Updates to the iLike Sidebar for iTunes

We've posted the latest-versions of the iLike Sidebar for new users to download. We haven't autoupdated all existing users yet, but we're letting you know on this blog so if you're an avid iLike user please visit the link above, get the new Sidebar, and let us know if you notice anything strange or bad.

Note: you probably won't notice anything visibly different, but a lot changed under the covers:

What's new on the Mac: your iTunes playlists are shared!
Previously available only to Windows iTunes users, this is now on the Mac. We've also fixed a small "memory leak" that caused the iLike Sidebar on the Mac to use too much computer memory if left alone for a looooooong time.  (as an aside: if you recently received an auto-update to your iLike Sidebar on the Mac, that was not this update - it was an accidental upgrade but didn't change anything whatsoever. oops!)

What's new on the PC: your iTunes library updates are reflected to iLike.com daily!
On Windows the new iLike Sidebar finally syncs your entire iTunes library data (playlists, playcounts) to our servers on a daily basis. Actually, the sync happens many times a day - so changes in your iTunes playlists/playcounts will show in your most-played-songs and playlists on iLike.com. If you mostly listen to music offline or on your iPod, this means when you sync your iPod your playcounts will finally update on iLike.com daily. And if you ever wanted to "zero-out" playcounts for a particular song, you can finally do that (in iTunes, right-click on the song and select Reset Playcount).  We'll soon add these innovations to the iLike Sidebar on the Mac.

P.S. for those who ask why our Mac Sidebar lags the PC - it's partly because we have more PC users, but also because Apple doesn't support the same 3rd party interfaces on the Mac as on the PC. We also had trouble believing this, but we need to work around short-comings of the Mac iTunes platform where it works better on the PC. (Yes, we're asking Apple to fix it)

Finally, there is no "quote of the week" this week. However, we have an announcement that is near and dear to our hearts: our office manager Maggie Snyder has officially quit smoking for life! We're putting it in the company blog because now she can never go back on her word!

Comments

[Arturo]

Very nice..I hope Mac version be much faster now.. I quit using it because of huge amount of memory used, and My iTunes crashed a lot then... I'll try it again :) .. I must say I've never stopped using Windows version ;)

Good work!!

[Sean]

I am just hoping for some new functionality in the Windows Media Player client...although I am still just happy to have one.

[Matthew Green]

can we have version numbers please?! it makes it so much easier to see when you've done an update

good going on bringing the memory usage down, it used to use 100mb+ (!) and now uses 9mb :)

i would also like see a flashing alert on the ilike panel when it's closed

[Alan]

Any possible solution in sight for linux users?

[Andrew]

Thanks for updating, so that this works with iTunes 8, iLike team!!!