On Stage, a new app by German developer Fabian Kreiser, is a lightweight companion to the iPhone’s iPod application that, together with a custom UI design, comes with neat Wikipedia integration that also supports Sophiestication’s Articles out of the box.
If you’re looking for a more powerful iPod replacement that does a bunch of things like Wikipedia lookup and recommended artists, make sure to check out My Artists, which we reviewed a couple of times on MacStories. On Stage is a smaller alternative with a feature set focused on letting you pick music from the iPod library and display Wikipedia information for the playing album, song, or artist. The app also displays lyrics like in iPod.app but has a function to retrieve lyrics online if missing.
Upon firing up On Stage you’ll notice an iPod icon in the upper left corner. That’s where you’ll always go back to find music to throw into On Stage. I wish the developer considered an integrated tabbed view to choose music without the additional icon tapping, but I guess he wanted to focus on the music playing view and album artwork rather than multiple tabs on screen. In the iPod view there are tabs for Albums, Artists, Songs and Playlists. Unfortunately, On Stage doesn’t support the new Home Sharing feature in iOS that allows you to stream music off iTunes on your Mac. You’ll have to use a local iOS library to use On Stage. This might be a deal-breaker for many, and I definitely look forward to seeing whether Fabian will manage to get streaming to work in a future update.
In the playback view, there’s the standard album artwork and, once you tap on it, an icon in the top toolbar to display or hide lyrics. The action icon at the top right lets you lookup music info on Wikipedia, load missing lyrics and find more songs by the same artist on your iPod library. Wikipedia integration is very cool: it uses Articles’ web sheet to display Wikipedia content and there’s even a menu item to send entries to Articles. Again, this isn’t as fully featured as My Artists but at $0.99 you get nice Wikipedia support and good-looking graphics.
On Stage is an elegant app with a minimal feature set, but if Wikipedia lookup is your thing and you happen to like Articles it might be just what you need. Go download it here.
