My Killer App

There's a blog that's running a contest right now to find the next Killer App for Macs: My Dream App.

Here's my entry:

I am an iPod/iTunes fanatic: How Steven Jobs Got Me. Sorry, Marty.

I have roughly 2,000 CDs loaded onto my latest iPod.

In MAC OS X Panther, iTunes allowed me to look at my CD album art in both iTunes and on my iPod. It was a nice feature, but nothing too splashy.

And now, with MAC OS X Tiger, I get an added bonus: iTunes album art can be displayed on my computer as a screen saver. Yep, I can now see all the CDs I've got in my iTunes library, displayed as album covers. Five rows from top to bottom, seven columns from left to right, I get a lovely mosaic of squares on my computer screen when it goes to sleep. And every few seconds, one of the squares swivels (like the computer has its own little invisible Vanna White inside) to change and display a new album cover.

Nothing more than a momentary diversion, granted, but one that grabs me every time -- because, with more than 2000 "albums" to look at, I get to see a lot of CDs that I haven't played in quite a while. With 15,000 songs on my iPod, there's a LOT of music that I haven't played recently.

So here’s the Killer App:

Create an option on the “Album Art” screensaver function so that when I come back from lunch and I see all those album covers on my screen, and I see a CD I haven’t played in quite some time, I can move my mouse to point the cursor at a particular CD, click on it, and have iTunes open and begin playing that CD.

How cool would THAT be?

All it would take is a software fix that would start a three- or five-second delay from the moment I moved the mouse, and another one that would recognize the particular file folder associated with the album art I choose to point the cursor to before clicking.

The result? I’d get to listen to a much wider variety of music, on a far more regular basis, without having to deliberately take the time to search through my iTunes library. And isn’t making our lives easier what Apple and Macs and iTunes are all about?

Here's the rotten part:

The contest's submissions window was over long before I wrote this post. That's the price I pay for doing what I do for a living -- as much as I really would have liked to submit this idea, I just haven't had time to sit and do anything that wasn't job-related for way too long. As it was, I wrote this little post at about 3 AM this morning. And I haven't even had time today to actually publish it.

C'est la vie.