Category Archives: Tune Buddy

Boo! Tune Buddy Posts Wrong Cover Art To Facebook!

Posted on by

Many users complain about Tune Buddy submitting the “wrong” Artwork to Facebook. Well, the problem is known and there’s no solution in sight.

Because: It’s not a technical problem but rather … gasp … a licensing problem.

We (and probably you) don’t have the rights/the license to distribute Cover Art found in your iTunes library on the internet. If you post a ton of copyrighted artwork on your Facebook account bad things can happen (like FB decides to close down your account).

We came up with a solution to this problem that works … well … not well but well enough for the most popular songs: We use the last.fm API to retrieve cover art. And as Tune Buddy is a registered Last.fm app this gives us the right to use the art retrieved from last.fm in our app which has the feature of posting to Facebook. So it’s all ok – from the legal side.

Sadly Last.fm’s Cover Art repository is rather lacking and you get the results you get.

Sorry for that.

Good news, everyone! Tune Buddy 1.80 is out.

Posted on by

It took some time but Tune Buddy 1.80 is here. It’s mainly a feature release but it also fixes 2 critical bugs:

1. The Facebook authentication issue where users couldn’t authenticate Tune Buddy with Facebook.
2. A nasty crash under OS X 10.7 Lion.

The bugs are fixed, Tune Buddy is perfect again. ;) So let’s take a look at the new features:

1. Spotify integration. As you know Spotify launched recently in the US and a dear Tune Buddy user requested support for Spotify’s player. So I did it. Now you can see what Spotify is playing. Tune Buddy recognizes automatically which player is active and playing so you don’t have to do anything to make this feature work.

2. Playback controls. Many users wanted this but I didn’t see any reason to built it in. After all we have shiny Apple keyboards with media playback control keys. So why include such a redundant feature? Well, because it rocks. After prototyping this feature out of pure boredom I couldn’t believe how useful it is. It’s not a replacement for my playback keys but it’s a nice addition :)

3. Scrolling songs. Instead of appending a stinky “…” to the trimmed song title Tune Buddy can now scroll long song titles.

4. Better support for small screen resolutions. Tune Buddy now tries to figure out how much free space you have in your menu bar and resizes itself to that maximum. Which should fix the Tune Buddy disappearing “bug”. (Which actually is not a bug but a limitation of OS X that hides too long menu items that conflict with too long app menus). The detection is not perfect yet and I’m working on improving it. :)

Also to celebrate the 1.80 release Tune Buddy is on sale now in Apple’s Mac App Store. Till August 1st you can get Tune Buddy for $4.99 instead of $14.95!