After what seems like ages, the new version of Growl has come out (0.6). Growl is basically a helper application which manages notifications from various applications. For example, if you are running Adium, you can have a little notification pop up whenever someone makes their presence felt online. A neat little perversion of this type of functionality is found at this page. Basically when the tune changes in iTunes, it sends a notification to Growl, which then hooks back into Adium to change my MSN/ICQ/Yahoo buddy icon. The new release of Growl has a new notification style which works really well with the iTunes integration. It's called Musicvideo, and looks a little like this:

It's a pretty cool little MTV effect going on there. The next challenge I face is getting Skype working with this. It's got support for the little profile pictures, but the AppleScript support is kind of lacking at the moment. Since Skype was released for the Mac, I've been making many phonecalls to distant friends and relatives (some in exotic places such as Chatswood) for close to nothing. Once it matures into a proper Mac application (with neat integration to the Address book for example) I'll be a very happy chappy.

Another geeky development that's been happening in the background is work on mt-daapd. There is some work to develop an XML-RPC / CGI interface for manipulating playlists - so hopefully things like requesting specific artwork, or adding rating capability to shared libraries will be just (i.e. a few months) around the corner.