Last.FM Album Cover Quilt Your Mac Desktop
One of the great features of last.fm user pages and widgets are the album and artist image quilts that they use in flash on the site and in embeddables. If you are anything like me, you will have thought how great it would be to be able to take such image quilts and actually place them on your very own Mac desktop. Well now you can!
Just released on BETA is the new desktop application for Mac OSX to generate an album quilt for your Mac desktop. Last.FM user Solak has created MacDesktopGenerator, currently version 0.5, that takes the information from Last.FM’s web services providing data about a user’s top listened artist, albums and tracks and turns that information into a visual quilt. The only requirements for the software are Mac OSX 10.4 or greater (Intel or PPC), a last.fm user account to download the album information from, and of course an active internet connection.
Features that the software currently benefits from include:
- The ability to generate an image of tiled covers based on your top albums list
- Ability to save the result album quilt file as .tiff
- The auto-sizing of wallpaper, based on your Mac’s desktop resolution
- Auto-setting the number of covers to best fit your display size
Features that are going to be implemented in later versions include:
- Manually setting number of tiles
- Editing colors and effects of image
- Auto-setting new wallpaper
The process of installing is pretty easy and only requires you to download the .dmg file for the application from the MacDesktopGenerator web site, mount the image and then drag and drop the application to your “Applications” folder and then run the app itself. Once up and running, simply type in your last.fm username and click “Generate”. Finally, save the resulting album quilt to the “Documents” folder on your macintosh HD and then open up System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver. Select to chose an image from the “Documents…” folder and you shoudl see the quilt ready for selection. It really is that simple!
I installed the application and had no glitches. I love it and find it a super addition to the ever changing range pictures i use for my own desktop. I certainly look forward to future upgrades of the MacDesktopGenerator.
Feel free to find out more about my musical taste over on my user profile page at Last.fm or to find out more about what you can do with the available Last.fm web service and PHP in my article: “Using Last.fm Web Service Data Feeds with PHP“.
