I Love Stars

Andy Kim — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:52:08 -0700

"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.

If you cringe at the thought of having unrated songs in the library like I do, you'll enjoy I Love Stars. Mainly, it's there to show the rating, but you can adjust it with the mouse as well.

Here is what you'll get once you launch I Love Stars:

To quit, right click for the menu:

If you want I Love Stars to launch at boot up, go to System Preferences, Accounts, then Login Items and add it to the list.

I Love Stars is completely free (as in beer), but if you are a music lover, check out my commercial application Tangerine! too.

Thanks to Steve Harris for sharing the rating control code.

2.0 UPDATE:

I think I'm having too much fun working on this little app. I found myself giggling like a schoolgirl a few times today. In what might go down in the history books as the fastest release of a 2.0 version, a day after the initial launch, the sequel is ready already.

The new version features 150% more features:

I Love Stars hides itself when iTunes is not playing
It does so with a nifty animation
You can assign half a star rating by clicking on the last star
It is smaller and requires less memory
1 bug has been fixed

Freebie

I Love Stars

2.0 UPDATE:

2.1 UPDATE: