that’s whacked

Philips & Songbird

Friday, Jan 8. 2010  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

By now you’ve seen the news about our partnership with Philips.  Big chunks of the team have been cranking pretty hard on this partner release and we’re super excited to ship some things we’ve been working on for a while, and to get Songbird into the hands of even more users. The feedback has already been tremendous; thanks to everyone for your support!

As you know we’re big believers in openness and as such we try to share our development plans and progress with you as regularly and freely as we can. This isn’t as straightforward when other companies are involved — especially large, global, public companies like Philips. So we apologise for not being able to talk openly, sooner, about this new relationship but we hope, even as a bit of a surprise, you can appreciate why this is a good thing for the company, the products, the platform, and all of our users. As always we’ll strive to give you an early heads up whenever we can.

While there’s obviously some special work we’ll do for Philips, we don’t think about this as one-off work.  Much of what we do for them, is work we’ve been planning  to do for all Songbird consumers.  For Philips, there’s certainly a custom feather and the add-ons that are important to them and their customers. We’re working to make sure that all of what we build is valueable for you and for partners … with as few exceptions as possible.

Our partnership with Philips is a great step for us — it drives distribution, revenue, and an even tighter connection to the CE side of the world. Of course the partnership means more features to consider and tradeoffs to balance – but in this case, that’s a great problem to have.  There is lots of overlap in desired features from both sides, so this probably means you’ll see some things accelerated, which is good news for all Songbird consumers. We know that users around the globe using the software and sending us their ideas ultimately results in a better experience for everyone. So keep your suggestions coming.

There’s no resting on this week’s milestone achievement, we’re working fast and furiously on the next release, which will hit early this year. Stay tuned for more as we move continue evolving plans and working through development.

Thanks again for all of your support!

the post-release post

Monday, Jan 4. 2010  –  Category: Songbird

welcome to my post-1.4.1 1.4.2 1.4.3 post… where i talk about things you talked about after we talked about launching 1.4.3 (after our couple of respins) last week.

we’ve been following the blog comments, reading the bug reports, and getting the feedback from GetSatisfaction bubbled up to us via our intrepid Songbird Champs.  there have been a few recurring issues worth mentioning/recapping, so here we go in no particular order:

1. Windows 7 Support
   • Yes, we throw a warning message up when you’re installing Songbird regarding it being unsupported on Windows 7.  This is mostly a “caveat emptor” warning, we haven’t done full and proper QA test runs to ensure things work on Windows 7.  That being said, we have plenty of users who run it just fine on Windows 7.  If you do continue to install and run it on Windows 7, you may experience bugs.  We’re working on full and proper Windows 7 support for the next release if you want to wait.
2. iPod Support
   • As mentioned previously, we are no longer maintaining the iPod Extension.  Continually playing an unsupported game of catchup with Apple sucked, and we’ve opted to go with iTunes Import/Export Syncing as our supported way of having users sync their music libraries with Songbird.  As mentioned in that blog post, we’ve open sourced the iPod Extension (which is built on libgpod), and would happily welcome any community patches to it.
3. Splash Screen
   • Yeah, we get it.  Some of you don’t like the splash screen.  Unfortunately it does, believe it or not, serve a purpose.  Not everyone has the super-latest-OMFG-ITS-1BILLION-TERAHERTZ machine… and especially on some platforms (Windows XP for instance), there was no feedback as to when the application was starting.  If you really really really hate the splash screen that much, then go grab Simon’s splish splosh extension to easily change or disable the splash screen.
4. Bookmarks
   • Over the next few releases you’ll see us phase out some of the more web browser specific features.  This is a conscious design decision to differentiate Songbird as more of a media player than a web browser.  Let’s face it, we’ll never be a better web browser than Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.  We’ve never intended for Songbird to replace your daily web browser.  Don’t take this to mean we’re removing the web browser component entirely… we can’t, and we won’t since we use this for rendering things like the Last.fm Radio Directory, the 7Digital Music Store, the Concerts Listings page, etc.  It just means we’d prefer for add-ons to take a more integrated approach along the lines of the 7Digital, Concerts, SHOUTcast, & Last.fm add-ons where servicepane nodes are displayed that link to custom chrome (or heck even to webpages tailored specifically for Songbird, such as the 7Digital store).
   • That being said, if you really really really want your bookmarks back, I’ve made a Songbird Bookmarks extension that re-enables the bookmarks servicepane node so you can get your old bookmarks back.
5. Automatic Album Art Fetching
   • One of the new features in Songbird 1.4.3 is automatic album art fetching.  Depending on what mode you have album art in (either “Now Playing” or “Now Selected”), album art will be automatically fetched for the currently playing or selected track.  If you’re on a slow or high latency connection (and this can vary depending on your album art fetcher add-ons and priorities, set via the Album Art preferences), you may experience a lag when selecting or playing tracks as Songbird goes to fetch the album art.  We’ll work on improving the performance of this in the future, but for now – I’ve made an extension to allow you disable or enable this automatic fetching behaviour.

AIDS Ride, first official training ride down

Sunday, Jan 3. 2010  –  Category: Outdoors

I went on my first official AIDS Ride training ride yesterday… a “Category 1″ (the slowest pace group, average speed of 7-8mph) training ride leaving Orinda, and lasting 24 miles.  Turns out it was a bit slow for my pace, and I ended up riding in a breakaway pack that was riding up front.  I’ll try the Category 2 ride next week instead (11-15mph) which should be more my style I think.

In other news, I’ve managed to raise $2320 so far!  Only $680 left to go to meet my goal of raising $3000 for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.  Surely one of your New Years’ resolutions was to donate to stevel’s 545 mile bike ride from SF to LA, right?  If not, hopefully one of your resolutions involved donating to charity?    In any case, if you haven’t donated yet, I (and the SF AIDS Foundation) would really appreciate your donation and support…

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.

Photos from MozCamp EU 2009

Tuesday, Oct 27. 2009  –  Category: OpenSource, Photos, Songbird

Finally got around to uploading my photos from MozCamp EU 2009 in Prague

Again, just want to say thanks and a huge shout-out to the Mozilla Europe gang.  They put on a great event.  One of the most socially inviting and warm conferences I’ve been to.

MozCamp EU 2009 (Prague)

Friday, Oct 9. 2009  –  Category: OpenSource

many thanks to the fine folks at Mozilla Europe for hosting a brilliant MozCamp EU 2009 conference. most people on PMO have summed up things already, but here are my few fleeting thoughts

• logistically, the conference went beautifully.  from the transit tickets upon arrival, to the boat trip cruise, to the transit ticket back to the airport thoughtfully tucked into the conference bag with directions on how to get back to the airport.  nice touch!
• i thought of this more as a “social” conference rather than an “educational” conference.  to be honest, most of what was presented was stuff i knew about already (JetPack, Thunderbird, etc.) but i was occasionally pleasantly surprised (Stratified Javascript <drooool>).
• i’d hoped for some more hands-on type talks in the Developer track, and indeed, i modeled my Songbird demo/talk on that presumption.  turns out i was wrong.  i hope folks who came to my Songbird talk at least found it useful.
• i loved loved loved LOVED getting to meet Mozilla and Songbird community folks i’d not yet met face to face before.  getting to meet our localiser-extraordinares Nukeador and Goofy was brilliant, and getting to meet AlfredKayser (one of our most prolific Featherers) was just great!
• generally just seeing old friends, and making new ones was a helluva lotta fun.  Prague is a great city to socialise in, and made for a great conference venue.

climbing castle crags

Saturday, Sep 5. 2009  –  Category: Outdoors

last weekend wendy, keisuke, alisa and i headed up to Castle Crags to climb Six Toe Crack (the same route i climbed last year with jaime & zac). as with last year, it was fantastic. the weather was beautiful, the sky was clear of any clouds and a deep blue, and we had a great time.

i took some photos from the whole weekend, including hanging out at the awesome little B&B the night before, the climbing, and of the drive home.

alisa put some photos up on her Tumblr too.