iTunes has a Now Playing dock notification hidden in it on Mac OS X Lion! The notification would show the current playing song , that pops out of the iTunes icon in the Dock.
Mac OS X Lion came with over 250 new features that were almost visible to us. But there are some more features that comes like Steve’s One More Thing in Mac OS X Lion that can be enabled with some terminal commands. One such feature is the iTunes’ Now Playing notifications.
iTunes has never had such kind of notification system so far. Even it did not hide this kind of a notification. But Mac OS X Lion has this cool new feature that stands out of any other notification systems for the Mac. Growl has been providing such notifications for the Mac OS X for many years and is available in the Mac App Store.
As I said, this feature is hidden and does not come with an ON – OFF toggle to turn this feature on and off. This can only be enabled via the Terminal commands. So, here’s what you need to do to get this cool new notification working on iTunes.
- If iTunes is open, Quit it.
- Fireup a new Terminal window, and type this commend:
defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool TRUE;killall Dock - Once done, type this command in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image -bool TRUE;killall Dock - Now, fire up iTunes and try playing a song. The new popup notification would catch your eye!
If you are not happy with this, and want to deactivate, here’s the terminal command for it. Just close iTunes and type these commands in Terminal:
defaults delete com.apple.dock itunes-notifications
defaults delete com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image;killall Dock
This would disable the popup system on iTunes! This is a very clear hint that Apple would bring Notification Center to Mac OS X! And it would be a super cool addition to the Mac OS X 10.8, which would come in the coming years!
[Via Mac OS X Hints]