Tonight’s technical update is to our “Now Playing” feature, which shows the tune I’m currently listening to in iTunes.

Previously, this feature was driven by Sputnik, a “widget” written for a Mac utility called Konfabulator, that later became Yahoo Widgets. Sputnik watched iTunes, and whenever a new tune started playing, it would look up the album cover art at Amazon and upload (via FTP) a little chunk of HTML code that would display it with a link to the Amazon page for the album.

Problem: both Sputnik and Konfabulator are older programs, and they no longer work with the new Mac OS 10.5 (aka Leopard).

I searched and searched for a replacement, and was almost ready to roll up my sleeves and write my own when I discovered Brandon Fuller’s Now Playing: An iTunes for Mac OS X Plugin. It works with Leopard, and is actually easier to configure (if you know your way around PHP and XML, that is) and much faster than the aging Sputnik. So after confirming that it would do the job, I paid Brandon the $15 shareware fee and installed it on my desktop system. And it’s now responsible for that section of our left sidebar.

One enhancement that Brandon’s plugin offers: if iTunes has the album, then right underneath the song information you’ll see a link to its iTunes page, where you can preview that song and other tracks from the album.