Billboard 0.8.5
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.
Nice to see the preferences, I would like “Random” transitions as well.
Also still would like to change the font and size. Some song titles and album titles are much longer than the display. I can’t remember now what song but I did see one with the wrong artwork, would that be in my DB or something else?
Comment by Studiodave — February 24, 2009 @ 6:23 pm
OK watching it now I see what it does with transitions, no need for “Random” as it is all ready. The stars are what changes that, I had accidentally set one transition to 5 stars while the others had no stars and it seemed that only one transition was used.
Comment by Studiodave — February 24, 2009 @ 6:35 pm
OK now I see that the artwork that shows wrong is for an album or track that does not have artwork. Then it would seem to put up some random piece of art.
Comment by Studiodave — February 24, 2009 @ 6:53 pm
The artwork lookup tries to pull artwork from the track first, if that fails, it does a lookup for the first track with the same artist name and album name that also has artwork. It also caches these images to reduce future lookup times.
Comment by Tomis — February 24, 2009 @ 11:29 pm
It’s very seldom you run across a program that does EXACTLY what you’re looking for. Billboard is one of them.
I wanted a program that displayed my iTunes songs on my second monitor, which in my setup is a TV in my livingroom. This way I get the song information when listening to my iTunes songs in the livingroom, relaxing or having a party.
I can’t say enough how much I love this program.
Fits like a glove!
Comment by Stefan — March 9, 2009 @ 6:15 pm
Doesn’t work for me on 10.4.11 running on a PPC G4. I get an exception error on load. Verions 0.8.1 opened, but reported iTunes as closed even though iTunes was up and running. Here’s the error message text:
An exception of class FunctionNotFoundException was not handled. The application must shut down.
Exception Message: Could not load HIWindowFromCGWindowID from Carbon
Comment by mwschmeer — March 15, 2009 @ 4:47 am