FluidTunes Lets You Control iTunes by Waving Your Hands
The latest entrant into the cool eye-candy list of applications for the Mac is FluidTunes. This interesting utility lets you control your music by waving your hands in front of your screen. How about that! Suddenly, I felt the Harry Potter in me.
The UI features the familiar CoverFlow interface overlayed in front of the video feed from your iSight camera. Using your hands you trigger each large button, which look very Vista like. To scroll through the list you just move your hand across the screen and the covers scroll through.
The app works surprisingly well. I could move around my library by waving and twiddling my fingers at the buttons to activate them. Unfortunately, it displays the covers as songs and not albums. So each album has each song displayed as a separate cover. Another big minus is the fact that it raked up around 80% (of 200%) CPU while doing most of the actions.
However, there are some fundamental issues with the UI that make this a totally useless application. The very fact that it is designed around buttons instead of gestures, means that you need to have the app open and your eyes focussed to perform any actions. Next, Keyboard shortcuts are much faster for controlling your mac rather than waving your hands, and this app proves the fact. We can see why Apple isn’t offering a MultiTouch iMac just yet.
FluidTunes is a cool application that will be great to impress PC friends and grannies who like gadgets, but beyond that I don’t see myself using this on a regular basis. The app is a free download and works with Tiger and Leopard.
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Looks awesome and it’s always cool to have these kind of apps to piss off our windozer friends
Dumitru Tira December 2nd, 2008 at 9:46 am
pretty cool & amazing thanks
puneet December 2nd, 2008 at 11:33 am
I waved my hand like an idiot for an hour or so but I couldn’t get past the initial welcome screen
Azeem December 2nd, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Seriously? I mean I had some difficulty at first, but once I put the bright light on and set the display brightness to full, the contrast was good enough. After that if I just twiddled my fingers at a button they would activate.
Milind Alvares December 2nd, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Oh yeah after a lot of trials it worked!! Its awesome and I can’t wait to show it off to my friends. Unlike you said, on my Mac the total CPU usage of iTunes and fluid is less than 25%!! Oh God I wish I had a Girlfriend
Azeem December 2nd, 2008 at 7:06 pm