To my surrpise, Cover Stream updated to 2.0 on the 9th of May. I first heard about this application from TUAW from its 1.4 update, but TUAW seemed to have neglected its 2.0 release. The price of Cover Stream went up from USD$14.95  in March to €14.95(coversutra is also marked at this price) now for a lifetime update. Who knows, maybe it will be the next Coverflow which was acquired by Apple and integrated into their Operating System. Cover Stream is a hifty software that allows you to breeze through your iTunes library with the gorgeous coverflow interface without bringing to front the iTunes software itself. 

How does it compare to software of its kind, like Coversutra?

Memory usage

On my 101gb iTunes library loaded with 5272 songs with a larger portion of them in apple lossless format, Cover Stream uses 215.96mb of real memory and 499.61mb of virtual memory. It might seem a lot, but it still response quite quickly, despite some lacks when showing the currently playing album artwork after pressing the next track button. 

With Coversutra, it runs on a 40.58mb of real memory when idling and 369.58mb of virtual memory. Though I have not used more accurate measures to gauge the hit these 2 applications have on the hardware, it is pretty much self-evident upon a trial run. Coversutra recently updated to 2.1.2, before that it never crashed or lagged, given its small footprint and updates are more directed towards the user-interface rather than functionality. 

GUI

While the new application icon of Cover Stream looks much better than in the 1.4 version. I found one from macthemes2.net that might fit better as a replacement in terms of integrity on the menubar icon design.In Cover Stream 2.0, users see a more sleek GUI overall. The album artwork on the desktop looks very much like the other application only with  a more blurred display of album art. Not sure if this has to do with the fact that the album art is shown in profile and recedes into the screen itself a bit thus causing a distortion on the album art.

The animated transition between various clicks such as song selection, info display and song change notification lack a little bit but give the application a more advanced look compared to its last revision. Users can now choose to keep the browser window floating on top. One glitch is that after entering the preference pane with the browser floating, it would be gone once you close the preference pane. It will not come up again unless you uncheck and check the “Float on top” option in the menubar. 

Functionality

With the newly integrated search function, users can now see what they are typing in the Cover Stream window. And search result pops up almost instantly. One very frustrating aspect is that if you were shuffling songs in your library and for some reason you wanted to listen to one particular track, you will be stuck in that album after the track finished playing. Cover Stream would keep shuffling songs from that album only instead of your entire library. To solve this you have to go back to iTunes and delete the Cover Stream playlist, then go back to Music and select any track. The developer explained it has something to do with iTunes’ architecture rather than Cover Stream itself. 

In iTunes we could see the current song playing by pressing Command+L. For Cover Stream, The browser window does not always correspond to the currently playing song. And pressing command L does not seem to do the trick anymore than in the previous version. 

If you are not always importing songs to your iTunes library, it might be wise to turn off sync with iTunes at startup, this way it seem to take up less system resources. One other possibility is to uncheck “show icon in Dock”. 

Conclusion

This is a rather brief review. But it is obvious that Cover Stream is a great app for Coverflow oriented control of iTunes, as the developer intended in the first place. Though it still requires a bit of work to iron out the glitches, it is making great progress in challenging the place of better known album art display programs. It certainly is a keeper! 

Remember during the Macworld keynote, Steve demonstrated to us the new cool visual effects and features to be included in iChat 4.0? Like the wireless Time Machine, this has been pulled out of the final release as well.    

In case you forgot, it was actually Phil on the camera. Anywayz, instead of mourning for our loss, folks at the mac rumors site are kind enough to make this work for us. Not only is the holographic effect available to star war fans, with a few more clicks, you could turn yourself into the invisible man as well. Enjoy. Oh, in case you are wondering, this works in photobooth as well, sweeeet! Kudos to Ice-Cube & elbows! 

Yes, it knocked on my door this morning. It didn’t take longer than 15 mins to install on my core duo machine. More less the same time it took to install Tiger.  You of all people should know what is the rest looks like….  I will be posting an upgrade T-1 hour… see you again soon. 

Over at the green bay, it looked as if the GM has been leaked.Confirmation note of the leaked version being 9a581 could be found here. Interestingly the author’s remark on the machine running this seed changed from “on a private mac” to “a developer’s pc”, a snapshot over here.My oh my… mac users are debating if 9a581 is the exact version on the Leopard DVD to be released on the 26th. Is apple’s legal team going to do something about that build? Better yet, will this rumored build expire on Leopard’s official launch date? Like when Apple pulled bootcamp off its download page?What’s new on the GM?From a report by appleinsider, the 3D dock should retain its old 2D look when it’s been placed on the side. Is Apple hearing our prayers? doesn’t sound like much to me. So much for last minute surprises? We will soon find out. As always, Don’t Steal Software.