that’s whacked

Office rodent infestation

Friday, Dec 18. 2009  –  Category: Photos, Songbird

Sorry, I know I said we’d have Songbird 1.4.1 out this week – but we’re pushing it back to Monday due to:

• A few bugs caught by awesome Songbird users found in the beta release we pushed on Wednesday
• An office mouse infestation Ali discovered

Mice! Oh my!

Songbird 1.4.1 add-on update guides

Sunday, Dec 13. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

Heads up Songbird developers!   (Non-developer Songbird users, feel free to move along… nothing to see here, etc. etc.)

We’re planning to push our next public release of Songbird (1.4.1) next week, and wanted to give you a quick rundown of what’s new for the release and what changes you’ll need to make in order to bring your extensions and Feathers up to date for 1.4.1.  The major change is a brand new Feather called Purple Rain.  One of the consistent pieces of feedback we had regarding Gonzo was that there was a lot of confusion between the concepts of collapsing/expanding (using the splitter/grippy) a display pane vs. showing/hiding (using the buttons).  We’ve done away with the concept of showing/hiding, and moved to large more obvious splitters.  Users were also having trouble with the small display pane header buttons/tabs (used in Album Art, mashTape, etc.) so we’ve changed that functionality as well.

For extension developers, this means if you’ve previously utilised the display pane header navigation elements, you’ll need to change to our new model which uses sub-menus available via the display pane add-on picker/drop-down menu.  The good news is it’s fairly straightforward, and is super extensible to allow your extension to create entirely unlimited sub-menus/menuitems.  We’ve got this all detailed in our Extension Update Guide for Songbird 1.4.1 available on the developer wiki.

For Featherers, things are somewhat more involved.  We listened to a lot of the usability feedback we got from our users.. so on the plus side, we think the Feather is much more straight-forward and obvious to use for new users.  The downside is it’s a fairly major update to get your Feather working.  You’ll want to take a look at our Feathers Update Guide for Songbird 1.4.1 to get all the salient details.  The easiest thing to do is to startup the Feathers Creation wizard and create a new Purple Rain based Feather to get all the layout and widget changes, and then pull any existing images.  If you’re trying to migrate a Gonzo based Feather, keep in mind a lot of dimension sizes have changed, so your graphics probably won’t drop in one for one.  It may be possible (though untested) to keep your Gonzo based Feather, and just update the CSS with the changes done in Purple Rain, and then create new images for the new elements (such as the new Media Views and display pane images).  If you’re having trouble with updating Feathers, please drop by our songbird-dev Google Group for more info and some help!

(many many thanks to Michael Purses, one of Songbird GetSatisfaction champs for pitching in this weekend to help put together the Feathers Update Guide)

Translate. Songbird. Go!

Friday, Dec 11. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

We’re getting ready to ship Kanye, KoЯn, Songbird 1.4.1.  (so tempted to call it Kandy-Koated Kanye Korn after one of kreeger’s favourite candies)… due to some mishaps with the translate webapp, we weren’t able to get the new strings showing up on the site until yesterday.  Thankfully there aren’t many (<30), so we’re hoping our localisation community out there can dig in and help us plow through the remaining untranslated strings so we’ll have a multi-lingual bird ready for next week’s release.

Apologies for getting it resolved so late, we would definitely have liked to have had more time for localisers to finish working on the strings… but we really do appreciate everyone’s time and effort they put into these localisations for us.

If you’re interested in localising, and aren’t already on the songbird-l10n Google Group, go sign up!  It’s what we use for help and coordination among localisers.

KoЯn->Kanye (Songbird1.4) merge

Thursday, Dec 10. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

Just a heads up for any brave Songbird users who have been running on the KoЯn branch lately… in preparation for the release, we finished merging it over to the Songbird1.4 branch last night.

What does this mean? If you’re looking to pull and build your own, make sure you pull the Songbird1.4 branch. If you’re just looking for nightlies, make sure you grab them from the Songbird1.4 branch as well.