Happy New Year! (with beaTunes 1.2.7)

We hope you all made it safely into the new year and wish you all the best for 2008. Fresh from the bits'n'bytes press we just uploaded a new release of beaTunes to our servers. It addresses some minor usability issues, problems with empty blog labels/terms and problems with private blogger.com blogs. It also finally provides Windows folks - who don't have Windows Scripting Host (WSH) installed - with a better error message.

Enjoy!

beaTunes 1.1.5 is out

We have just released beaTunes 1.1.5. The newest version of the top iTunes library management tool features several bugfixes and enhancements:

• We adapted the blogging code to recent changes in blogger.com.
• The characters &<>!@, are now automatically dropped from labels/tags sent to blogger.com, since blogger does not support them.
• To improve inspection, we added natural language single digit expansion to albumtypo-inspector and artisttypo-inspector. This means, that beaTunes will now recognize, that e.g. "four" and "4" mean the same thing. Note that this feature is limited to the numbers 0 to 9 of most major languages.
• Other minor usability improvements.

Enjoy!

Nike+ Blogging

The other day we came across a nice example of combing the beaTunes blogging feature with Nike+iPod, in particular Rush Frisby's Nike+iPod website widget:

Check it out at justagirl.com/nike/

What a neat way of keeping track of your workouts!

The New Blogging Support

We've mentioned it before: Blogging will be almost completely new in beaTunes 1.1.

These are the main improvements:

• Support for Atom 1.0, which is the most widely accepted API for publishing blog entries
• Playlist columns can now be re-ordered and turned on or off
• Playlists are linked to a CSS stylesheet, allowing for sophisticated designs
• Tagging of blog entries

Atom 1.0

Atom 1.0 is supported by most public blogs. We paid special attention to blogger.com's implementation for the standard. This means that beaTunes does not only support the standard blogger, but also the version of blogger that is currently in beta.

Playlist Columns

Just like in iTunes, you can now simply drag columns in beaTunes' blog editor to change their order. You can also right/command-click on the column header and turn columns on or off. This allows you to completely customize the layout of your playlist table.

Stylesheets

To go one step further, with beaTunes 1.1 you will also be able to choose a stylesheet that will be linked directly into your blog entry. This CSS stylesheet can define the looks (color, font, etc.) of your playlist. beaTunes offers a couple of pre-made styles, but also allows you to add your own. You will just need to create the CSS file, put it on your server and tell beaTunes about it (in the blog preferences).
To check what your blog entry will look like, beaTunes now offers a Preview. Just hit the button (circled in the screenshot) and your blog entry will be rendered in your standard browser without having been posted to your blog.

Tags

Many blogs now offer labels or tags to keep your entries organized. Since beaTunes already supports tags for individual songs, it's only natural to also support blog tags. For each blog entry beaTunes will pre-populate the new tag area right below the title. The tags are drawn from the artists' names, genres, songs tags etc. - in fact, this is configurable in the blogging preferences. Plus, you can add whatever other tag you think makes sense and remove the ones that don't.

To summarize: Blogging about your favorite playlists just got a whole lot easier!