Nanobar: A sleek and minimal Bowtie/Ecoute theme

Nanobar is a minimal and lightweight Bowtie / Ecoute theme, which condenses all the information and playback controls you need into a small and sleek bar that takes up hardly any space, blends right into your workflow and does not distract you from what you're really doing.

Nanobar is placed in the corner of your screen (which comes in especially handy if you have your dock set to 'always visible' and have some free space down there anyway) and displays the current song's title and artist, along with an album artwork thumbnail. Its semi-transparent background acts as a progress bar, allowing you to monitor the current playback position with ease. Clicking Nanobar will cause it to elegantly extend and display a set of playback controls, which are easily re-collapsible through another click.

In addition, Nanobar comes with an extensive configuration file, which enables you to toggle various features of the theme, such as replacing the album artwork thumbnail with a pixel-perfect 'music note' icon or enabling rounded corners on all sides, in case you wish to place Nanobar somewhere else than in the corner of your screen. To access it, navigate to ~/Library/Application Support/Bowtie/ for Bowtie or ~/Library/Application Support/Ecoute/Themes/ for Ecoute, find Nanobar in the list of themes (QuickLook can help you), right-click it and select Show Package Contents, and finally open up configuration.js.

I hope that you enjoy Nanobar and that it turns out useful in your 'everyday computer usage' (which is why I created this in the first place, to achieve that goal for myself). If you've got any questions or feature requests, please let me know!

Enjoy!


Update: Version 1.1 released
This update adds new functions to toggle the player controls by hovering the theme (rather than clicking it) and to automatically snap the theme to the corner, as well as a more efficient method to use the maximum of the available space for long track names. Please note that the update only applies to the Bowtie version of the theme, as the Ecoute Theming API is currently unavailable and I need it to port the new changes to Ecoute.


Deviations used in the preview image:
— iMac .psd by ~Nemed
— Crowsnest by =IvanAndreevich (permission granted)