New 0.6pre Blessed Nightly (the laser edition)

By raffel raffel

moonbeam.png

Get your weekend started right with the latest Songbird 0.6 blessed nightly! Maybe you’ve already read our post about how Songbird is harder, better, faster, stronger? If not, we encourage any/all to download the latest blessed build and send in feedback and bugs as we work toward our final 0.6 release which ships in early June.

We’re excited to announce the following improvements for you to checkout:

  • We have implemented jemalloc as our memory allocator for XULRunner on windows/linux. On these platforms we’ve been noticing Songbird’s memory footprint has reduced between 15-20%.
  • There is a new metadata editor! To check it out select a track and choose cmd/ctrl+e. We’re working on improving the UI (the current CSS rules are placeholders.)
  • We now write metadata back to the file. This feature needs additional testing before we ship the product so please use it cautiously until we get through QA and release a final build. While we are not aware of any major problems we encourage you to have your media backed up before using this feature.
  • The iPod add-on has been completely rewritten to support our new device API. While it’s still going through a battery of QA tests you can get it here and give it a try with 0.6pre on your platform:
    Windows - Linux 32-bit - Linux 64-bit - Mac PPC - Mac Intel
  • For Windows, the latest MTP add-on has been revved and we’re supporting more devices.
  • Major performance improvements in the library when scrolling, filtering and importing (we now support much larger libraries too.)
  • For Mac, the latest Quicktime add-ons for ppc and intel greatly improve playback performance for local MP3 and M4A files (no more latency issues before playback begins.)

We’re proud to share this day in history. Did you know on this day in 1962 a laser beam was successfully bounced off the moon for the first time? Ok, so we admit this release isn’t nearly as monumental, but still, it’s one giant leap for the ‘bird.

Performance Improvements in Songbird 0.6!

By raffel raffel

Over the past few months we’ve heard from a number of users asking us to focus on performance optimizations for the next version of Songbird. Today, we’re excited to share our progress. If you can’t wait for Songbird 0.6 to ship (it lands in early June) you can try our latest blessed nightlies and judge our performance improvements for yourself. Alternatively, you can watch the following video to see the progress we’re making!


Songbird Library Performance Enhancements from Songbird on Vimeo.

The screencast linked to above focuses on the performance gains we made during this release specific to optimizations around the library. You’ll note Songbird now supports importing and managing significantly larger media libraries, scrolling in the application is now fluid, and filtering media is much faster.

But wait, there’s more!

We have made some huge improvements that should greatly reduce memory usage on Windows and Linux. We now have jemalloc turned on for the base framework, XULRunner, on Win32 and Linux. We followed Mozilla’s lead and didn’t turn it on on the Mac because the OS X allocator performs well. On Linux, jemalloc has been turned on for over a month, but Win32 took a little more work.

We provide packages to the developer community of the Mozilla base of our code (XULRunner) in both release and debug mode. When we first tried to enable jemalloc + XULRunner the application would not compile out of the box when set to debug mode. We spent a lot of time and effort getting that specific configuration working, which was the cause of the delay for Win32. We’re currently working on upstreaming that patch, since Mozilla engineers ran into the same exact problem with Firefox a few days ago.

The performance improvement in memory is about 15-20%, depending on task. jemalloc is currently only used for the XULRunner stack; while this represents a significant portion of where we spend our processing time (as can be seen by the memory usage improvement), we’re investigating using jemalloc as the allocator for our Songbird stack.

jemalloc’s design goal was a “scaleable, concurrent” allocator. Since we make more use of multiple threads than many applications, we’re excited at the prospect of another possible performance gain.

Songbird 0.6 is still a few weeks out from launching, stay tuned for some additional performance improvements that will land that improve our search functionality!

Help Make Songbird Better!

By raffel raffel

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We’ve been looking for ways to get feedback from active Songbird users because your input helps us make Songbird better. In the next release we’ll be asking users if you’d be willing to take a quick, anonymous survey about the product. The details that follow will only apply to users running 0.6 Final and does not impact nightly users.

We didn’t want this to be a surprise to the community so we wanted to share all the details upfront and be as transparent as possible. To be totally honest, we don’t like asking users to take a survey any more than most people like being asked but we felt like it was critical to the success of the project to gauge the communities feedback to some open questions we have been basing some assumptions upon.

The data we collect will not be shared with 3rd parties. We are simply looking to have more data about what users want in order to help us prioritize implementing the features that you’re asking for. It’s really that simple, cross my heart and hope to die. In the future we might open up a survey on this blog to a larger audience but we wanted to start qualifying some of our assumptions against people who are current, active users of our latest release.

Since we are specifically interested in feedback from Windows, Linux and Mac users who have spent some time running Songbird here’s what it’s going to take to trigger the dialog asking you if you are willing to take the active user survey:

* You will need to be running Songbird 0.6 Final, and
* Have launched the application more than three times, and
* Run the application for at least 30 minutes in total, and
* Satisfied all of these requirements before June 30, 2008

If the above described conditions are satisfied, the next time you launch Songbird you will see a dialog like this, asking you if you’re willing to take the active user survey:

survey.dialog.png

The active user survey will end on July 1st, 2008. If you elect to take the survey a tab in Songbird will open the website hosting the questions (the survey itself will be hosted on SurveyMonkey.com.) If you elect not to take the survey the application will continue to operate as if nothing happened. :)

Please note: we will only ask users if they are willing to take the active user survey once. If you say no we will not nag you again and we will set a preference in your profile indicating that you didn’t want to take the survey. In the future, assuming you don’t nuke your profile and that we elect to run another survey in the application, we’ll respect that choice and not nag you again. No stats regarding your preference about opting-in or out of the survey will be shared with us, it’s a local setting on your machine and we are not transmitting that data.

Finally, Windows users who uninstall Songbird 0.6 Final will note that going forward there is an option to give us feedback regarding why you uninstalled the application. If you elect to take the uninstaller feedback questionnaire your default browser will launch and open the website hosting the questions (the questions will be hosted on SurveyMonkey.com.)

We want to make clear that we respect your right to choose whether you want to provide us with feedback. Our goal is to simply make Songbird better and we really appreciate hearing from you. Thanks for considering to take the survey and our most sincere apologies to anyone who might take issue with this. We’re open to your feedback including on this subject! Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments below or via email, you can reach us at: customer [ a t ] songbirdnest.com. BTW for those wondering Songbird 0.6 will be out in early June!

Return of the RIA?

By roblord roblord

Mozilla’s Mark Finkle recently concluded that the term RIA, Rich Internet Application, has lost its meaning.

RIA (the acronym) has jumped the shark. I find that I can no longer use RIA to describe anything anymore. The definition has been watered down and twisted to the point that nearly any application can be called RIA.

I agree. Finkle names names of Adobe and Microsoft software evangelists pushing proprietary app frameworks that have obfuscated the meaning of RIA and, in their wake, the user-centric, community-directed utility promise of the RIA class.

However, I don’t follow Mark’s conclusion to retire the term RIA. The term has currency and fluency; Let’s re-appropriate, replenish and sharpen it. With a new definition, Firefox, Thunderbird and Songbird are practical and aspirational leaders of the RIA class.

The key is to emphasize the I in RIA. The Internet is global network of community-centric client-server systems including the Web, email, DNS, etc. An RIA implements the client-side of at least one of these Internet systems.

Also, the R in RIA should be measured by “richness” found in exemplary IAs, Firefox first among them. The metric is user utility and community adoption of the client. Firefox’s open source, vibrant community, Open Web manifesto, widespread adoption and 5,000+ community-contributed add-ons establish a very high “richness” bar.

With this definition it’s easy to discern the real RIAs from the wishful: RIAs implement the client-side of Internet methods, formats and protocols. In the Web client-server system, RIAs are better known as user-agents or Web browsers. In the email client-server sytem, RIAs are better known as email clients.

By this definition, is Twirl, a useful desktop app for Twitter built from Adobe AIR, a RIA? No, it’s a proprietary app, platform and service integration. However, if someone built an desktop IM-like client from the open source Mozilla stack that posted your Twitter-like status to your OpenID via Attribute Exchange and thus accessible to all Twitter-like status tracking services like Twitter — that would be a really cool RIA.

Your comments are welcomed!

Request for feedback: Option A or Option B?

By komi komi

Over the next few releases we have committed to spend cycles revisiting Songbird’s UI. I’ve always appreciated and enjoyed the way Alex Faaborg keeps the community in the loop when it comes to UI changes in Firefox. I’m going to make an effort to follow his lead in the hopes that together we can make Songbird’s new UI the best it can be when it ships.

We want to kick off this project with a request for feedback regarding the layout of the application. We’ve reviewed the feedback that we’ve received from the community over the years and identified a few possible directions that we could take. We would love to hear your thoughts - please let us know which option you prefer and for what reasons. Thanks!


Option A - Rhymes with “My Moons”

  • Layout of UI elements are similar to a certain popular media player
  • Familiar to those who have used Songbird in the past
  • All the important controls are at the top of the window
  • Songbird looks like a media player with an embedded web browser

option-a-tumbnail-20080502-2.png


Option B - Designed For Songbird

  • Navigation (green) and media controls (pink) are separated to minimize any confusion (eg: previous track button and back button)
  • Unified navigation elements don’t change much whether browsing through your library or the web
  • Location of the back button is consistent with web browsers and OS file managers
  • Songbird looks like a media player and web browser hybrid

option-b-tumbnail-20080502-2.png