Remote control API for Spotify? - spotify

Is there such a thing as a Spotify remote control API? I want to write an app which lets the user control the Spotify desktop client (play, pause, volume, playlists, etc.) but I can't seem to find any documentation anywhere.
There are iOS and Android remote control apps out there so I'm just wondering how they do it if there isn't an API.

On Mac OS X, Spotify can be controlled 'remotely' (i.e. from other apps) using AppleScript, either using the bundled API or the System Events service.
Here's an example of using the bundled API: https://github.com/activars/spotify-applescript/blob/master/spotify_control.applescript
And another one using System Events (it isn't quite as elegant): http://www.jacktams.net/2010/04/28/spotify-applescripts-version-0-4-3/
Official documentation is a bit thin, although you should be able to use the AppleScript editor's library feature to find out more about the methods offered.

Related

How to develop Spotify Desktop Applications, now Libspotify is discontinued

have done my due diligence, and not found any other posts that answer this question, but as usual, if you know a similar question, point me that way!
I noticed a long time back that Libspotify has been dicontinued:
(https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/libspotify/)
So, my question is - what should we do for developing Desktop applications?
They do state: "We hope to be able to provide you with a new library for other platforms." But, this has been going on since 2015!
I have seen many projects in GitHub still using Libspotify - so what should we do? An update was promised "in the upcoming months" but I've not seen anything yet.
What should we do for developing Desktop Applications?
We at Spotify don't currently provide playback as part of our platform offering outside of our iOS and Android SDKs, and I don't have any updates on that at the moment. As mentioned on the website, we hope to be able to provide playback SDKs for more platforms in the future. We don't support any new development on libspotify.
You can use the Spotify Web API to interact with Spotify in a variety of ways, including getting information about metadata, and accessing/modifying user libraries and playlists, which may be useful. You can also use the Applescript API to control playback on macOS, which may also help.
The Spotify Web API is pretty straight forward to use. Of course it defines the protocol rather than implements it so it is OS independent.
I put together a few classes to help unwrap some of the JSON parameters simply. These were written in Swift for macOS.

WinJs background application

I am working on creating a Windows 10 Universal app. My goal is to have the app run in the background and periodically display a status notification to the user.
I've seen a few articles that talk about creating a background task within the app (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/launch-resume/run-a-background-task-on-a-timer-), is this the best design pattern I can follow? I'm fairly new to Windows Universal apps and any recommendations on how to do this would be appreciated.
Look at the IBackgroundTask docs. In addition, you can easily implement notifications via the OS with Adaptive Toasts
Since the story around notifications can get complex depending on how you want to control UX, don't be afraid to research building an RT component if you can't find a UWP API that meets your needs. For instance, you can package an RT component with your UWP app that calls into native C++ libraries or more low-level Windows APIs to curate the notification experience for your user.

Can the spotify (windows) desktop client be extended?

I found no clues in the developer documentation, but equalify claims that it integrates into the desktop application. They don't offer a free version so I couldn't try it out.
Is it possible/supported to create extensions for the desktop client and is there some hidden documentation available?
I'd be interested in developing one, but so far I had no luck in finding any documentation.
It used to be possible using the Spotify Apps API. I think you can still manually sideload apps, but there is no App Store or similar. Moreover, support for old Spotify Apps is about to be dropped completely in the future.
So no, there's no way to extend Spotify as far as I know.

Windows 10 universal app cross app communication availability

I am an WPF developer with little knowledge for the way "mobile" apps work but in general I believe that they work in some sort of sandbox way (meaning they should not be able to access each others process, info etc., I might be totally incorrect on this one). So I am wondering if such "limitations" are applied to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps?
The reasoning for my question is that I would like to write and app that checks if another Universal App is in process and use some of its information. In WPF there are ways of doing just that but in UWP apps I am not sure if it is/should/will be possible.
Thanks.
There are a couple of solutions in Windows 10. Firstly, if you are building an enterprise app and can also side-load normal Desktop apps, you can use this technique to build your UI as a UWP but also be able to break out of the sandbox and do other things on the desktop.
Secondly, if the app you want to read from is cooperative (ie, is designed to provide information; you're not just grabbing it without permission) then you can use App to App services to send and receive information between two consenting applications.
Both links are to //build videos but you can download the slides too that should contain code samples.

Posting to Instagram via Script/Online/Program. Anything is good but mobile

I just wanted to know if there is a way to upload images to Instagram WITHOUT using iOS / Android?
I'm really desperate for a solution, if I can't find anything I will have to run a virtual android device or something like that (I have a virtual machine running Windows XP 24/7 anyway)!
Instagram's official RESTful API does not allow for uploading photos, since they want to encourage "life on the go."
However, some work has been put together to document their iPhone API, and some unofficial client libraries have even been made. Check out https://github.com/mislav/instagram/wiki
It seems that's your only alternative at the moment. None of the unofficial libraries look very complete, so you'd have to do the work of sending requests manually, using the reverse-engineered API specs provided in the wiki.

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