Product Reviews

iTunes is one of Apple's most important applications. It started life as a humble music jukebox but now it's the control centre for the iPod, Apple TV and the iPhone. It's so influential that the new operating system, Leopard, has integrated the Cover Flow technology to use in the Finder. It's no surprise then to see developers trying to extend and improve the capabilities of iTunes.

The latest of these iTunes add-ons is Jax from JoeSoft Software. It's a plug-in management application that adds a number of options and features to the iTunes interface and is designed to simplify some tasks, such as syncing news and mail to iPods and Apple TVs. To be fair it's more a collection of plug-in type features that have been brought under one umbrella. Rather than sitting outside iTunes as a separate entity, Jax appears as a new option in the menu bar and all its options are managed without launching it as a standalone application.

There's an alternative visualiser with various options for displaying patterns and information as tracks play. There's also a very interesting feature called Music Map, which creates a spider chart linking artists in your iTunes playlist to people they've worked with or are associated with in some way. A Lyrics tab displays the

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words so you can sing along Karaoke style. An Album art tab allows you to control the images more closely and choose from any available alternatives. Jax can also help you manage video content allowing you to convert your favourite video files in the optimal formats for an iPod, Apple TV or iTunes.

For your iPod, Jax offers a simple way to sync RSS news feeds, documents and mail to your device. In this version there's the option to track the weather, cinema show times and directions from Google Maps. Sadly these are currently only supported for US cities. Support for more places should be implemented soon.

The idea behind Jax is that it's the platform that iTunes plug-ins are based on. This isn't such a bad idea but it does leave the application looking and feeling a bit disjointed. The alternate visualiser has limited appeal but the Music Map is an interesting way of introducing new artists you might not have considered. The lyrics tab saves you from making a trip to Google to find out whether Hendrix really is singing 'excuse me while I kiss this guy' and the Album art controls make it simple to manage your covers in one place.

Video conversion is good and it provides a way to standardise your collection of Internet material very simply. The way it brings in your recently viewed videos from your browser also makes it a very handy application.

Overall, Jax feels a little like an unfinished application that's been released too early. JoeSoft says it will release the API soon so other developers will be able to add functionality but as yet there's not much to make us sit up and take notice. There's nothing wrong with what Jax does and the Music Map and video conversion tools are interesting. Ultimately, however, the features that Jax adds to iTunes aren't all that compelling or different from those already available.