The Lyrics to my Life

Jeff Atwood posted a suggestion a while back for a “Support Your Favourite Small Software Vendor Day“. He has an interesting point, in that there’s a tendency to not register the shareware stuff out there. I’m as guilty as many others on this — I tend to not buy software that doesn’t do what I expect of it, keep looking for something better, but never find it.

Some of these are painfully apparent in my computer setup. I run dual-screen setups both at home (2560×1024) and at work (3200×1200), and I manage both with the excellent shareware application DisplayFusion. It has the unfortunate effect of being so good that I use it once, then forget about it for at least 3 months. Finding good backgrounds is easy on DeviantArt, though, and I’ve always had a soft spot for auto-rotating desktop backgrounds. Well, turns out DisplayFusion can do that in its registered (or “Pro”) version.

It has the rather sour licensing terms of “one computer only” however, so I’d need to buy two licenses. I find that rather greedy, to be honest — I never use both computers at once (they’re both stationaries, one at home and one at work), and while I certainly find the application worth the money, I don’t fancy paying for the same thing twice, for the same reason I don’t think people should be restricted to installing Spore on 3 computers, as long as they’re only playing on one at a time.

If you’re a small developer trying to make money off shareware applications, I’d advice you to not try to put MS/EA-style restrictive licenses on them. There’s just no point, and while EA may be able to take the hit of being despised by every forum flameboy around, you can’t. The likely effect is that you lose sales rather than gain additional ones. Result in this case: I’m looking for another good dual-monitor wallpaper application to buy instead.

Another app I’ve used for a long time is Minilyrics. I’m an absolute music junkie, tend to be listening to various kinds of music more or less constantly. I’ve always been interested in lyrics viewing addons, but fell completely in love when I found Minilyrics. The difference is the amount of config you can do with Minilyrics.

Most lyrics viewers scroll down text in a window — Minilyrics defaults to this as well. This takes up a chunk of screen space, and as I mentioned I like to have my music on a bit more often than always, or a bit more often than that. But with Minilyrics I can set it to scroll horizontally, and place the app as a small strip just about anywhere. At work I basically always run Visual Studio maximized on my primary monitor, so I’ve ended up with a setup with Minilyrics layered transparently on top of the title bar.

Minilyrics on top of visual studio's title bar

I love that setup — it keeps the lyrics where there’s always an unused bit of screen space, and it’s always easy to check out whatever those words that just floated by in the headphones were, without taking focus away from what I’m doing. It doesn’t look like much on a still image like that, but seeing the words scroll by is awesome.

At home I don’t have the luxury of a single app always running in maximized mode though. I’ve grappled with that for a while, and ultimately came up with my current setup, which has Minilyrics running at the bottom of my second monitor, in a reserved space (so I have a lyrics bar on my second monitor, just like you’ll have the task bar on your primary monitor).

Minilyrics at the bottom of my second screen

I haven’t been able to find any applications that properly put up a bar like that on a second monitor, so I ended up writing a very small application only for the purpose of reserving that space with a transparent window. It took me a while to figure that one out — most application I’ve seen with the capability to dock in like that with the edge of a screen calls it “docking” — Microsoft terminology calls it “Application Desktop Toolbar” (thanks, Stack Overflow folks). Once I knew what to search for to get the information I needed, writing the app was quick and painless.

Anyway Minilyrics had some very annoying bugs, but I still kept using it. And the latest version has fixed nearly everything that annoyed me — so it was well worth the money.

To end the whole theme of music: I guess anyone who can identify both songs has a suitably wicked musical taste to be compatible with mine.

What shareware do you use?

1 Comment

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  By Johan Svensson, Wednesday, February 4, 2009 @ 0:35

  Funny how synchronicity works. Breki wrote about some OS X software recently, I saw Merlin Mann’s desktop tour of the various apps he uses, and I’ve been thinking about writing about the free/shareware apps I use myself. Guess I’ll do that.

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