DittyBot: iTunes on Your Phone

Plastic Bugs – Home of the ‘Original’ GIMPshop » Blog Archive » DittyBot – An Applescript Adventure
You send a text message from your mobile phone to your POP email account. Your text message should contain the keywords of a song title (and possibly an artist name) that you want to hear. DittyBot finds that email (he checks Mail every 45 seconds) and copies the song name into a text file. The song name is then copied into iTunes and a playlist is created from your search. Next, DittyBot loads Skype (the internet telephony app) and begins calling your mobile phone. Your mobile phone rings and when you pick it up, you should hear your song start playing in all its compressed glory.

Picked this up via MAKE blog. While it is all about using AppleScript for cool iTunes stuff, it does provide a bit of a road map on how we can get Classcaster to route around complex menuing issues. Following the Dittybot map, a student sends an email to a specific address including the name of a lecturette in the message. We grab this via POP, extract the info, locate the MP3 and then have Classcaster call the number associated with the from address and play the lecturette. Will require user registration, but it could be a cool feature.