Tonight I was sitting here looking at iTunes 4.6 and thinking how the little arrows they added to each item to take you to the music store were pretty cool. However, it also occurred to me that what I would really want from those arrows is to use them to access similar items in your library instead. For instance while playing a song by Tom Waits it’d be cool to be able to click the icon next to Tom Waits in the artist column and see all the songs I have by Tom Waits. Being an Apple app, known for good design, I decided to try the various modifier keys and wouldn’t you know it, option clicking the icon does exactly what I wanted. The iTunes team never ceases to amaze me with the incredible quality of their work. Oh yeah, it also works from within the music store, makes it very easy to check if you already have a particular artist in your library.
Hmm, a little search on Mac OS X hints also reveals that you can swap the behavior of those little buttons so that you don’t have to hold down option to access your library.
Just run:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YESNice!
BTW, on Windows I guess the sequence is ctrl-shift-click to search in your library. No idea how to swap that permanently.
iTunes Arrows
Here’s a cool tip from Kimbro Staken:
The “inverted” behavior is much more useful for me than doing the ITMS search.