In Praise of Music Visualizers (nerdy but beautiful)

For the last five years or so, I've been a pretty die-hard Mac user. But before that, in what I term my "shameful past," I used Windows almost exclusively, even making my own computers.

I rarely look back on those days with any kind of excitement or yearning, but there is one thing Windows (or, more accurately, Winamp, a music player for Windows) has that Mac hasn't had: gorgeous music visualizers.

When I mention music visualizers to long-time Mac users, they just stare at me blankly. And with good reason: iTunes has had shitty music visualizers forever. Really crap, and pretty surprising for a company whose core audience for years was designers, filmmakers and musicians.

Meanwhile, on the Windows side, Winamp (and even Windows Media Player) shipped with beautiful, responsive music visualizers, going all the way back to 1997, when Winamp was first released.

I'm not writing this as a reminiscence or history lesson, much less as a Mac bashing opportunity. I'm writing it to beg, plead, and insist that everyone who runs iTunes 9, whether on a Mac or Windows machine, switch over to it right now, turn on the music visualizer, hit show full screen, and sit in wonder at something lovely and mesmerizing.

Okay, you're back. Great, right?

The basic construct of the visualizer is that one or more emitters emit particles, with our without trails, in constantly changing colors and shapes, and one or more invisible spheres exert gravitational pull on the particles. The three basic units here (emitter, particle, sphere) interact in surprising, beautiful, and frequently unique, ways (I think the variety and complexity of the interactions varies with the abilities of your graphics card, but I first discovered the visualizer on a first-generation MacBook Pro, so anyone who's bought a computer within the last 3 years, at least, should be able to enjoy). The visualizer's responsiveness and variety are so good that it frequently seems like the software "knows" the song, and is anticipating verse, chorus and bridge.

Thanks, Apple, for letting someone really dig in and show off what a music visualizer can do. And thanks also to whoever invented the visualizer to begin with. You rock.

P.S. Hit the ? key while the iTunes visualizer is running for a list of keys you can hit to vary your experience.

Productivity Software (nerdy, sorry)

These are the free things I use all the time, and find myself constantly recommending to friends. They all offer iPhone components that sync to the provided information, so I can enter (and have access to) information wherever I am...

TRAVELING
Tripit: You sign up for free, and then forward all your reservation emails for flights, hotels, etc., to plans@tripit.com. The site parses the information in the emails, and posts your plans online. You can have Tripit friends, who can see your trip plans (though not in enough detail currently), and you can post your trips to Facebook (or not, if you'd prefer). The iPhone app really makes this site useful, with its quick ability to retrieve everything from confirmation numbers to airport maps to weather reports.

NOTES
Evernote: Basic sign-up is free, and is a full application for the Mac, Windows and iPhone. All sync through the Evernote servers, so everything is up to date wherever you go. Evernote allows syncing of text, websites, and (if you upgrade to the paid option) files of all types. This is a very full-featured application, but in its most basic sense it gives you access to all the little snippets of information you come across in daily life, wherever you are.

EVERYTHING
Dropbox: This is the one ring to rule them all. Dropbox is a free service (for 2GB; you can pay for more storage) that creates a folder on your computer that you drop whatever your want into. Whatever you drop in is synchronized (extremely quickly) to the Dropbox server, and then to any other computers you have installed the software on. You can then access the information from the Dropbox website, or from any synchronized computer. You can also share folders with other users, so that all parties can update the information in the same folder. The iPhone app allows you to look at whatever's on your Dropbox (assuming the iPhone can read the file) wherever you are. And you can star items on the app so it keeps them accessible even if you're offline. Do yourself a favor: go to the website and set yourself up. Now.