You can't do visuals on the display. It only lets you display text. There isn't any way of directly addressing the individual pixels on the display. The only graphics displayable is whatever is built into the firmware.
The baud rate of the display is quite low so even if you did rewrite the firmware to allow you to use it as a graphical display the refresh rate would be very low.
Finding out what is playing is easy enough if you've got Hijack installed. If you're fine with just a slave display that lets you go back and forward between songs and possibly a few other functions then it would be perfect.
- Trevor