Impulsive Highlighters

Review: GimmeSomeTune 2.0

GimmeSomeTune is by no means a revolutionary application but it does make something that usually is either more involved than necessary (Growl) or requires money (Synergy) and wraps it up in a neat little package with an appropriate name. GimmeSomeTune displays a floating window (pictured above) whenever iTunes starts playing a song. It also has the ability to assign Keyboard Shortcuts to common iTunes commands such as Play/Pause and Next/Previous Track amongst others. I have found these to be virtually indispensable as iTunes inevitably ends up in the background unless you're the type who likes to watch his music in addition to listening to it. If you see yourself nodding at this point, allow me to classify you as a "Weirdo" and also excuse me for ignoring you for the rest of this brief review.

GimmeSomeTune is customizable to just the right degree in my opinion. I never wanted to choose between the myriad of themes Growl presented me with and in GST, I don't have to. There is one, it looks good and it works. Fades in and out to boot. You can set its opacity, and if I am not much mistaken, the duration for which it disturbs you on-screen. In addition to this appropriate level of customizability regarding the general appearance, GST also allows you to choose exactly what items of information appear in its window. It also has just the right amount of customizability when it comes to dealing with Cover Art. It asks you what to do when there is no Cover Art associated with a song. It can fetch it from Amazon.com, display a standard "No Cover Art" image of your choosing or do nothing.

GST also has two other features that I do not use - one that I used and gave up on and the other that doesn't strike me as particularly necessary. The first one is an option to display the currently playing album art as your iChat display picture. It was very decent of the developers to think of this, because it is a very nifty featurette. However, the big bounder of a problem with this is that, in case iChat is not open when you start playing a song in iTunes, it bloody opens it up, and so, by chance you wished to be offline on iChat, it makes you go online. That is quite unhappy as far as I'm concerned. Also, it does not integrate into Adium which I think is a big deal. The second feature that I simply don't use is a mini-player which can show up as you desire (or something of the sort, I don't really know).

One little nicety about GST that I should mention is that it has a Daemon process which detects when you launch iTunes and it launches and quits GST accordingly. Incredibly nifty.

Anyway, that's the gist of GimmeSomeTune. Excellent piece of software. The problem about the iChat/Adium display picture thing? Well, I found a piece of software that works better in that particular regard and I'll probably write about it next since Sunday afternoons are not suited to doing anything better. 

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