Today I’m releasing Billboard 0.9.8, an iTunes controller and status display (for Intel and PowerPC Macs running Tiger or better)

This should be the last release before 1.0 (which should come out about two months from now) and it’s focused mostly on polishing things off, formalizing the trial terms, and fixing some bugs.

First I’ll talk about the trial terms and what they mean. The user has a 30 day trial period in which to try Billboard completely unrestricted. All features are enabled during this time. At the end of that 30 day period a few things happen: Fullscreen and Kiosk mode are disabled, random entries in the browser are blocked out, and album-art is replaced with an alternating ad*.

What’s new in 0.9.8? My favorite new feature of 0.9.8 is the improved album art quality. Both when dealing with high-res and low-res album art. Additionally, there are several minor updates to include support for iTunes 9 (and iTunes U). And clicking directly on the album art now displays a contextual menu for the current song. You’ll find the complete change log at the Billboard homepage.

And don’t forget; as a thank-you to everyone who has sent in feedback, you can pre-purchase Billboard 1.0 for USD $9.95 before it ships, that’s 50% off the final price of $19.95!

*A Word About Ads:
Of course, the hope is that no one will even experience the post-trial ads because they will have paid and registered for Billboard before their trial is over. But regardless, I’d like to assuage any concerns over privacy. The ad system does not send any personally identifying information to any servers. And only one ad is loaded per track. When possible, Billboard displays contextual ads, that is, ads which relate to the song you’re listening to. It does this by looking at the tags of the song, and cross referencing them against its own database of contextual ads. Again, I’d like to stress that no information about your listening habits is sent to any server in order to achieve this. As far as the ad server is concerned, it can’t tell the difference between an ad being pulled contextually, or one being chosen at random. If you have questions about any of this, feel free to leave a comment, or send feedback at the Contact page of SideTree.com.

Today I’m releasing Billboard 0.9.7, an iTunes controller and status display (for Intel and PowerPC Macs running Tiger or better)

This version introduces two big new features; Last 10 and Tunemarks. Both of these features are geared towards solving issues related to internet radio, but will work with any media playing in iTunes. Now when you ask the question; “What’s that song that just played while I was in the other room?” You can simply go to the Last 10 menu and see the last ten songs that played, along with helpful links for each of them. And if you’d like to keep a reference to a song for later purchase or reference, you can add it to your Tunemarks.

One feature which I’d like to highlight is the new behavior of the search field in the Browser. Previously, it served only to search your entire iTunes library. In Billboard 0.9.7 however, the search field is used mainly to filter the current list. Say you’re in the Radio listings, looking through the Eclectic section and you’d like to find all the rock stations. Now you can simply type “rock” into the search field, and there are all the stations whose title or description match. If you’d like to search your entire library, you can still do so from the Home, Search, or Playlists screens.

There are a number of other enhancements and fixes as well including animations for smoother transitions of interface elements, and detection of situations where iTunes requires user interaction. Other new features include customizing the toolbar, and an option to show the playtime even when the toolbar is hidden, among others.

You can access the current change log at the new Billboard homepage. Incidentally, you may notice the new website that Billboard is being hosted on. I’d like to assure everyone that this doesn’t reflect new ownership or developers, but a new home for the various applications and projects I’ve had scattered around the web. I’ll slowly be moving these projects to be under one digital canopy, at SideTree.com

As part of the move, currently registered users will see a dialog asking them to update their registration. All that should be required for most people is to simply click the Update button. If you experience any problems, please feel free to contact me via email (under the Help menu in Billboard) or via the Contact page at SideTree.com

And don’t forget; as a thank-you to everyone who has sent in feedback, during this public beta period you can pre-purchase Billboard 1.0 for USD $9.95, that’s 50% off the final price of $19.95!

Today I’m releasing Billboard 0.9.6, an iTunes controller and status display (for Intel and PowerPC Macs running Tiger or better)

This version brings all-new Shuffle and Repeat controls, as well as several bug fixes and improvements for Star Ratings, the Browser, the Control Bar, and transitions. The complete change log is available in the Links section in the upper right.

And don’t forget; as a thank-you to everyone who has sent in feedback, during this public beta period you can pre-purchase Billboard 1.0 for USD $9.95, that’s 50% off the final price of $19.95!

Today I’m releasing Billboard 0.9.5, an iTunes controller and status display (for Intel and PowerPC Macs running Tiger or better)

This release brings two major new features; window view, and the Browser. Now you can easily toggle Billboard out of fullscreen, throw it in a corner of your monitor and get some work done while still seeing your album art beautifully displayed. The new Browser lets you search your music library, add tracks to a target playlist (”iTunes DJ”, for example), switch the current playlist, and more. Additionally, it features enhanced support for iTunes’ built-in “Radio Tuner”, allowing you to easily peruse the many great stations provided, and mark favorites. Also, when pulling album art for radio streams, Billboard will now try to locate the correct song duration as well, which makes for an even more seamless internet radio experience. (Album art and song durations are courtesy of Amazon.com)

The Browser, in combination with Kiosk mode, turns your mac into the perfect digital jukebox. Users can search your music library, find the song they like, and add it to the playlist (of your choosing), all without having full access to your computer.

There are a number of smaller improvements in this release which add up to create a more polished experience. Album art is now displayed in the dock icon by default. You can now edit star ratings directly from Billboard. The iTunes and Amazon store buttons have now been consolidated into a contextual “links” button which includes searches of Wikipedia, MySpace, and more. And that new links button is displayed as part of the new control bar, which provides a cleaner interface for scrubbing through songs, as well as volume and other playback controls.

And in addition to all of that, there are several new features that were spurred on by user suggestions. Some of these I had already been considering and decided to ultimately implement because people asked for them. These new features include: Smarter use of the space on vertically oriented monitors, ratings for the different angles album-art is displayed at, various improvements to the VirtualDJ, and lastly, the ability to select a font for the main Billboard status display. So remember, if you have a suggestion, don’t hesitate to send it my way. It just might make it into the next release!

Screenshots of Billboard in fullscreen, with the Browser Open, on vertically and horizontally oriented monitors:

And don’t forget; as a thank-you to everyone who has sent in feedback, during this public beta period you can pre-purchase Billboard 1.0 for USD $9.95, that’s 50% off the final price of $19.95!

Today I’m releasing Billboard 0.9.1, a fullscreen iTunes status display (for Intel and PowerPC Macs running Tiger or better)

This release is mainly made up of bug fixes, with increased support for iTunes Shares, iTunes Store content, and radio streams. There are also a few new options in the preferences, including automatic removal of borders on album art. Also, visual feedback is now provided for keyboard shortcuts such as play/pause, volume up/down, etc.

With the goal of increasing iTunes integration, there is now an option (Preferences>Advanced) to forward unhandled keyboard shortcuts to iTunes, and a Billboard launch script which can be installed in iTunes’ Scripts menu. You can easily instal it from within Billboard.

As a thank-you to everyone who has sent in feedback, during this public beta period you can pre-purchase Billboard 1.0 for USD $9.95, that’s 50% off the final price of $19.95!

Today I’m releasing Billboard 0.9, a fullscreen iTunes status display (for Intel and PowerPC Macs running Tiger or better)

There are a number of new things in this release; Kiosk Mode to keep people from exiting Billboard (perfect for parties), the Virtual DJ to announce song changes using MacOS X Text-to-Speech, options to auto-hide various interface elements (such as playback control), and a slew of new transition types for both MacOS X 10.4 and 10.5. There are also a few new settings for tweaking the performance of Billboard, including iTunes update frequency and transition FPS control.

I listen to a lot of internet radio. Unfortunately some stations provide iTunes with poorly formatted tags, or include various announcements along with the song tags. To that end, there is a new “Clean Up Tags for Displays” option that attempts to alleviate this problem. And speaking of tags, Billboard will now attempt to fit long tags entirely on screen by reducing the text size.

As a thank-you to everyone who has sent in feedback, during this public beta period you can pre-purchase Billboard 1.0 for USD $9.95, that’s 50% off the final price of $19.95!

With that in mind, here’s a few features planned for future releases*:

• Visual feedback for keyboard shortcuts
• Playlist control/editing/searching
• Remote control iTunes over the network.

Today I’m releasing Billboard 0.8.6, a fullscreen iTunes status display (for Intel and PowerPC Macs running Tiger or better)

This update fixes an issue which prevented Billboard from launching on MacOS X 10.4 machines. It also fixes a number of display/performance issues.

New in this release is the ability to download album art for CDs, the option to display album art straight-on instead of at a randomly selected tilt, a nice new icon, and the ability to select the transition duration.

I posted a poll on the Billboard download page for a few feature ideas I have. You can help me prioritize which to implement by heading over and voting for your favorite. Been thinking it would be nice to put some of that empty screen space (above the track names) to use. Maybe allow for displaying personalized content like web pages or something.

Take the poll.

Again, thank you to everyone leaving feedback.

Today I’m releasing Billboard 0.8.5, a fullscreen iTunes status display (for Intel and PowerPC Macs running Tiger or better)

I’ve been getting some excellent feedback on Billboard 0.8.1. Thanks to everyone who let me know about problems and left suggestions! I really appreciate it.

Here’s a quick run-down of the changes:

* Fix: reduced CPU usage
* Fix: no more screen blanking on transition
* New: control over auto-flip delay and transitions
* New: improved support for RadioParadise.com internet radio station (play time, additional tags, link to song page and amazon page)
* New Advanced Options: prevent display sleep, show on all Spaces, and more

Starting things off, there are two major bug fixes to reduce the CPU usage and fix a problem introduced in 0.8.1 where the main screen would temporarily blank out during transitions if you had Billboard running on a second monitor. I’ve noticed a similar blanking issue happening when expose/spaces are open during transition and I’m looking at how to work around that issue. I also have a couple ideas for ways to reduce CPU usage even further.

There’s now an entire section of the preferences window dedicated to transitions. You can control the delay between them, set ratings to control frequency, and preview each one. Personally, I prefer the page flip, with a few others popping up every now and then for variety. You’ll need MacOS X 10.5 or higher to get all those nifty transitions listed (there’s a couple built-in fallbacks for Tiger users).

I’m particularly happy with the improved RadioParadise support. RP is a professionally mixed internet radio station I recommend everyone check out. If you’re listening to their stream in iTunes, Billboard will now go to their server and request an XML feed with additional information about the current song. And if you turn on Player Controls in Billboard’s preferences it will display the playtime and duration of the track. Pretty sweet! If you know of any other radio streams that publish song information like this then let me know.

So go check out Billboard 0.8.5 and leave a comment, or drop me an email. I’m mainly developing this to my own satisfaction, but I’m open to hearing any crazy-out-there feature requests.

Today I’m releasing Billboard 0.8. It’s a fullscreen iTunes song display designed to run on a second monitor, though you can run it on any available display. I wanted something simple and elegant that was readable at a distance. Perfect when DJing parties, hanging out with friends, or just lounging around the house. Put on Party Shuffle and open Billboard.

This started as just a quick personal project, the version number reflects that it may still have some rough edges. I’m open to any feedback and feature requests.

Get Billboard 0.8