December 22, 2007
iTunes Album Art Cover Flow on your Desktop
Getting to your music without having to launch iTunes is handy. Doing it visually is a plus. Cover Stream is a new iTunes controller that puts Cover Flow view on your desktop in a stylish floating window.
Like many of the album art tools, you can click to flip covers around and select individual tracks. Cover Stream also allows searches, access to your playlists, lets you assign hot keys for volume, pause, skip, hide etc. and it puts the current cover design in the dock (nice touch). Leopard is required and the full version is $14.95.
Cover Flow certainly has come a long way since it's early days as a somewhat obscure iTunes plug-in from a few inspired independent programmers. Quickly gaining poplarity, it utilized Apple's Core Graphics technology so well that Apple purchased the code, releasing it as one of the cover art features of iTunes 7. Now it's built right into the OS. This is the first external iTunes controller I've seen that uses the Cover Flow view.
