iTunes bookmarks

I’ve been thinking for a while that one of the problems with the iTunes Music Store is that there’s no analogue of the tabbed browser – you can’t skim down a list and say ‘that looks interesting… and that… and that’ without a lot of back-and-forth. Bookmarks are also a little clumsy; you can drag tracks to the Finder, but they’re those odd phobos.apple.whatever nonsense links. It works OK, but it’s not as elegant as one might like.

Tonight I had one of those ‘I wonder if you can… oh, they thought of that, and you can. Cool’ moments that are, let’s face it, the reason we like Apple stuff so much. It turns out that you can drag tracks/albums/etc to playlists. What you get is a link to the 30-second preview, but all the track information remains, so you can shortcut to iTMS results for the track, album, artist, etc. Buy the track and the link updates in some terribly cunning way that probably caused some sleepless nights for some poor coder, but was worth the toil since it’s exactly what you’d expect to happen.

So now I have a ‘Buy?’ playlist, which serves as a cache of bookmarks I might revisit when I’m feeling flush. Simple, really. I’m surprised it took me so long; oh, and this is where both my readers say ‘yeah, we know, we’ve been doing that for months.’ Tsk.

Meanwhile… what? you expected me to post about the US Presidential Election? No, sorry, I can’t bring myself to face it just yet.