Ok, this will be the last update to Sidecar for a little while (no promises). 1.5 seems like a nice number to hold at while I work on some other projects. I’ve put enough hours into a project with a very limited audience to feel mildly guilty, but I’m having a lot of fun with this. Hey, I respect your life choices.

To catch up newcomers, Sidecar is a theme (jacket) for Simplify, my favorite music controller for Spotify, iTunes, Rdio and most web-based players. Sidecar currently only works on 27” monitors, but that limitation will be lifted on an upcoming version of Simplify1. Your 11” Air will soon have a new option for decorative music control.

Sidecar 1.5 adds three new variations which feature soft lines, fades and a kind of “dripping” transition as the song progresses. The “Nightfall” one is guaranteed not to match any of your wallpapers, but I like it anyway. Kind of. You have to see it in the right light.

I renamed all of the variations in a manic moment. You’ll just have to live with that. I also added visual notifications on play and pause, and some JavaScript and CSS quirks have been smoothed out.

YouTube Video

I restructured the source on Github to make it easy to play with, if you’re interested. Feel free to poke around and offer criticism/improvements.

Sidecar v2.1

A jacket for Simplify 2.7+ and 27-inch (2560x1440) monitors. More sizes coming soon.

Published 06/17/13.

Updated 06/17/13. Changelog

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  1. Simplify 2.6 is being submitted, and it fixes click handling for play pause (so it responds on the first click), among other things. The version coming after that will allow jacket developers to scale to screen dimensions and define positioning for jackets like Sidecar.