Thanks to today’s sponsors: iClip, the multiple clipboard solution for OS X, Awaken, the iTunes compatible alarm clock, and macZOT!, for daily deals on Mac software.
The Apple announcement two days ago resulted in Pavlovian response drooling, followed by a sinking realization that iTunes 7 had rather severely crippled the potential performance of one of our soon to be announced finalists, Coveristic. Ultimately, we decided that Coveristic would not be able to perform nearly as well as it could have without Cover Flow built directly into iTunes.
Coveristic was a strong entry and finalist pick from the start, with the excellent freeware CoverFlow lacking an update for over a half a year, literally dozens of “3D Album Browsing” entries flooding in (Coveristic was the best fleshed out of these), and development manager John Casasanta labeling it as his “dream app” in an Ars Technica interview:
“I guess that a void that I see in the Mac marketplace is something along the lines of CoverFlow, but something more full-featured. CoverFlow is probably my favorite app but it’s seriously lacking in basic features. I strongly believe in minimalist design, but I also feel strongly that when a huge community is crying out for certain features then they should be implemented.
“But I’m getting sidetracked because of my desire to have the ultimate 3D iTunes controller.”
Ultimately, we screwed up. We should’ve waited for the Apple announcement before contacting Gunnar and confirming Coveristic as a finalist. I want to thank Gunnar at this point for playing along with a pretty unfortunate situation as well as anyone could have.
As you might’ve guessed, this situation resulted in us scrambling to find a new 24th finalist and messed up our scheduling a tiny bit, but we’re mostly back on track now and will be announcing today’s finalists by this evening.
Thanks to Gunnar Hermansson for his quality submission and handling of this situation, and curse Apple for stealing our idea before it was announced! (Just kidding, we know it was CoverFlow inspired.) Gunnar, will be ‘taking home’ a new iPod nano as a conciliatory prize. Continue reading to view his extended entry.
Coveristic
A music browser and player that lets you browse your itunes music library by album cover art. All your album covers are tiled over your entire screen real estate. Moving your cursor over the screen will make the albums close to the cursor larger, the effect will look something like a ball under a pice of album art cloth. From there you can select any album to make it fly up close and open so that you can see both front and back of the album at the same time. On the back there will be a list of all the songs in the album and you can choose to add any or all to your playlist, by any of the following choises: “play now”, “play next”, “mix into the playlist”, “play last”, “replace the current playlist with this”, …
Searching will show only the hits on your screen but in the same manner as before so every cover will be able to take up more space on it’s own. An alternative is to let the mismatches only fade to a much darker shade. You can also decide if you want to see everything at once or only a small part (but with larger cover images of course) and pan around the large plane of album covers. The zoom level will be controlled by scrolling or with a slider, just like in iPhoto. To be able to have any sense of where to find your music on the plane (if you can’t find it by the cover) you should be able to sort the music by al the standard ways but also by sound. To make this possible it will have last.fm integration. Similar sounding music will be near to each other in this mode.
This integration could also be used to make a playlist of random music that sounds similar. When you select where to start it looks the artist up on last.fm and try to find an other artist in your album that has something in common with your choice, and than it repeats this for as long as possible. You could of course use this to search your music for everything that sounds like any specified artist. Of course to make these searches snappy the app will have to make these searches based on your itunes library on last.fm in advance and in the background and save the results. Much like spotlight does it’s indexing.
When not moving the mouse it will zoom in on the current album playing and when it is about to change it will fly in an arc all the way over the plane and “land” on the next album to be played.
The playlists created can of course be saved and synced to your ipod.
Placing searches in the plane:
Another idea for sorting music in the plane is to be able to place specific search on different points in the cover art plane, for example could everything near top-right corner be “alternative pop” and near bottom-center you could have “80s music” and in middle-center all the recently played tunes and in the top-left there could be “5 stars” or any other search criteria you could think of.
Technices used:
Core animation, Spotlight and some network technology more to connect to last.fm
