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  |    |    |  Good concept, needs work

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Good concept, needs work

Feedback Type:  Review

Contributed by: Stormchild Thursday, July 20 2006 @ 01:48 PM PDT

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: Less than a month

Recommend Product: NO

This is a potentially useful tool. It initially did not work at all for me, and I discovered it has to be in the main /Applications folder, or it will just "ding" and give up immediately everytime you try to find artwork, without actually searching. After moving it into /Applications, the searching now works.

The user interface has several issues. You cannot disable any of the info columns (or show ones other than what it comes with). The window size and position are reset to default everytime you launch the app, as are all of the info columns -- and the 'Kind' column is (for some reason) about 800 pixels wide by default. When the window has been maximized to use the whole screen, it does not resize to accomodate the info or queue drawers when those are shown, leading the user to believe the info and queue toolbar buttons are not working. You have to click the window "zoom" button again after enabling the info or queue drawers.

When you select an item that does not yet have artwork, the info drawer's image well says "no artwork" (as expected). After searching for and selecting the cover, however, it does not update to show that the item now has artwork. You must unselect and reselect the item for the change to be reflectted.

A more bothersome usability issue is that when you "skip" an item (because it didn't find the artwork you wanted), you must also press "cancel" (and then, for some reason, wait for awhile) to get out of search mode. This means it takes two button clicks and a wait of a few seconds to cancel a failed search. Even worse, if you were searching for the artwork for an entire album, and had selected all of that album's songs, you'll have to repeat the entire above procedure for each song, even though you obviously wanted the same artwork for all those tracks. I sometimes even had to "skip" a blank set of results, and wait again, before being able to fully cancel out of a failed search. This is the weakest area of the program and needs attention.

Minor cosmetic issue: The progress "spinner" is in the same spot as the cancel button, and appears overtop of it.

I don't see the point in showing a vertical "selection" when sorting the list by one of the column headers. It's not really a selection (you cannot apply any commands to just that one column of information), and therefore is an unnecessary visual distraction that should be eliminated.

As for the actual results, it seemed to do a good job most of the time. I noticed I got some book covers in one situation; perhaps the filtering needs to be refined a little, although I don't know the details of how it's done, so may it isn't possible (or at least not easy) to do this automatically.   
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