I'm happy to announce that I Love Stars 3.0 is out! Please consider it my small Christmas present to fellow Mac users as it continues to be free.

I Love Stars 2.0 was a little menubar application that did just two things: 1) show you the star rating of iTunes' currently playing song and 2) let you click to set a new rating.

Version 3 keeps to its simple mission but adds two important new features:

"I Love Stars" is my new freebie application that shows the rating of iTunes' currently playing song in the menu bar. Before I say anything else, here's the download link.

I spent a good part of yesterday solving a problem that's been bugging me. That is, how to rate songs in iTunes with as few brain cycles as possible.

You tend to get distracted switching back and forth from iTunes and even rating songs with iTunes' dock menu is not fast enough when your hands are on the keyboard. Apps like QuickSilver and CoverSutra already solve a big chunk of the problem by letting you assign keyboard shortcuts for raising and lowering ratings—I have command-option-control-up and down arrow set to raise and lower the rating, for example—but I needed a way to quickly see what the rating actually is before changing it.