Bremsstrahlung

A few days ago I came across PicoPlay and couldn't resist trying it out. The creator bills it as a lighter weight alternative to iTunes that plays music with minimal resource usage.

My main initial impression is that it looks really nice; the transparent HUD look works very well in this usage. Most of all, the entire window (tiny though it is) flushes orange when the mouse cursor is moved over one of the buttons. I wasted about five minutes mousing over the buttons just to watch it do that.

Ultimately, however, I don't think that I will personally get a lot of mileage out of PicoPlay for two reasons: Firstly, I found PicoPlay's resource usage to not be meaningfully different from that of iTunes. While PicoPlay used only ~15 MB of RAM to iTunes' ~35 MB, I have 4 GB to work with, so I really don't care. What I do care about is CPU usage, and in that respect the two were indistinguishable, each choosing randomly to hover at about 3.5% or 4.5% depending on when I checked. Both are low enough to not be much of a big deal, and PicoPlay had no noticeable edge.

The second issue is that PicoPlay appears to have no AppleScript support¹. I rely heavily on iTunes AppleScript support, mainly so that I can pause it with a single key without having to use the mouse or bring it to the front. (This is terribly useful when I'm listening to music at the office while working, and need to pause it because somebody has walked over to talk to me.) What this boils down to is that if used on a day-to-day basis, PicoPlay would actually get in my way far more than iTunes, because I would be obliged to interact directly with its main user interface², minimal though that interface may be. To extend this issue, iTunes' scriptability allows it to interface nicely with QuickSilver, which I admittedly use infrequently, but do like having available as an option.