Album Art For The Rest of Us

March 11, 2009
Version 1.1 released. Universal binary, works on Leopard + Tiger.

Download here.

With the release of iTunes 7, album artworks are a minor rage. I downloaded my fair share of artworks (even though I do not have an iTunes account) and wanted a way to display them in a screensaver. As all regular readers and their grandmas know by now, I’m still running Panther, so I couldn’t (obviously) use the screensaver that apparently ships with Tiger for this very purpose.

I wanted one very badly and since I couldn’t find anything out there, I had no option but to “get my hands dirty”. The result is Album Art For The Rest of Us version 1.0.

When I conceptualized I had imagined one artwork on the screen at a time, but somehow this (screenshot below) seems better. Some of the “features” are:

  1. Displays an artwork on a random position on the screen.
  2. Adds an artwork every two seconds.
  3. Scales down “bigger” artworks to 300 X 300 pixels before displaying them. If the artwork isn’t “sqaure”, it scales down the image such that the larger edge is 300 pixels.
  4. Uses 50% Transparency to display the images on top of each other.

Note: Since the screensaver uses Applescript to get the artwork, iTunes needs to be running in the background for it to function. If iTunes is not running when the screensaver starts, it will be started automatically.

I have tested this on a machine running Mac OS X Panther 10.3.9 and iTunes 7 and it works fine. It should work with other versions, but I have no way of verifying that works fine on PPC Tiger. If you happen to get it running (or run into any problems) under any other setup than one mentioned above, either drop me a line or leave a comment.

I appreciate encourage any/ all feedback. If there’s enough interest I would be willing to convert some of things (above) into user configurable options.

Download (16 KB).
If you are having trouble downloading, try this page instead.

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3 or later (Tiger PPC compatible), iTunes.
Screenshot:
Screenshot

[tags]Album Art For The Rest of Us, iTunes, iTunes 7, artwork, album artwork, Panther[/tags]

A week is a long time in football (and life)

What a difference seven days can make. The last time I was here, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to bits. While I wouldn’t exactly use the word “love” in the same context yet either, things are looking (much?) better at the moment.

What was wrong? Things at home I don’t wish to talk about here, stuff at work that I can’t talk about and the realisation that I might finally be over a relationship that never was. You might think the last would be a good thing, huh? Go figure. To top it all back to back league defeats at the hands of the Everton and Chelsea, the bitter rivals and defending champions respectively.

Anyone who saw the game against Chelsea (I didn’t but whatever) would agree that the “better side lost” – anyone who isn’t crazy or Jose Mourinho i.e. Anyways, I’m not one to clutch at straws so wouldn’t harp on that but one needs to consider the ridiculously skewed fixture list to keep things in perspective. And yes, no one’s winning 90 points this season – no one. Repeat that until it gets into your head.

Things have changed quite a bit since then. For starters, the Reds are banging in the goals again – 5 in the last 2 games (I even managed to catch the Newcastle game on the telly, which has been a bit of a rarity this year) and two clean sheets as well, thank you very much. That is one less thing to worry about – not that I think my worrying does any good (to me or LFC). But life’s better if your team’s winning, trust me.

More importantly, the thing at home I mentioned above is all but sorted out now – that’s a life++ in a big fancy loop right there. The other two remain, but let’s leave it at that, as things will never be “all sorted out” will they? Life would anyways be too darn boring if that somehow managed to be the case.

PS – I’m finally making some progress writing Cocoa code as well.