Cover Flow

Cover Flow

The Cover Flow interface
Developer(s)	Jonathan del Strother, currently developed by Apple
Stable release	RC1.2 (1.997) / September 11, 2006
Operating system	Mac OS X, Windows(iTunes), iOS (iPod touch,iPhone, iPod Nano 4th Generation, iPod Nano 5th Generation, iPod Classic
Type	Music Software
License	NN (Redistribution w/o permission prohibited)
Website	apple.com/itunes/

Cover Flow facts,

Cover Flow is an animated, three dimensional graphical user interface integrated within iTunes, the Macintosh Finder, and other Apple Inc. products for visually flipping through snapshots of documents, website bookmarks, album artwork, or photographs.

Cover Flow is browsed using the on-screen scrollbar, mouse wheel, gestures, or by selecting a file from a list, which flips through the pages to bring the associated image into view. On iPod and iPhone devices, the user slides their finger across the touch screen or uses the click wheel,.

History of Cover Flow,

Cover Flow was conceived by artist Andrew Coulter Enright and originally implemented by an independent Macintosh developer, Jonathan del Strother. Enright later named the interaction style fliptych to distinguish it from the particular Cover Flow implementation.

Cover Flow was purchased by Apple Inc. in 2006, and its technology was integrated into its music application, iTunes 7.0, which was released September 12, 2006. The name was previously "CoverFlow" without a space.

The last release of Steel Skies’ stand-alone application, version RC1.2, was released on September 10, 2006, and was freely distributed until the end of the next day only, however it remains available for download from MacUpdate.

On January 9, 2007, when Apple announced the iPhone, it was announced that it would incorporate Cover Flow technology.

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During the WWDC Keynote on June 11, 2007, Steve Jobs announced that Cover Flow would be added as a view option in Leopard’s Finder.

On September 5, 2007 Apple announced that Cover Flow would be utilized in the third generation iPod nano as well as the new iPod classic and iPod touch models. Cover Flow was integrated into the fourth generation iPod nano by the use of an accelerometer which accesses Cover Flow when the iPod nano is turned horizontally on its side.

On February 24, 2009, Cover Flow was also included with the public beta of Safari 4, with the final version of Safari 4, released on June 8, using Cover Flow to browse history, bookmarks, RSS feeds, Bonjour, and Address Book.

In April 2010, Apple was granted a patent on the Cover Flow interface. On 1st October 2010, Apple was ordered to $625.5 million to Mirror Worlds LLC for infringing patents relating to Cover Flow,. The company is currently appealing the decision.

Cover Flow and Other implementations

The open source media player Songbird offers a Cover Flow navigation add-on called MediaFlow.

The proprietary media player MediaMonkey also offers a Cover Flow add-on called MonkeyFlow. It can either be embedded or run as an external remote application. It is by far the best imitation to iTunes own Cover Flow, but yet with more customizability options.

Using Compiz Fusion (Shift Switcher) or KDE 4 (Cover Switch on KDE 4.1 or later) on a Unix-like system, it is possible to switch between open applications with a Cover Flow animation.

A Cover Flow-like interface was used by the graphical search engine Search Me.

The free jukebox firmware Rockbox also implements a Cover Flow-like album art viewer, called "PictureFlow". However, PictureFlow is not part of the main UI, instead included as a demo.

(source:wikipedia)