A self-proclaimed hipster whining about Apple branding in iTunes - it was the perfect setup for writing a nice, crispy flame article. Then again, I promised myself not to be too snarky anymore - so let’s instead turn this into an opportunity to look at Google Search.
The situation: A guy is running iTunes Visualizer during a party, and the Apple Logo is one of the Visualizers, so it pops up from time to time. (It’s not really a surprise - if you ever ran Visualizer, you’d know…)
The solution Ellinore over at CNet has is writing a blog article to complain about the “troubling” act of Apple, “sneaking in” a billboard.
Let’s instead try to solve the problem. We want to run iTunes Visualizer without the Apple Logo - how can we invoke the power of the Internets for us?
Well, obviously Google is one answer. So how do we build a decent search query for Google? I’ve usually had luck by keeping the search terms to a minimum, only listing items that are crucial to the question at hand. So what goes into our query?
- iTunes - this is what it’s all about
- Visualizer - that’s the part of iTunes we want to fix
- Apple Logo - that’s what we want to operate on
- remove - that’s what we want to do
Now, let’s structure that so it resembles a Noun-Verb-Object structure - Google seems to like that. This gives us: “iTunes Visualizer remove Apple Logo“. And lo and behold (I love saying that!), the very first result gives us the answer.
It turns out the guy who wrote the original iTunes Visualizer also wrote something called G-Force - a visualizer plugin for pretty much most media players that have any relevance, including iTunes. Without any logos, for somewhere between free and $30, depending on what features you want.
To be fair, the original article mentions in passing that there are other options than the default - but without any links. I guess it’s easier to complain than to solve the problem…