As I headed off to college last fall, I realized that it would be difficult to continue maintaining all of these various projects, and still take on new ones like Coolpoints and Cardstalker. I was more than right, I have so little time to devote to my Mac apps and Dashboard widgets that I seriously considered abandoning them.

However, the most successful software isn’t maintained by just one person. It’s maintained by many. And open sourcing Mindquirk’s applications is a great solution. So, starting today, all three main applications from Mindquirk are open source. I am hoping that this will do two things. Firstly, get more people involved with working on these great applications. Second, influence me to continue working on these projects and clean up the source code so it isn’t so embarrassing. So please, fork us on GitHub.

Xbox Live Friends on GitHub
Harmonic on GitHub
Symphonic on GitHub

See you in the source!

LyricWiki cannot be faulted for this, however. They provide a great service and attempt to do so without stepping on the feet of the music industry. If they were to ignore the label’s demands they would most likely have a lawsuit on their hands within minutes. Mind you, LyricWiki is still allowed to exist, presumably after paying a hefty licensing fee, but that application developers can’t access it. This is just another bit of flailing as the music industry continues crafting its own demise.

Record companies are quickly becoming irrelevant. We don’t need them to get our music anymore. We want to support the artists, not the record labels. Believe me, I am not one of those people who arrogantly and disingenuously says things like “information wants to be free” as an excuse to pirate music. Music has value. Pirating is not a right, and it deprives artists of money. Even if artists get a tiny sum after the label takes its cut, they still get some money and supporting art is important. I don’t mind paying for music. What I do mind, however, is when record labels try to protect the lyrics for no reason at all. Lyrics are included in liner notes in physical albums, but not on digital downloads. Nobody is selling the lyrics, not even the record companies, so how is a free database of lyrics a threat to anybody?

So that, dear readers, is why Harmonic can no longer access new lyrics. It can still find lyrics that have been saved previously in iTunes, but that’s about it. This is frustrating for you guys, and it’s frustrating for me. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to fix this problem. Harmonic is free, and I don’t have the resources to license lyrics on my own, nor would I. It shouldn’t cost money to get lyrics for songs one already owns.

I need your advice. I haven’t found another lyric site with an API, and I don’t want to get involved in the moving target of screen scraping. How do we proceed from here? Leave a comment or email me with your suggestions.

- New, more compact, design for the options toolbar
- “Clear Lyrics” button now works correctly
- Additional international support for artists and titles with special characters in the name, like Mötorhead

Harmonic 2.3

After the jump, there’s a story! A boring story! For developers!

And now, a little design aside you might find interesting (but probably won’t). This is just a sort of long-winded story about a minor change to Harmonic. This change is in the new options toolbar: the removal of the “paste lyrics” button when there are already lyrics available. The reason for this is that I have been inundated with comments, reviews, and emails about the paste button not working correctly.

However, the paste button has always worked correctly but it seems like the previous placement in Harmonic has revealed that a startling amount of people do not understand how copy and paste works.

Every single person who contacted me about this was attempting to use the “paste” button to insert the existing lyrics into iTunes (which Harmonic does automatically — if you see the lyrics in Harmonic, they are saved in iTunes). The confusion, I believe, is partially related to the Dashboard metaphor, which implies a layer ancillary to the normal “application” layer, as widgets do not have the standard accoutrements of applications: active icons in the Dock, visibility in the Command + Tab application switcher panel, or a menu bar. The key item here is the last one: a menu bar. When you activate Dashboard, you can still see the active menu bar of the application you were using (presumably iTunes in this case). This can be confusing, especially with a function like copy and paste which is an application-wide function. Because of this, and because of Harmonic’s tight integration with iTunes anyway, there is an expectation that the widget is somehow “part” of iTunes’ interface. Therefore, the “paste” button is assumed to perform an operation on *iTunes* rather than Harmonic.

This assumption is certainly flawed, because the other buttons in the widget do not perform an operation on iTunes except for the “Clear Lyrics” button. Except, if someone was under the impression that they needed to insert the lyrics into iTunes then they likely would not also think that “Clear Lyrics” cleared the lyrics in iTunes. But the major flaw in this logic is the fundamental misunderstanding of copy and paste: to expect the lyrics to be *pasted* somewhere, they would first have to be *copied*. This, I think, is another example of people who are not too familiar with computers muddling up the terms, such as when people use “download” when they mean “install”. This, of course, is to be expected and it is the job of the designer to make the application easy to use for everybody. This kind of thing, however, rather difficult for “power users” (that’s a dumb term, but I can’t think of a better one) to consider when laying out an interface. Thinking about this will help you design something that is always clear. So, the moral of the story is to assume nothing about your users when designing an interface. Wasn’t that a great story? I’ve got more!

This should resolve the “Host ‘pedlfaster.pedlr.com’ is blocked because of many connection errors” issue.

Harmonic 2.2.1

**Edit (March 16):** LyricWiki is operational again!

So, welcome to Harmonic 2.2. Here’s what’s new:

- New colors: indigo and pink
- Looks nicer when the lyrics are set to “Instrumental”
- Fixed issue where preferences button was hidden on some color schemes
- Preferences button is now on the left
- More reliably finds lyrics under alternate names and through LyricWiki redirects
- Fixed an issue with ColorSync that could cause Harmonic to look funny on some monitor setups
- Made the “Update Available” banner more obviously clickable
- Tweaked preferences layout

Please [download the new version](http://mindquirk.com/apps/harmonic) and enjoy!

In case you’re wondering why the odd number leap, version 2.1 came out last night, but there was an issue with Tiger compatibility, but that’s been fixed.

This version is fully compatible with the latest versions of Tiger and Leopard.