A Series of Tubes

I’ve posted about CoverSutra before, specifically about its appearance. I didn’t like the default look of the search bar or desktop album art, so I found a collection of modifications that created an interface I liked.

A few days ago I discovered a program with similar abilities to CoverSutra, called Bowtie. It provides a window which one can use to control iTunes, and the bonus of Bowtie over CoverSutra is its skinability. It comes with 11 skins by default, but by looking around the MacThemes Forums, one can find many, many more great themes.

I was considering switching over to Bowtie completely, especially considering that it’s free, but it lacked a few things that CoverSutra has, which I think are very necessary. The first of these, and the most apparent to me, is the lack of a ‘hide from dock’ option, resulting in it always taking up space on the dock, even though it’s a very small app, and doesn’t really warrant a dock icon. A menu bar item, like CoverSutra uses, would be much better for this kind of application. This inadequacy can be remedied, however, with a small app called Dock Dodger, which can hide any application from the dock and cmd+tab switcher.

The other feature Bowtie lacks is the ability to search through the iTunes library, which is pretty much the core of CoverSutra. Upon this realization, it became clear that running Bowtie and CoverSutra side-by-side was definitely a viable option. Using Dock Dodger, I have Bowtie hidden in the background, so that I can use its interface instead of CoverSutra’s desktop album art (the Bowtie theme called ‘Wet Floor’ is really good for this usage), while I continue to use CoverSutra as my main music navigator.

As a final note, I feel I should mention that up until Bowtie, I still used my perennial favorite utility, Quicksilver, for my iTunes-related hotkey needs. CoverSutra’s hotkeys work great, but I found that there was no way to get the CoverSutra notification under the menu bar to appear when using CoverSutra’s own hotkeys to change the song, so I refrained from using them. However, Quicksilver hotkeys can be somewhat sluggish at first, and Bowtie loads faster at boot-up than Quicksilver, so I recently moved my play/pause and next/previous hotkeys over to Bowtie, and my increase/decrease volume & rating hotkeys to CoverSutra. This setup has treated me well so far, and I’m very happy with it.