Daily Mac App: Tunesque
Apple's app and media world is pretty extensive -- music, videos, books, apps and games. Tunesque makes searching both the iTunes Store and the Mac App Store a breeze, right from your menu bar.
It has to be said that searching for things within either the Mac App Store or iTunes isn't the easiest of operations. For starters you actually have to fire up one of two apps, and let's be honest here -- iTunes isn't the fastest program around. You can't search both stores at the same time either, so it's a double job if you're looking for something like Evernote for both the Mac and the iPhone.
The tiny little app sits in your menu bar waiting for a search command. Simply click the button and start typing, just like you would with Spotlight. By default Tunesque will display everything -- music, movies, TV shows, artists, Mac apps, iOS apps, eBooks, audiobooks, podcasts and even iTunes U; but you can refine your search areas if you're never going to want to pull up things from iTunes U, for instance. You can also choose which country store to search too, meaning that by default you can search another country's store or of course your local one.
Tunesque will search as you type in you keywords and give you all the possible results in a drop-down menu. You can then navigate the list with the arrow keys, or a mouse hover, with a nice little pop-up summary of the highlighted search result displayed to the side, just like Spotlight does in Lion.
Once you've found what you're looking for it's just a case of hitting enter, or clicking on the correct entry, to be taken to the appropriate store. It's a great aggregator that makes searching the Apple media and app stores an absolute breeze. It's one of those apps that makes you question why Apple didn't build that kind of functionality straight into Spotlight, and it has changed the way I search iTunes and the App Stores.
Tunesque is a great little app, and best of all it's available for free from the Mac App Store, so give it a whirl and let us know what you think.
