Mac Apps

Search the iTunes store from your menubar with Tunesque

The iTunes store is an amazing place where you can buy and gain access to a huge range of digital goods, from music and movies to apps, audiobooks, ebooks and universityย courses. However, if youโ€™re in a rush to find and buy things it can be a bit clunky to navigate, first you have to open the iTunes store or the Mac App store, then you need to start your search and then narrow down the results by category until you find exactly what youโ€™re looking for. Youโ€™re probably so used to doing this to buy something that you donโ€™t even notice how time-consuming and slow the whole convoluted process can be, do you really need to open up a whole new app just to quickly search for stuff that Apple wants to sell you?


Unsurprisingly the answer is no, once you download Tunesque (donโ€™t us us how youย pronounceย that oneโ€ฆ) youโ€™ll be able to search the entire Apple store just like you can search through your computer with finder. The freelyย availableย app (which you can download here) sits in your menu bar and provides you with a simple search box within which you can write yourย queries.

The searching process is surprisingly quick, with the results in the slick drop down menu appearing in real time as you type out your search term. Tunesque really doesย trawlย every single aspect of app store so youโ€™ll be able to find everything you need including podcasts, iTunesU material and ebooks as well as the moreย familiarย songs and movies.

Once youโ€™ve found what youโ€™re looking for Tunesque even lets you use keyboard shortcuts to navigate between the differentย categoriesย that itโ€™s found. As an extra bonus the search results even show you the prices for each bit of content, so you can work out what the most cost-effective way ofย purchasingย what you need, or for finding material thatโ€™s freely available through the app store. Whatโ€™s even more useful is the information that that Tunesque gives you when you hold your mouse over an item, the pop up window will show you the material icon, a detailed and scrollable description of what the app does and the reviews that are feature, plus the five-star rating that itโ€™s currently got.

The only disappointing thing about Tunesque is that, whilst it makes the searching process a lot easier and can streamline how you discover new material on Appleโ€™s own store, it wonโ€™t help you at all when it comes to purchasing or downloading things. There must be some restrictions on how Apple allows developers to access the material on itโ€™s store because as soon as you actually click on the item you want to get from the iTunes store youโ€™ll be moved onto iTunes or the App Store to finalise your purchase and hand over your details.

Obviously personal security could be at risk here, and Apple would never want you to give bank details to a third party, but itโ€™s a shame that although Tunesque really helps you out when youโ€™re searching for items it wonโ€™t actually make the process of buying them any simpler and youโ€™re still going to have to open another app to make the purchase.



Before you go

After spending over 20 years working with Macs, both old and new, theres a tool I think would be useful to every Mac owner who is experiencing performance issues.

CleanMyMac is highest rated all-round cleaning app for the Mac, it can quickly diagnose and solve a whole plethora of common (but sometimes tedious to fix) issues at the click of a button. It also just happens to resolve many of the issues covered in the speed up section of this site, so Download CleanMyMac to get your Mac back up to speed today.

mac-pc

About the author

Chris

I've been a passionate evangelist for Apple and the Macintosh throughout my working life, my first love was a Quadra 605 working with a small creative agency in the south of Norfolk UK in the mid 1990's, I later progressed to other roles in other Macintosh dominated industries, first as a Senior graphic designer at a small printing company and then a production manager at Guardian Media Group. As the publishing and printing sector wained I moved into Internet Marketing and in 2006 co-founded blurtit.com which grew to become one the top 200 visited sites in the US (according to Quantcast), at its peak receiving over 15 million visits per month. For the last ten years I have worked as an Affiliate and Consultant to many different business and start ups, my key skill set being online marketing, on page monetisation, landing page optimisation and traffic generation, if you would like to hire me or discuss your current project please reach out to me here.

You can also follow me on: and

Add Comment

Click here to post a comment

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.