I've been feeling pretty guilty the last few days. I know I should be working on TaskPaper, but I've had this other app idea on the back burner for a few months... and I just had to spend a few days trying the idea out. Here's the first draft blurb:
CoverWall - See your music For iTunes users who have lost track of what they own and just listen to the same few songs again and again. CoverWall allows you to see all of your music in a single screen. Unlike iTunes' list based views that only show you a few items at a time, CoverWall shows you everything in a simple and quickly browsable screen.
This is definitally a one trick pony, utility app. But for myself at least its a fun and useful trick. My goal is to eventually sell this app for 9.95. I don't really see it as an iTunes player replacement (such as maybe Coversutra is). Instead it's an app that you can occasionly browse to:
It's now working well enough for me to play with. My plan is to sit on it for a month or two and get back to TaskPaper. In the meantime please try it out, and let me know what you think. What will make it worth $9.95 to you.
Note Currently startup time is pretty slow, and during that time you are left staring at a blank screen. So give it a few minutes to load.
And the download link.
Copyright © 2008 Jesse Grosjean. All rights reserved.
Nick Brawne - April 16, 2008 4:54 PM
Interesting.
Definitely gets into an interesting and hard to describe space.
You write that you don't want it to be an iTunes replacement like CoverSutra, but it does need to provide some playback capabilities. How many, or how much control becomes the muddy area. At the moment it plays immediately when you click a square, but there is no information on what the square is, and no way to control playback in any way.
Can think of several enhancements to what you have.
Currently clicking on a square starts playback, it would be good if clicking a square
Moving your mouse over the image should enlarge it (like the dock with variable magnification)
For large collections it might be nice to be able to do a wall of just one or two genres, or a wall of stuff that you have not played for X amount of time - or anything that currently be defined by a smart playlist.
Perhaps a way to filter out podcasts and audiobooks ?
Is there a way that this can be built into iTunes ? Perhaps making it into a plugin visualizer that controls rather than responds to the music. ?
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Kamil - May 1, 2008 2:54 PM
Hi, this is exactly, what I´m searching for right now. I hate browsing my Albums one by one and not having the overview.
For me, the killer features would be to zoom into the wall and navigate around, because the covers get really small when you have many albums.
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jesse - May 2, 2008 1:26 PM
I've glad you are interested. This app is a bit on the backburner right now as I'm trying to get TaskPaper out, but I expect to pick it up and release it (quickly I hope) once TaskPaper 2.0 is out. I'll likely let you set a minimum size for album artwork, and then add a scroll bar if all your albums don't fit at that minimum size.
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Kyle Conroy - July 16, 2008 2:42 AM
Jesse,
Maybe instead of a scroll bar, the albums could be placed on "pages" such as the main iPhone screen, and scrolled horizontally.
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bcomnes - May 8, 2008 8:00 PM
I have my library on my Time Capsule drive and access it over gigabit ethernet. The startup times in terms of actually loading the artwork is really quite slow.
But a cool idea. Kinda like the itunes screen saver.
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jesse - May 8, 2008 8:07 PM
Yeah a lot like the iTunes screen saver... I actually didn't know about that until after I started work on CoverWall. The big difference is that CoverWall shows you "everything" at once.
Performance should be a mostly solvable problem. The first time (ever) that you launch the app it's likely to be relativly slow. But after that (given some coding time) all those pictures can be cached, so after the first launch load times should be fast... and then a background process will run behind the scenes making sure that the cache is up to date, but you as a user won't really notice that.
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ByronFortescue - May 22, 2008 6:14 PM
Quite an interesting app, indeed..
You should find out how the iTunes screensaver gets the images so quickly and steal the code ;)
First thoughts:
Actually the first time I see the idea of really seeing the album art and making your choice executed well, much better than when using CoverFlow..
Visual feedback, make the buttons pop-up when you hover over them, not when you click them.
When clicked, play the album.
When double clicked, let them fly forward and turn around, presenting a track listing (see iPhone/iPod Touch) so you can define your choice even more.
Add a visual note telling you which album is currently playing.
Maybe add more visual appeal by adding features like a 'shake' option to rearrange the album art in a different (random) way, and see all the artwork flying over your screen to a new position.. Giving a new perspective on things maybe in terms of color and position..
Maybe this whole thing belongs in a menu-bar item, so you have a place where you can acces the program from without having a screen with album art on your screen all the time, or having to cmd-h the program. Maybe with a nice genie effect.. sucking the screen in and out when needed.
What to do with a whole lot of album art? More pages, or scaling artwork? Maybe both? I can't really see what happens cause I have only a limited amount of album art..
Filter out podcasts and the like.. They don't come in albums and don't have nice artwork most of the time..
Pricing, depends on what feature set is presented of course, but I'm leaning towards 7 or 8 dollars instead of 10. Still, I know the US dollar is going very poorly nowadays and will be going downhill in the future from what I can tell, so maybe 10 is better in that perspective :)
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