hours work for someone at Apple to do this, but I could be wrong… I'm using Growl in much the same way, but the tracks end up stacking up in Notification Centre. One widget that just changed based on the current song would be great.

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ParasValecha 2012-08-07 02:17:58

Agreed, it's a very neat idea. Having the navigation buttons (play/pause, previous, next) along with the track information would be very helpful as well.

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RandomX2 2012-08-09 17:54:38

I think it's a great idea. I find it frustrating to double-click the home button to get that information from the lock screen - and it is even less useful when the phone is unlocked.

edit: typos

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zerock 2012-08-14 11:05:01

That's something i really want to have there in NC.

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vmyap 2012-08-21 15:44:02

osxdaily.com/tag/os-x-mountain-lion/ - I don't know if this was posted already or what you are looking for but a nice guide from osxdaily

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DaveBinM 2012-08-21 19:22:54

I use something similar, called "iTunifcation", but I think like the stocks and weather widgets that are built and integrated by Apple, this also should be something that is baked in by Apple.

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