Snip from a story I filed today for Wired News:
[The Austrian developer who wrote the controversial PearLyrics widget for iTunes said he created the app to win the heart of a would-be girlfriend who moved to Hong Kong.
"I realized I probably would not see her again for a long time — even worse, I wasn't even sure if she felt anything for me," said Walter Ritter from Dornbirn, Austria. "In my despair, I turned to my second big love: music."
Many mopey love songs later, inspiration hit. Ritter set to work on PearLyrics, a little program that serves as a helper tool for Apple's iTunes. When a song is playing in iTunes, PearLyrics hunts down the lyrics on the internet and adds the text to the digital music file.
Ritter dedicated the application to his would-be paramour, inserting a message explaining how he felt about her: "Dedicated to Claudia Witting, my source of inspiration. Something in my heart needs her more than even clowns need the laughter of the crowd…""If only my application would be good enough, my dedication message might finally get to her — no matter where in the world she was," said Ritter, a usability researcher at the Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences.
Link to story. Image: screenshot of PearLyrics, with a very special search term. Photo is presumably of the young woman who inspired the software.
Previous Boing Boing posts about the legal conflict between PearLyrics and Warner Chappell Music here: Link. Weeks after a public apology from the music publisher for a harshly-worded legal threat, neither Ritter nor Apple have received go-ahead to make PearLyrics available again.
