Magnetblog

iTunes for Windows

Just some random thoughts on iTunes for Windows:

1. Why does everyone think that just because there are already some legitimate music services for Windows, iTunes is too late to suceed? Sure, there's buymusic.com and the MusicMatch music store, but those services have yet to develop a following at all. The iTunes store has been selling 600,000 songs/week up to this point (10 million songs since late April), which is a number none of the current Windows services have been able to touch. Too late? Bah, I say!
2. Of all the complaints you could have about iTunes for Windows, an unintuitive user interface is not one of them. Maybe the redraw rate is sluggish, and it's too bad that the AAC format songs don't work with your Nomad, but if you can't figure out how to navigate the iTunes UI, then you've got much bigger problems. iTunes has to be the best app I've ever used in terms of having a UI that's solid and easy to understand.

iTunes AppleScripts

And iTunes AppleScripts!

I've just started looking through the site, but it looks to have tons of cool ideas, from searching Google for album art to automatically deleting the currently-playing track from your library and your hard drive.

iTunes Smart Playlists

This is a great idea: smartplaylists.com. It's a website where you can post and share smart playslits you've created for iTunes. Kinda relates back to the thread from a little while ago on SuperDeluxo about iTunes usage methods.

I love smart playlists; when you have your music tagged decently there's no better way to get a handle on really huge music libraries... because, really, are you going to tell me that when you have 3000 songs you can glance through them all quickly and decide what you'd like to hear? I didn't think so. ;)

My current favorite smart playlists include:

• High School / College: songs from 1996-1999 and 2000-2003, respectively
• Last 4 Months / Last 4 Weeks: songs added to my library in the past 4 months / weeks

I also have all the standard ones, like "Top 25 Most Played," "Most Recently Played," "Least Played," etc.

OS X Software

Books is a cool native OS X app for keeping track of a collection of books. It does everything you'd expect, like storing several attributes of each book and sorting and searching on all of them. What's really cool, however, is that the app fills in all the info about the given book automatically after you enter the ISIN, including a cover image - I wonder if Books is using Amazon's web services?

On a similar note, I stumbled across Useful Mac tonight, which is a weblog listing a smallish number of high-quality OS X applications. I'd seen a lof of the apps there before, but did find some cool new things to try out. Comictastic in particular looks like something I'd like (and something that would make me another 20 minutes late to work every morning).

My Dock

Since everybody else is doing it, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and show you my dock:

From left to right, we have:

• Finder


• System Prefs


• Terminal (Yay, Unix!)


• Camino (only for the very few webpages that don't render right in Safari)


• Safari


• Adium


• BBEdit


• iTunes


• Stickies


• Grab (only there because I was taking a screenshot)


• Apps folder


• My home directory


• Trash

Not very exciting, I know, but those are the apps I use 95% of the time I'm using my computer.