What it is: Trigger Finger is the touchscreen jukebox program I've always wanted: simple to use, easy on the eyes, flexible and powerful. I've got a thing for college radio so it comes pre-loaded with all the radio stations from goodradio.org, but if that's not your thing just click Stuff --> Clear Buttons. And you certainly don't need a touchscreen to use Trigger Finger, it works just great with a mouse too.

Quickstart. Super easy to configure: drag a song, playlist, folder of songs, movie, program or batch file onto any button to associate that button with it. Then if you'd like you can drag an image onto the button to change its graphic. You can even drag an image directly from Firefox. To get a bit more control over the editing try right-clicking or "long-clicking" a button, which lets you do things like add labels. There's lots of other features, see below for more info or have a look at the documentation.

Download it: Version 1.1 (January 18, 2011).

Learn about it: see the help file for more info.

 

Snazzbo Features:

- Music Jukebox. Play songs or playlists from your harddrive or network super easily with your finger through big purdy buttons. Supports mp3, wav, and flac. Just drag a song or playlist onto a button, and you can then drag a picture onto it to change the appearance. Right click (or "long click") to add a caption. You can also do snazzy things like make a dynamic playlist from a folder of songs. And you can use the onscreen keyboard to search your harddrive and network for media, and the search is blazing fast. And there seems to be a rule with touchscreen applications that their onscreen keyboards must look like crap, and Trigger Finger attempts to break that rule once and for all.

- Movie Jukebox. Drag some movies onto some buttons and you've got a movie jukebox. See the video notes in the documentation, but the gist is you can either send videos to whatever video player you want (hopefully either VLC or Zoom Player), or use Trigger Finger's built-in player for a really nice poor man's VJ rig. Make the movie window fullscreen on a secondary monitor or projector and approach gizmo nirvana.

- College Radio Jukebox! Comes pre-loaded with the proverbial cream of college and community radio stations, most of them streaming 128k shoutcasts or better, all with the station's logo and contact info. And you can record any shoutcast you're listening to... All the station data data comes live from goodradio.org so it should stay reasonably up to date even after I've lost interest in the project.

- X10 Light Controller! Get an X10 firecracker for about $10 and you can wirelessly control lights from Trigger Finger. If that's not slick I don't know what is. See the docs for more info and a hardware list, and don't worry it works just great through USB even on Vista and probably Win7.

- Run Programs and Batch Files. Buttons can also trigger programs or batch files so you can do god knows what.

- Touchy. Very touchscreen friendly, which sounds like a Craigslist posting title. Works great with a mouse too. And with all the graphical buttons its oh so purdy.

- Multi Monitor Support. Can run fullscreen on any monitor, and can even launch fullscreen on any monitor. See the "advanced tip" in the documentation.

- Keyboard Shortcuts. You can assign any keyboard key to any button.

- Joystick Control. You can also trigger buttons with a joystick and joystick buttons. Get a wireless joystick and control things from your couch with a big smug look on your face.

- iPhone Style Mouse Gestures. Don't trust a touchscreen program that doesn't have mouse gestures! Drag your mouse/finger left or right to scroll through pages, and up or down to get in and out of fullscreen mode.

- Webserver optimized for iGizmos. Join the network with your iPhone or whatever and control it wirelessly.

- Low Impact and Portable. Doesn't install anything outside its own directory so won't crash your puter, and can be run from a thumbdrive or wherever.

Here's a screenshot with things pretty scrunched up, click it for a bigger and more spacious one:

 

See the help file for more info.