Posts Tagged ‘Widgets’

Lyrics and Artwork on the Mac

Sep 15th, 08 / Comments Off

I’ve tried a bunch of tools. Pearlyrics is gone thanks to the RIAA, it was great because it would go through your whole set of songs. All the rest just do the current playing song and most are widgets now:

# “Harmonic:http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/2035. This seems to work the best. Listens to the current song and plugs the lyrics into iTunes and therefore into the MP3s.
# Cantopod. Nicest interface, but doesn’t automatically insert
# I Sing iTunes. This is most popular sing it handles Japanese and Chinese lyrics, but it seems to hang for me.
# “Album Art Thingy 1.9″:http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ipod_itunes/albumartthingy.html. Reported downloads artwork and lyrics inthe background. Cost $15, but saves lots of time!
# “Amazon Album Art Widget”:http://www.versiontracker.com/php/dlpage.php?id=28644&db=mac&pid=85611&kind=&lnk=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.widget-foundry.com%2Fdownloads%2FAmazonAlbumArt-2.12.zip is a manual utility and looks up the current song.
# “GimmeSomeTune”:http://mac.blorge.com/2007/10/21/free-mac-software-sunday-automatically-fetch-itunes-album-art-with-gimmesometune/ is donationware that does lyrics and artwork.

Also you want to automatically get artwork. ITunes finds artwork, but unless you manually go a Get Info and put it in, it doesn’t copy it into the MP3.

Geek

Zenphoto

Apr 9th, 08 / Comments Off

_MG_1173_4_5_tonemappedOK, finally flopped Nextgen Gallery for ZenPhoto even though I can’t get the widget to work. But, let’s try integration. First, you should see a “Photos”:http://tongfamily.com/zenphoto button now at the top. You do need a password to see anything though :-)

But to get it to actually integrate into the blog is the trick. First there is actually putting an image from ZenPhoto into WordPress. This isn’t quite photoblogging, but is somewhat useful. You can either hack around looking for the address or use Zenphotopress to do this as you can see above. The nice thing about Zenphotopress is that it shows you thumbnails of what you want to see.

_MG_1173As an aside the first image is an HDR image that is a combination of three exposures using Photomatix. And then you have the photo as it was originally.

Wordpress, Zenphoto

WordPress Widgets

Apr 9th, 08 / Comments Off

Quick review of widgets and WordPress. BTW, does anyone think the WordPress 2.5 is confusing compared with 2.3? sticking the really important plugins and settings to the right to be confusing and there are so many entries under Manage it makes no sense to me.
h2. Thumbs up:

* WordPress Auto Update. Hey every program should have this. It automatically finds and updates your WordPress

h2. Thumbs down

* IM online. This is supposed to figure out what is online and what is not. Always says don’t know and really slows the site down. A common problem judging from the comments on the WordPress extensions. I deleted it. Too bad, having one place to see that you are online would be really useful.

* Nextgen Gallery. This is actually a wonderful program, just lacks the ability to password protect hierarchically. Some templates don’t work with its widgets.
* PHP Gallery. I’ve used before, but the integration with WordPress just seems broken.

h2. Don’t know yet

* Multiblog WordPress. Eventually I’ll need this, but right now by default each WordPress is its own installation and needs it own maintenance
* ZenPhoto. Seems to be working well right now, but we’ll see. Has the features, but can’t get the integration with WordPress to work right. Seems to require lots of open passwords for things like ZenLatest Post.

Wordpress