Plug – Native OS X client for Hype Machine

by alex_marchant • 12 years ago

125 55 12 years ago

ianwalter• 12 years ago

Amazing, thank you for making this!

If for some reason I wasn't up-vote banned, I'd give this +1. I cannot stress how nice this UI looks. Had not really looked into hype-machine prior to this, but I really like it so far.

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

Shoot, well, appreciate the intention. Glad you like it, keep in touch with us at @plugformac if you can.

schrodingersCat2• 12 years ago

Huzzah! A HN admin saw this thread and re-enabled voting (Thanks Daniel!). Up-voted...

RTesla• 12 years ago

It's beautiful.

cezary• 12 years ago

Really nice work, I use their website every day and I might just switch over to this.

dewey2• 12 years ago

I really like this. I'd love to see scrobbeling to last.fm integrated. Is this something you'd consider for a future release?

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

That actually already works. Just need to connect your last.fm account at http://hypem.com/find_friends.

dewey2• 12 years ago

Saw the tweets about the scrobbling feature in the meantime. Thanks, it's working now. It looks like it's not using the "Now playing" feature [0] though, any specific reason for that?

Another question: Is there a reason why it's not possible to resize the window? Some tracks are cut off and it'd be more comfortable to have a little bit wider window because the long track names are not scrolling by so you never see them.

Apart from that, enjoying the app so far! Thanks.

[0] http://www.last.fm/api/scrobbling

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

Side note: I recently ported all of Plug to Swift (dev build, not yet released of course). Swift is a great leap forward!

aaronharnly• 12 years ago

Any observations?

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

Optionals are really interesting. In theory it's a really smart concept. In practice it seems to add a bit of complexity. Will be interesting to see if the concept pays off in the long term.

adamcw• 12 years ago

The app looks awesome, and also served as my introduction to Hype Machine. How I haven't managed to hear of this service before is beyond me. Now I'm just sad I didn't know it existed until now.

Also great to hear that Swift development is going smoothly. I just started into learning it, and so far the strangest thing I've found is that I've learned a ton of Objective C by having to struggle through missing documentation/examples and having to learn the Obj C way of doing things and then translating them to Swift. It's been interesting.

650REDHAIR• 12 years ago

So much <3! Hype Machine is great and this definitely feels like something that would have come from them with the amount of polish and detail.

Keep up the good work!

cobralibre• 12 years ago

This looks lovely — great job with the UI.

I can see from the Hype Machine blog [1] that Plug was developed with the approval and assistance of Hype Machine. Nevertheless, it's unfortunate that the client requires the end user's username and password credentials rather than using an authorization framework like OAuth 2.

[1] http://blog.hypem.com/2014/04/we-are-9/

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

Fair point. To mitigate this, we never store your password. Basically we exchange your username/password combo for a token from Hype Machine which is used to authenicate requests.

The only data we store are your username and some basic settings in a .plist (`open ~/Library/Preferences/com.Plug.Plug.plist`) and your token which you can view in Keychain Access.app and search Plug.

smcnally• 12 years ago

if i auth to hypem via twitter credentials, i have to pass those via plug?

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

Also, credit where it's due, Glenn Hitchcock (https://twitter.com/glennui) is the evil design genius here.

nnnnni2• 12 years ago

I'm happy about that. I'd rather have a separate login (with unique password) for each service than log into everything using the same account.

EDIT: I misunderstood the complaint! I thought that they wanted to login using a Google account or something similar rather than having a place in Hype Machine to allow Plug to connect and use a token to pass the permission to the program. Oops! I completely agree with the poster's comment in this case.

lucian1900• 12 years ago

You misunderstand. This app requires you type in your password inside it, as opposed to using some form of token from the website (which is how OAuth2 works).

teacup50• 12 years ago

Oauth is terrible desktop/mobile UX, and it doesn't provide any real security. A genuinely malicious application can spin up a webview under its control -- or do almost anything else it likes with your account.

As long as passwords are stored in the system's secure keychain, using passwords is not just OK -- it's the right desktop/mobile UX.

The only time OAuth makes sense is on the web, where by the very nature of the web's design, user's passwords would be provided to unrelated 3rd party servers outside the user's control.

Please STOP inflicting OAuth on non-web platform's users.

ddoolin• 12 years ago

This is awesome. I hadn't even heard of Hype Machine but your app made me curious (looks great btw). Two nice little surprises, I'll have to start checking them out.

ahmett• 12 years ago

Awesome job, lovely UI. Are you planning to add "Scrobble to Last.fm" feature?

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7968066 :)

girvo• 12 years ago

I've barely touched The Hype Machine before, but this UI is so nice that I think I'm going to become a great fan! Well done!

amark• 12 years ago

I've been a hypem fan for 7 years. Take it from me, it's the BEST.

My company's UX even riffs off of theirs (with an unrelated focus)

tuanx5• 12 years ago

I've been using Plug for about a year, and I have to say it's my favorite player. The past month I've also started using SoundMate and Radiant, but I still feel that Plug is the smoothest and least in the way.

jtmoulia• 12 years ago

I love it! Are there any plans for including the hypem time machine feature?

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

We do what we can in our spare time. We usually prioritize features by demand. So tweet us and get your friends to if you want something built.

rishtal• 12 years ago

Way to go! Hypem is awesome.

jmduke• 12 years ago

This is great: as a hypem addict, I'm excited to play with a desktop app. A few points:

- When is playlist support planned? (I'm pretty sure it's only been out for like two weeks so the delay is understandable.)

- Where can I report bugs?

- Consider allowing horizontal resizing or a marquee effect on table cell hover: track names getting cut off is sort of frustrating.

Jhsto• 12 years ago

I'd like to add the performance issue when loading a lot of songs. I have mere 400 favorites and when I want to listen some old song, I have to scroll all the way down, which makes the app almost unbearable to use.

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

Great point, the fix is a WIP. Look for it in the next update.

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

When is playlist support planned?

Playlists are awesome. Hard to say, Plug is a hobby project so we add features as we can. But we usually prioritize features by how many requests we get.

Where can I report bugs?

Hit us up at @plugformac

Consider allowing horizontal resizing or a marquee effect on table cell hover

Totally, this is very high on the to-do list

po• 12 years ago

Been using Plug for a month or so now and want to say thanks. Another bug report for you:

It sometimes has trouble playing more after it is playing down to the last song that has already been loaded in the list. I think it needs to query for more songs when it gets down to the last few.

plingamp• 12 years ago

Just one (small) design thought, the sidebar has the appearance that it could be hidden. Or maybe i've just been on mobile for far too long. Looks great, nonetheless!

mross462• 12 years ago

And while we're at it:

https://github.com/salomvary/soundcleod

and

https://kbhomes.github.io/radiant-player-mac/

arrakeen• 12 years ago

i'm getting a lot of repeats when using shuffle. perhaps a more itunes-like method would be better

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

Makes sense, it's just a random algorithm which is far from ideal. Just need the time to implement something heftier (Spotify knows what's up http://labs.spotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/?_ga...).

rkayg• 12 years ago

Been using plug for quite a while, and as an hype machine addict, I am absolutely in love with the app.

henningo• 12 years ago

Very nice (I'd heart the software if I could!)

Hype machine is fantastic for music discovery. The big hits always surface there months before they hit the radio/mainstream.

Any chance for a Windows version (I'm stuck on a PC at work!)

alex_marchant16• 12 years ago

Sorry, don't think this will happen :( Maybe a nice virtual box setup running OSX with Plug installed! (haha, jkjkjk, hypem.com is great and has so many features)

niles• 12 years ago

Once you find a blog you like, you can use Peel [1] to rip the MP3s to iTunes. Unfortunately it does not work with Hypem top lists, only the direct RSS that it aggregates.

[1] http://www.getpeel.com/

palmeida• 12 years ago

Great piece of software. congrats! Feature request: Would love to be able to apply a filter by genre

benburton• 12 years ago

Would be nice if there were some way to thumbs down/always ignore particular artists. Chris Brown, for example.

bluzeee• 12 years ago

Looks simply beautiful. Excellent design.

One thing that grabs my eyes always are side bars. For some reason i feel left side bar for right handed person it not convenient and vice versa.

But, i see all apps designed with left side bars. Wondering why left side only while many users to my experience are right handed ?

baseten• 12 years ago

Nice work, nice ui. I had to go lookup my hypem login info cause i hadn't visited in a while. at first glance this is something i will be using.

jordanbrown• 12 years ago

Hands down this has been my favorite mac application since the first version came out. I hope the rest of the cocoa community takes notice.

Keep up the good work Alex & Glenn!

Plug – Native OS X client for Hype Machine

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