Clutter On Your Desktop
What is this? A beautiful new user interface from the makers of iTunes?? They’ve wowed with CoverFlow, and full screen glory in the elegant Front Row interface and AppleTV; Have they added yet another UI with which to browse through our music?
Honestly: no. The video you just watched is a free application for Mac OS X called Clutter, brought to us by the fine folks over at Sprote Rsrch. Clutter allows you to pick albums from your iTunes library that you’d like strewn about on your desktop. You may resize them and organize them as you see fit, even choosing to keep them aligned on a grid if you like.
Once an album is on the desktop, you may right-click (or control-click) the album and select any song from the album to being playing immediately in iTunes. A playlist is also created in your source bar. Clutter also maintains the album cover of the currently playing song over its own icon in the Dock.
I really enjoy using Clutter, and encourage you to try it out as well. As I have often said, the art of the album is a lost one. (The New York Times seems to agree with me.) I always enjoy listening to an album from start to finish that way I can evaluate it as one piece of art instead of a few pop jingles.
And of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a library full of music with big beautiful album art.
