The MacTrack – iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and Mac News

Need to rate your iTunes music tracks?  Don’t want to interrupt your current activity by switching to iTunes?  You need I Love Stars

This neat little application sits on the menu bar and allows you to set the iTunes star rating of the track currently playing.  You can do this either by clicking on the appropriate star or, even nicer, the application is mouse scroll-wheel aware so you can simply roll the wheel whilst hovering over the application’s display in the menu bar.

If you right-click on it you can see the current track name and album.

Oh, did I mention?  It’s FREE

Also worth looking at is another, more feature-rich, free application: You Control: iTunes

If you want a quick and simple, no fuss rating tool you be hard pressed to find better than I Love Stars.

Portland, Oregon – You Software has announced the immediate availability of You Control 1.7, the award-winning utility for creating custom menus on the Mac. This update introduces improvements for better support of iCal on Leopard, as well as a number of enhancements and fixes for other modules in You Control. The Calendar module is one of 19 modules included with You Control. You Control modules are the building blocks that allow users to create a wide variety of custom menus, with all kinds of information directly available from the menu bar.

The Calendar module provides quick access to all of the user’s iCal calendars. New in version 1.7 is support for iCal calendars served via a CalDAV server (such as the iCal Server on Mac OS X Server). This version also improves the handling of To Dos created in Leopard’s Mail application and provides general performance improvements.

In addition to the Calendar module changes, several other modules have also been updated based on user feedback. Highlights include:

* Improved compatibility for RSS feeds in the News Reader module
* Support for Microsoft Word 2008 in the Fonts module (when used in conjunction with You Control: Fonts)
* Minor fixes and enhancements in the Clock, Weather, and iTunes modules

We recommend that all You Control users running Mac OS X 10.4 and higher update to this version.

You Control: Fonts 1.3.1, You Control: Tunes 1.7 Also Released
In conjunction with the release of You Control, both You Control: Fonts and You Control: Tunes have been released with updates introduced in You Control 1.7. You Control: Fonts introduces support for Microsoft Word 2008, allowing simple, consistent font selection in this popular word processor.

About You Control:
You Control is a powerful utility for creating custom menus that extend the functionality and usability of your Mac. You can place your user-created menus in a variety of locations, including the Menu Bar, any corner of your monitor screen, or you can pop your custom menus up anywhere on the screen using key commands you specify.

You Control is loaded with time saving tools that make working with OS X better, faster and easier. In addition to taking control of iTunes, you can create custom menus that allow you easy and instant access to your Address Book Contacts, iCal events, news, stocks, weather and any file or folder on your Mac.

Pricing and Availability:
You Control 1.7 is a free upgrade to registered users and is compatible with both Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) and

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I thought I’d share a little utility that I use on a daily basis but would be lost without, in fact I don’t really consider it an add-in as it’s used so much. You Control: iTunes gives you full control over iTunes from the menu bar. There are many utilities that can do this but where this one excels, for me anyway, is the ability to rate a song directly from the menu bar without having to switch back to iTunes.

I can already control track playback with my Apple keyboard but was frustrated that firstly, most of my tracks remain un-rated and secondly, to rate a track I had to interrupt what I was currently doing and switch back to iTunes (hence the reason for most of my tracks being un-rated).

The interface to You Control: iTunes is highly configurable allowing you to show as much or as little of the controls as you wish.

Scrolling track and album details can be shown in the menu bar, either Read the rest of this entry »