James recently wrote about 3D Web-Browsing With SpaceTime. Watching the demos on the SpaceTime site reminded me a lot of the Cover Flow features being added to Leopard, Apple's soon-to-be-released version of OS X.
If you have ITunes 7 you can see Cover Flow now - just click View > Cover Flow view - or you can watch a demo of Cover Flow in Leopard here.
My question is this: Is all this really a good thing? Will it help me find things quicker or is it just pretty?
I find Cover Flow in iTunes fun to play around with, but not great for finding songs. The (text) search in ITunes is very good and very quick and I can find what I want so much quicker that way. Plus, having used iTunes the last several years, leaving my old albums and CDs to collect dust, I no longer know what the cover art for an album looks like. As I watch the pretty covers - most of which I've never seen before - fly by in Cover Flow I'm amazed that they belong to songs and albums I own. So Cover Flow is not much use for me - right now - when it comes to finding songs in iTunes.
But I can see how it might be helpful in the Finder. When I'm searching through a folder I usually have a better idea of what the document, photo or movie I want looks like than I do of what I named it. So seeing the document in Cover Flow view really might work to speed things along.
I'm looking forward to putting this to the test when Leopard is released. At least I'll be prepared with a computer with plenty of graphics power!
Comments (3)
iTunes' album view is nice eye candy.
Posted by james | June 29, 2007 6:36 AM
Posted on June 29, 2007 06:36
For a minute, I thought Brian wrote this post, Susan's dislike was so strong. I hated cover flow when I ran iTunes on my Windows laptop, worse than Susan did in this post. I can't remember if I raged about it here, on her blog, or on mine, but I'm sure there was raging on my part.
When I upgraded to an iMac, it was on by default and I left it on. I kind of like it now. MacOSX seems to not puke as much as Windows when you're running the pretty bells and whistles, or maybe that's just me. Either that, or being a Mac user has devolved my interest in the inner workings of my home computer into "Ooh, pretty!"
Posted by Jason | June 29, 2007 9:31 AM
Posted on June 29, 2007 09:31
I'm wondering what Jason is insinuating here, but we'll leave that for another time. I finally downloaded SpaceTime on my home pc. I found it annoying. It really didn't help me on searches, but it did look cool. I like the idea, but it's just not there yet. Now, if you integrate it with Google, which is pretty much how I live on the internet, Sign me up and I'll pay for it. I want to be able to view a whole page, instead of the text blurb usually taken out of context in the search, and see if it fits my query. Where's my cake I want to eat it.
Posted by Brian | July 10, 2007 8:51 PM
Posted on July 10, 2007 20:51