Released today, iTunes 8 is the most recent and advanced iteration of Apple's media management and playback software. iTunes 8 includes a new Genius recommendation engine, new visualizers, a new grid view, and new terms and conditions.

The Genius engine recommends other songs you might enjoy, based on a song you've selected in iTunes. If you have a diverse range of music, iTunes does a pretty good job of finding the "mood" of your selected song, and generating a playlist of songs that fit with that mood. Plus, it kicks off the playlist with the song you selected.

When you first use the Genius system, you must agree to its terms and conditions, and then it gathers information about the songs in your iTunes library. This took about three minutes on my 2.8GHz Intel iMac and my 2,100-song library. It then sends that information to Apple and builds a profile based on your likes and dislikes. You can then use the Genius Sidebar, which appears to the right of your playlist.

Here's a nifty idea to add a little organization to your Finder sidebar. Since it does not natively support separators, one fellow decided to hack up a solution by creating some fake applications whose icons are transparent and whose names consist of line characters. You can then drag and drop these on the sidebar to give the desired effect.

It's a small thing, but a nice one for keeping your Finder sidebar visually tidy. The package also contains a nifty little AppleScript application that will launch the Terminal at the location of a folder dropped on it.

[via Lifehacker]

While the Mac web generally (and justifiably) has quite a few gripes with the long-disregarded Finder, it actually offers quite a few unsung features that make working with your files efficient and fun. The upcoming changes to the Finder in Leopard certainly do look nice, but I think it's about time we set aside our differences with the Finder, if only for a moment, and rekindled our love with its truly pleasant and useful features. Hence an unofficial new TUAW mini-series: Love your Finder (I call it a mini-series because a lot's changing in October when the new Finder finally arrives in Leopard).

Take the File > Add to Sidebar (command-T) feature that I forgot all about until listening to Thursday's MacBreak Tech episode. The beauty of the Finder's sidebar is that you can drag anything you want into it, including folders (including those from networked volumes like an iDisk), files and even applications. Your customized sidebar is then available in every Open and Save dialog throughout Mac OS X, making it a great spot to quickly place and remove projects you're working on, apps you need for a short time and important folders in which you need to often save or retrieve things.

The sidebar gets even cooler, however, if you can wiggle that keyboard shortcut to your workflow. Got a file you need to remember later today? Cmd-T. A pictures folder you use for blogging that's buried deep in your Home folder? Cmd-T. A bunch of applications you're testing out for business or pleasure? Boom - that shortcut makes it easy to turn your Finder sidebar into a pseudo-cork board for all the stuff flying up and down your todo list, since all you have to do to remove an item is click and drag it off the Finder window to get that satisfying 'poof.'

Combine this trick with our Mac 101 tip for adding your own items to the Finder's toolbar and you can put together one mean, lean window that can let you browse your files faster than ever before.

Following a dilemma that Gus Mueller faced when designing the UI for his latest release of VoodooPad 3, Mac DevCenter has posted a request for feedback on this most heated of UI topics: palettes or sidebars? Preferences can easily sway in either direction, and I personally miss the old-school functionality of Mail's pre-Tiger drawer (yay for column widths that don't have to be constantly re-adjusted), though I will concede that the drawer look is old and ugly by today's slick UI standards of palettes and sidebars.

But what do you TUAW readers think? Do you prefer palettes, like in Photoshop, OmniOutliner, iWeb and Pages, or do you prefer the sidebar UI of Tiger's Mail, ecto and NetNewsWire's subscriptions panel (though it's interesting to note that NNW also uses a drawer for its site catalog)? Sound off.

Here's a good idea. We all know that the Finder will let us put references to folders in both the Dock and Finder window sidebars. However, a row of generic folders in the Dock looks just like that...a row of generic folders. How do you know which is which?  If you don't feel like hunting around for the perfect freeware desktop icon that says "2005 tax stuff,", check out FolderBrander.

It's a simple utility that lets you quickly add color or text to a folder's icon. The sliders let you position/skew your text so it looks right, and it will even work if you aren't using the default Aqua icons. Now your folders are identifiable at a glance.

FolderBrander requires Mac OS 10.3 or later and a single license will cost you $9.95US.

Today's tip is all about your Finder sidebar. I've altered mine a bit from the default setup to better accommodate the way I work. The first thing I do is to remove the Movies, Music and Pictures folders. They're really only a single click away from my home folder, plus I use iTunes to manage my music and videos, and iPhoto handles my photos. So I rarely need to go poking around those folders manually. To remove a folder or other item from your sidebar, simply click and drag it out of the list, then let go and it's gone.

Next, I've brought in my current projects. To add an item to the sidebar, simply click and drag it into place. A thin, blue line appears between existing items. Drop it in and you're all set.The four folders you see below my "Documents" folder contain the files that are currently receiving all of my attention. Now they're only a click away, no matter where I've navigated to in the Finder.

The "Trash" is actually a super simple Apple Script that reads:

on open
tell the application "Finder"
move the selection to the trash
end tell
end open

I saved my script as an application, moved it to my "Documents" folder, gave it a sweet icon from The Iconfactory and dragged it into my sidebar. Anything dropped onto it will be moved to the trash. Finally, my Quickdrop folder is where I store all the junk that I accumulate during the day (I like a clean desktop). At the end of the day, I decide what I want to keep from in there, move those items to their proper locations and send the rest to the trash.