May 19, '03 09:59:00AM • Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 9 Scale: 0 to 10 ten lights with 10=perfect]
- Developer: Sprote Rsrch [Product Page]
- Price: Free
Once you have a cover, the way you clutter your desktop is pure Macintosh -- just drag the cover artwork out of the Clutter window and drop it where you wish. This creates a virtual album that can be control-clicked on, allowing easy management of songs on albums, as seen at left (larger image). Over time, you begin to accumulate favorite albums scattered across your desktop, hence the name Clutter. But having cluttered your desk, you'll find it really easy to find that favorite song you wanted to hear without having to visit iTunes to do so. When you're tired of an album on your desktop, just click once and hit delete.
Until yesterday, if you wanted the Clutter artwork directly in iTunes, you had to manually go into the Clutter artwork download folder and drag and drop the image into iTunes. But Clutter version 1.0d13 adds a new "Copy Cover to iTunes" menu item to make the process really easy.
After using Clutter for a week or so, though, I've found that I use it in a different manner than the author intended. Although you can clutter your desktop with imagery, and easily copy the artwork to iTunes, I do neither of those things. Instead, Clutter has replaced my iTunes window. I no longer leave even the minimized window open. I simply create a small Clutter window, and I have song, artist, album, play, previous track, next track, and cover artwork available at a glance. The other side benefit is that when I switch to iTunes, I now get the full size window (since it opens a new one when activated), instead of having to manually click the expand button on my minimized window.
The only reason I gave Clutter nine stars instead of ten is that the newest version seems to have a problem with the play control buttons losing their functionality -- the 1.0d12 version didn't have this problem at all, so I hope it's temporary. Basically, sometimes when I try to click any of the buttons, they don't respond. It takes some combination of window resizing and switching apps to restore their functionality. Other than that one glitch, though, I think Clutter is perfect!
