  urlLink Thanks to a tip-off from urlLink plasticbag.org , I am now playing about with a very cute new software gizmo, name of urlLink Clutter .
It's a little OS X application that looks up the tune playing in your iTunes, fetches the appropriate album cover from the prodigous Amazon database, and displays it in the primary Clutter window. Then, the cute part. It is possible to drag any number of these album cover images onto the desktop, where they can sit, in whatever arrangement you may care for, and you can rummage around in them, and when you find something you fancy hearing, you double click it, and off it goes. There's more. The album covers, which behave somewhat like windows, and somewhat like icons, are zoomable from ridiculously tiny to screen-fillingly huge. Keystrokes will whisk to to the relevant page on Amazon, or to Google search results. There are a couple of minor grumbles, which aren't really serious enough to amount to bugs - the search is rather literal, and I was dismayed to find that the first three or four tracks I tried gave no results when Amazon's database disagreed in rather inconsequential ways with my ID tags, and when I double click an album on my desktop, it takes a small eternity to find the tracks in my collection and get going.
But then, my collection is unfeasibly large. This thing has been out in the world about two weeks, so I expect there will be some refinements - mutating into a plug-in for iTunes, perhaps? - but it's a brilliiantly simple idea, it deserves to be everywhere, and to make Sprote a gazillionaire.
Which, since Clutter is freeware, is unlikely to happen... Now, if some kind soul would figure a way of piping this through to blogger or MT, and we can have a bunch of album covers floating up and floating down the page, we've got something that'll show a clean pair of heels to Blogamp, n'est ce pas? 
