★ …Pulling a TechCrunch

TechCrunch is the site that always makes a point to say, “we told ya so.” For those of you that respond with, “well they’re just that cool.”- maybe so and that’s why I’m going to “pull a TechCrunch” and take full credit for Apple’s new vertical artist tab in iTunes 9.0.

That’s right. Not only did I call it but I also am the only person on The Internet that inspired Apple to do this. I called it back before the engineer that coded it was even working at Apple. Just like TechCrunch, I’m that cool. Jealous? Yeah, you should be!

In 2005, while we were still using iTunes 4.7, I wrote a blog post on my (now defunct) blog, DailyTechTalk about what we could expect from a future version of iTunes. Sure I said that this was a feature that should be in version 5 but Apple spent the past 4.5 years perfecting it so I’ll let this one slide.

In this post, I said:

The way we organize music is more and more difficult every time I get a new CD. I have almost six thousand songs in my iTunes library and finding one to listen to is difficult so I just hit the Random button or organize the library by “Date Added” and listen to my latest songs because I have songs in my library I am tired of and tend to skip more than I listen to. Apple should add a hierarchical view in the Playlists area that enables Playlist grouping. You can create a group called, “Favorites” and put your top 25 songs, favorite love songs, dance, hip hop and movie soundtrack theme songs. The list is yours to make but grouping them together would be great for users with tons of playlists. I was connected to someone’s library via Airport and saw they had hundreds of playlists for only ten thousand songs. I was amazed how they even navigate those playlists.

Also, you can organize songs one way. You can sort them by name, artist, genre, album, year, type and more. What if I want to hear all songs by Michael Jackson organized by year. I would have to create a playlist with all Michael Jackson songs and then sort by year. I could save time by having two sort bars at the top of the screen. The top bar would be general organization. The second would look the same but would organize those songs. You could organize all songs by Genre then all genres organized by Artist. All Oldies songs would be in order and each artist would be in order in that genre or year, album, whatever. I proposed this idea in an old article but is a feature I would really like to have. I also think you should be able to save a search in iTunes to a playlist. I feel this will be added with Tiger’s spotlight technology and is only a matter of time since Tiger’s Finder can already do this.

So there you have it. I out-scooped TechCrunch and I wanted everyone to know that I was first at calling this feature! Me and only me! No one even had a bit of insight to to this on iTunes until I said it so I guess you can say that I had the exclusive taste of the vertical artist sidebar even back in 2005. BOOYAH! Naturally, I wanted to make sure everyone knows I’m just being sarcastic.

BTW, don’t make fun of my old blog’s text formatting. I’d rather not talk about it.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.