BUSHBABYWAS Extremely clear and simple to set up through a pane in System Preferences, and highly customisable. Displays album art reliably and It does everything all the many myriad other iTunes controllers do, but seems to be more reliable and stable. Let's you rate the currently playing song using a keyboard shortcut - without this I doubt I would ever rate my tracks. The closest competitor for ease of use, features and stability seems to be the excellent GimmeSomeTune (http://www.macupdate.com/reviews.php?id=20412), but I think Sizzling Key's elegant pop-up notification looks a lot better than GimmeSomeTune's more cluttered, bezelled one. And Sizzling Keys has very slick playlist and search pop-ups, though to be honest I find switching to iTunes using the provided keyboard shortcut easier. I would like to request, however, two features, one small, one a bit more ambitious. GimmeSomeTune has both. a) the ability to only start when iTunes does, rather than upon system startup would be a boon. I realise this would require a small watcher daemon, but I still think it would be worth it. It's annoying to accidentally start iTunes by unintentionally pressing one of Sizzling Keys' keyboard shortcuts. b) The killer feature, which would stop me switching to GimmeSomeTune, would be the ability to fetch lyrics for the playing song and display in a similar transparent window. GimmeSomeTune's automatic search seems to work far more quickly and fetch many more lyrics than other similar applications, so implementation would v. good to top it. But it would make Sizzling Keys by far the best iTunes controller available. Anyway, excellent app. This and GimmeSomeTune are the ones to get if you want an unobtrusive, powerful but easy to use iTunes controller. (Version 3.2.7) |