Prosoft's utility for iPod

Jan 10, 2007 11:15 GMT  ·  By

"Jax" doesn't sound like a meaningful word at first sight, don't you agree? Well, we have the notorious Major Jackson Briggs, known as Jax, the character from the Mortal Kombat game series, the Irish slang for the toilet or the Java API for XML, but we're not going to talk about none of these now. So... what we're going to have here, then?

Jax for iPod is a software product "that opens your iPod up to a whole new universe of possibilities", according to its producer, Prosoft Engineering. Yesterday, Jax was revealed to the public, and if you want to find out more about this product, you can check the Prosoft booth at Macworld, but if you can't make it to the Expo, just keep reading...

Jax is an application that uses an upgradeable and expandable architecture, having a "plug and play feature set". Good, but... what does this mean, exactly? Each feature of Jax is a module called a Jak, and after you get the program, you will be able to add new features to it by downloading and installing additional Jaks from the producer's website. This makes me think that the Jak is the twin brother of the well known plugins used by thousands of computer programs.

At this time, Jax comes with more than a dozen of built-in Jaks, including customizable visualizers for lyrics management and finding songs in a library based on the contents of their lyrics, but album art management features have been included too, so you can change the album art with your own pictures or get higher resolution covers for the albums that you already own.

Since your life is not limited to music and video only, you can also get news, emails, weather forecast and gas prices and download them onto your iPod as text or spoken words in the MP3 format. Using Jax, you can even download videos from YouTube or Google Video! At this time, pricing is unavailable, but Prosoft said that the application will be available in early February.