Not everyone seems to know that iTunes 7 includes the software that used to be called CoverFlow. It was (and I use the past-tense because it is no longer available as a separate application) a novel way to browse your music collection — by album cover, as if you were flicking through a stack of old vinyl in a milk crate.

It was really cool, and now it’s part of iTunes, which is also cool. It always felt a bit ridiculous running a separate program just to browse the music that you then play in iTunes anyway. (But not so ridiculous that I didn’t use it anyway.) I liked the original implementation a bit better though, which let you see your albums in full-screen glory. Jammed into the already busy iTunes interface, it doesn’t quite work as well. But oh well.

It must be awfully rewarding to be the author of such a nifty tool who gave it away initially for free with no expectations, and then was offered what one must assume was a tidy sum to sell the whole thing to Apple.

I say all this as a preface to noting that the same author has released a little tool called NanoFibre, “for sensible generation of iPod playlists.” The aim of the program is to let you fill your smaller-capacity Nano-type iPod with random albums as opposed to just random tracks. The idea being that some of us like having our music be chosen randomly, but we also like to hear albums in their entirety.

Nice. A nifty little concept, executed swiftly and with minimum fuss.

But my favourite aspect to this is actually the little dig the author gets in at the end of the announcement. They mention a few things the software doesn’t do, and add, “I don’t need it to display ripples/smoke/gravity waves around the window while it generates a playlist, so…umm…it doesn’t.”

Some might posit that CoverFlow was one of the trend-setters in the current state of affairs for Mac application interfaces, in which certain notorious parties have made their programs do silly yet pretty things which has upset certain other parties who think all the gratuitous eye candy is detrimental.

Smoking windows are silly of course, but CoverFlow was anything but gratuitous. Okay, it did feature reflective surfaces, and that’s kinda silly, but otherwise it was just a slick, well-polished tool that did one thing and did it well. More software like that is always welcome.