utilities

Knowing how to write a program is great when your computer doesn't work exactly how you like, such as iTunes not showing an estimated time remaining for a podcast download. Luckily I knew the trick to making a transparent window and a plugin that can take pictures of the screen. Armed with these I can put the window over the iTunes progress bar, take a picture of that area it defines and make an algorithm that scans the image and figures out how far along it is, keep track of time and that's all I need to estimate remaining time. It does all this each second. This is what it looks like...



As with many of my utility apps I expect my "iTunes image recognition progress meter" to be outdated in the next iTunes update (ie iTunes will show remaining time), but it was fun to make:) I've tried image recognition programs before but this is my first success.