Betalogue

Mac OS X’s Address Book has a somewhat hidden feature where, if you have selected a card in your Address Book database, holding the Option key down while the card is selected will highlight in yellow in the “Group” all the groups which contain the currently selected card.

It’s handy, because you don’t always remember which group(s) a given card is part of, and you can access cards without going through a group. For example, if you search for a card by doing a search in the Search field, after having selected the “All” group option, you get a list of results in the “Name” column that doesn’t correspond to any specific group in the “Group” column (since it contains results from different groups). At that point, you can select one of the results and hit Option, and Address Book will show you which group(s) the selected name is part of.

Well, I think that iTunes could use a similar feature. Indeed, in iTunes, you can create a variety of playlists in the “Source” column on the left-hand side, and you can have tracks in your music library that appear in several different playlists.

Here again, you quite often access individual tracks through a variety of paths. So you don’t always know if the current track you have belongs to any playlist(s) you have created. Right now, there’s no easy way to see the playlist(s) that the selected track belongs to. You have to memorize the track information, and then switch to the “Source” column and scan through the playlists to see if the track is in any of them.

That is why I think it would be useful if iTunes had a similar feature to the one in Address Book. When a track is selected, holding the Option key down would highlight in yellow those playlists in the “Source” column that the track is part of. It would be simple and effective. Best of all, it would be consistent with the Address Book interface, with which iTunes (and other database-driven OS X applications) have a number of things in common.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, January 27th, 2005 at 3:34 am and is filed under iTunes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.