Designer Jon Hicks’ obsession with music apps left him with a problem — he couldn’t find any that met all his needs. So, like many others in the age of LLMs, he built his own.
Hicks calls his app Jacket, and it’s easy to understand why when you see all the references to physical media. Giant artwork, extensive liner notes integration and perhaps most surprising and impressive, spines.
The spines harken back to Apple’s long-lost Coverflow view in iTunes.
The spines themselves have a few different text styles, decided by their genre. So electronic music gets a monospaced font (Space Mono), classical gets a serif, and so on.
The implementation is gorgeous and really does give the feel of a real-world object.
Nagging Guilt
Hicks clearly has some lingering guilt about using an LLM to build his tool. He’s torn about the plagiarism that enables LLMs, the financial cost, and the personal cost of his all-consuming obsession while building the app. He’s not sure where this goes next, but I do wonder if he’ll consider releasing the app.
