Thursday, November 29, 2007

Cool iTunes gadget for Vista Sidebar

I very much enjoy using Vista (despite all the FUD) although it isn't particularly more spectacular than XP Pro, it isn't much prettier than any of my KDE desktops, and it's probably quite similar to OSX (I have not used OSX for years so I'm no judge of what it does/n't do excepting what I read online from people I deem at least remotely reputable. I've been seriously considering building some gadgets for myself; however, I just found a gadget I was planning on writing (thanks for saving me the trouble mysterious gadget man!)




You can see the gadget on the right side of the full size image (please excuse the code in the IDE I'm hurriedly writing a screen capture test...)

It is a gadget for controlling iTunes from your sidebar and it shows album art as well. Very nice; however, if you do not start iTunes by default on your machine when booting up, this gadget will do so from now on. There's currently no option for disabling this either (so I may end up writing one in any case.) I've been thinking of writing a 'live thumbnail' UI utility anyhow (it would use the DWM thumbnail manager and whatever window you wanted watched you could manipulate its controls from the sidebar thumbnail. May not sound useful to you, but for myself (with several desktops in addition to a multi-monitor setup believe me it *is* useful, lol...

Anywho - Enough jawing/clacking. Here is a link to the gadget:

Vista iTunes Gadget



Enjoy!

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