synergy

since my migration to panther i was looking for a decent controller for itunes. the problem was, that my favorite freeware app (PTHitunesnotifier, now a 70$ shareware: youcontrol) to control itunes did not work on panther. the problem is, that i often want to switch to the next track, because i’m not in the mood to listen to the current one (i have a really broad library of about 1500 songs, which are normally set to play on random, so sometimes the one coming up, doesn’t fit). up to now i could achieve that with keyboard maestro which did the hot-key control for itunes, sparing me the right-click on the dock-icon of itunes and then selecting: “next song”. i can just hit F7 to pause or F8 to skip to the next song, greatly decreasing the change to get distracted from my current task. one thing i was missing though is the announcement of the current song, which was what PTHitunesnotifier did really nicely for me. that’s where synergy comes in handy. it has a nice pop-up window - called floater - which announces the current track (as seen on the left). synergy also has good hotkey-control for itunes, so my F7 and F8-keys have something to do, and features also a nifty menu-bar control, which comes in handy sometimes. the only drawback is that it costs 5€, so it’s not free. but hey, i can start it ten times until it wants the serial, which makes it possible for me to use it for free for nearly three months if i do not reboot too often :-) and then i will gladly shell out those bucks if i haven’t found anything better…

do you use a controller for itunes or have a better suggestion for me? leave a comment.