Remember Itunes Cover Flow? In Zenteek I Brought It Back!

The "Albums" section gained Cover Flow. Not because anyone asked. Because I missed it.

You probably remember it: iTunes 7, 2006. Album covers tilted into 3D, scrolling through your library, reflections shimmering underneath. Apple killed it years ago and the general consensus seemed to be that it was decorative, slow, and unnecessary. Mostly because they couldn't make it work on mobile for some reason. Anyway. Three things I'm willing to defend.

The beauty of building solo is that there's no PM telling me which features earn their keep. There's no design review where someone asks "is this on-brand?" There's just me, my library, and a quiet conviction that albums deserve to be looked at and not just listed. So I built it as an alternative to the "grid view", complete with keyboard nav, drag-to-scrub, a slider that addresses the entire library, and a "Random" button if you're feeling lucky.

Reflection was a bit iffy. The vertical flip used the wrong anchor and the mirrored content was being drawn upward, off the top of the cell, where it got clipped. The fix was changing one parameter. The lesson, again, was that visual bugs in SwiftUI rotation/scale code are almost always anchor-point bugs.

Is Cover Flow practical for power users?

No. The grid is faster if you know what you want. The list view shows more metadata. Cover Flow is for the moments when you don't know what you want. When you want to browse the way you used to, with your eyes, just flipping through your collection until some artwork unlocks a memory or reminds you to listen that album more - and it's there.