14 DAY TRIAL // Among the multitude of cool new features implemented in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple has thrown in an enhanced screen saver function that scans the user’s iTunes music library to display all the cover artwork it can find with built-in Quick Look functionality for one click playback.
As usual, whenever we stumble upon a new Lion finding, we are happy to cover it in a special report in our Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Features category.
This time around, we’re here to talk about Apple’s new interactive iTunes screen saver.
A developer playing around with Apple’s preview build of Lion took some time to test out this hidden feature in the upcoming desktop operating system and confirmed that it allows users to set an Album Cover screensaver in System Prefs.
According to a report by Macgasm, users can hover over the album covers with their mouse pointer and hit the play or pause button to stop or start playing music.
From what we can tell by looking at these screenshots displayed to the left (click to enlarge), the function integrates with the system-wide Quick Look feature.
Quick Look allows instant playback of music or video, blows up thumbnail-ed photos, and offers a quick glance of any supported document by hitting the Space bar.
The Album Cover screen saver will undoubtedly make its way into the hearts of die-hard Apple fans, as it proves once again that Apple is coding Lion with the user in mind.
Third-party developers will undoubtedly want to put their ideas at work here. Many of them are probably already hoping Apple will open the APIs to them.
In the meanwhile, those interested in learning more about the exclusive new features implemented in OS X Lion, and other Mac stories, are invited to skim through the related links below.
Alternately, you can hit up the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Features tag to see similar articles.