ITunes 11 and Colors

I do love that feature. I developed something like this a couple years ago for a back office part of a project:<p><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4p5m4719ehvpohc/GUEHcYecYv" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4p5m4719ehvpohc/GUEHcYecYv</a><p>I don't have a good example of the project any longer, but I took a few snapshots during the development process. My test page allowed you to upload a logo and have the page dynamically change to match the new logo. The link above is a gallery of a few of my tests.<p>Sometimes it did a pretty good job. Other times the results were a little more 'meh.'<p>The original code was pretty hacked together in PHP and a little client side JS, though I've been considering resurrecting it as a ruby gem.<p>There was a bug in the code in one of these examples. The 5th image or so is of a tornado with a bright orange background. The code failed to select the orange as an interesting color to use. The result still looks fine but I would have liked for it to have sampled that bit as well. It's been long enough that I can't recall what the exact problem was.

Until just recently I was an iTunes power user. I have a 15 year old 80gb collection of pirated music - all full albums, all with pristine metadata and personalized genres. I do not have cover art tho, but I don't really care - until now.<p>iTunes 11 makes a big deal about cover art - their UI is nearly exclusively dependent on it. I don't like thumbnails.<p>When I look at my music, I want a big sortable list. I don't want a bunch of random (alphabetized) tiles that don't tell me much. Also - electronic music of today is largely post-album. It doesn't make sense to organize a bunch of remixes by different DJ by album cover.<p>The previous version of iTunes had a hybrid view that had a sorted list with a small thumbnail to the left. It was useful because the thumbnails would scroll nicely with the text.<p>But no longer as far as I can tell.<p>The whole idea of curating my own collection, through either piracy or purchasing, seems outmoded to me. It's expensive even when it's free. Pirating music, at least at scale, is time consuming. iTunes is ridiculously expensive. My music collection would cost me $20k if I bought it and it feels woefully inadequate when I try find something to listen to.<p>I just recently backed up my music collection and deleted it from my HD. I've signed up for Spotify Premium and am so far pleased.<p>$10 is very fair (a bit high, but fair). The quality is consistent, I can save songs and playlists to my devices (feels like buying) and create radio stations that are functionally superior to Pandora (skipping, etc) but algorithmically inferior (try getting it to play Louis Armstrong style music and see how long it takes to play modern music, for me it's two tracks regardless of downvotes).<p>Music discovery is just as important as curation, and Spotify scratches both itches. The iOS apps are buggy but so far it's working. I'm happy to leave iTunes behind. That said, I really loved SmartPlaylists. SmartPlaylists + Accurate Genres + Ratings = Powerful, Granular Track Syncing. It's just too time consuming, and now hard to manage with new emphasis on cover art.

I took the liberty of extracting the interesting bits of this into a reusable class, and tossed it up on GitHub:<p><a href="https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/ColorArt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/ColorArt</a><p>If I have the time this afternoon, I'll port it over to iOS, too. Or, if someone feels inclined to do so, I welcome pull requests :)<p>Edit: and I transferred the repo over to Panic. I'm maintaining a fork so the link above doesn't go dead.

Isn't something like this done for the Windows &#62;=7 taskbar icons too? Only for a single color, though.

See also:<p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13637892/how-does-the-algorithm-to-color-the-song-list-in-itunes-11-work" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13637892/how-does-the-alg...</a>

Good job "emulating" the iTunes algorithm. Request to op: It would have been good to have some sample code inline in the article that illustrated the algorithm. I know there's an Xcode project attached, but reading this on an iPad has its limitations.

Something similar to this was done at my old job, about four years ago. It took images that were not square and padding out the shorter dimension with an averaged colour from the edge. It looks like so:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/6WZCQ.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/6WZCQ.png</a><p>Sometimes it works well, other times it really doesn't. But it's an interesting idea- and certainly not a new one (though Apple has certainly done it better)

As someone without iTunes, what does iTunes do now? There are no screenshots/videos in this article.

This reminds of the work @matasar and @attaboy did back in 2007 on Dabble DB: <a href="http://blog.dabbledb.com/2007/04/white--or-green.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.dabbledb.com/2007/04/white--or-green.html</a>

We have been using this technique for a while to go from logo-to-brand, I have a demo and API for it: <a href="http://landr.co/brandr/" rel="nofollow">http://landr.co/brandr/</a>

It's a pretty cool new feature.<p>Something similar could be done in a browser with <a href="http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/" rel="nofollow">http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/</a>.

Stefan Sagmeister's logo/branding for Casa da Música takes this idea in reverse – the logo colors are determined by the surrounding imagery: <a href="http://www.sagmeister.com/work/featured#/node/192" rel="nofollow">http://www.sagmeister.com/work/featured#/node/192</a>

What's a good music player for OS X? I just want something simple that plays mp3s etc. and helps me manage my collection. Even before this redesign, iTunes was too bossy for me to like it. Is there something like Winamp when it was good?

As noted by jrajav, since Vista, the Windows taskbar features a single-color version of this, inferred from application icon.<p>Additionally, the New Tab page in Chrome has exhibited this (inferred from favicon) for as long as I can remember.

Since Windows 7, hovering over an open application in the taskbar has done a similar thing. I sometimes wonder how it almost always manages to pick the dominant colour, even if it isn't necessarily the most common one.

Anyone noticed the lag between typing and results being displayed? It's infuriating, instant search results used to be the hallmark of iTunes.

I always enjoy reading Panic's blog. They always have something interesting to say.