LookIt

Living in a multi-browser world

Most people use just one web browser, but some of us prefer to have two or more. We might need them to see how various web designs look, or because our most-of-the-time browser doesn't work on all web sites. If you are a Mac user in this situation, there is a great $12 tool for you: Choosy.

Choosy works as your "default browser". When you click on a link or a URL in an application such as a mail program or note taker, instead it taking you directly to a browser, Choosy pops up a tiny graphic that lets you choose between all the browsers on your Mac. Click one, and there you go. The configuration for Choosy lets you select which to put under your cursor so you can do a quick click, and the order of the others, and so on.

I have mostly switched to Chrome, but sometimes need to launch Firefox for some sites, so Choosy is really handy. It also allows me to quickly go to Safari to see how a particular site looks there. It's not that I really want to use it all that much, but the only use cost is the extra click from external applications, and the flexibility makes it worth it. There might be something similar for Windows, but I haven't found it and would love to, given that I have similar needs there.

Losing metadata in MP3s

When you buy an MP3 music file from a service like Amazon and install it in your MP3 player, you player already knows lots of information about the song, the album, the artist, and so on. This information, properly called "metadata", is stored in a special area at the end of the MP3 file so that players can use it. MP3 metadata is called "ID3 tags".

What is frustrating, however, is that while most hardware MP3 players show you the metadata while they are playing a song and when you are sorting your music, many don't. Here are a few of the MP3 players on my Mac: notice that none of them show the metadata such as artist and album name, and only the last one even shows the song title:
Firefox:
Safari:
Chrome:
VLC media player:

Note that the first three of these players actually can't know the metadata until they have downloaded the whole file; however, even after they have done that, they don't add the metadata to the display. To see this, open an MP3 that has ID3 tags, and notice that the MP3 player is unchanged.

The MP3 format is over 15 years old, and yet many software players are still rudimentary. I don't want to have to launch a separate program like iTunes or QuickTime just to see the title of the song I am hearing: my browser knows it, it just isn't telling me.