Envy Code R Programming Font Preview Release (Oh, and iTunes sucks)

Damien Guard has released a preview of Envy Code R , a good-looking programming font. At the moment, I think it looks best at higher font-sizes: I would definitely consider this for use in presentations.

Incidentally, the image is from some utility programs I've been writing for iTunes. I got an iPod for Christmas, something I asked for in part because I was under the impression that the iTunes software, being as dominant in the world of music management as Office is in the world of spreadsheets, must be reasonably competent.

iTunes sucks. It must have crashed twenty times in the past five days. And not just crashed, but hung processes, minutes-long freezes, cryptic memory-error messages: an entire litany of bad program behavior. The only thing I like about it is that it unlocked my DRM-ed music and figuring out how to "Convert to MP3" was the work of a few seconds.

After a year or so of relying on Pandora and KEXP, the "Party Shuffle" in iTunes seems just absurd. The only other thing I like about iTunes is that it has a COM interface, which implies that I can unlock a couple facilities. First up, I'm going to see if I can write a program that cleans up "genre" tags so that they provide a more relevant personal view. For instance, I have a lot of what most people would simply call "punk rock," but for me, I need to divvy that up maybe 5-6 sub-genres. On the other hand, even though there are many genres of hip-hop, I'd only need maybe 2 or 3. I've got an algorithm in mind...