By Aus 
Feb 29, 2008 4:56 pm
One of the big features we’ll be releasing as part of Songbird 0.5 is MTP device support.
MTP, or Media Transfer Protocol, is used by many types of devices these days. It ends up being pretty awesome because it enables device manufacturers to create devices that can all have the same great user experience when interacting with the contents and managing it from Songbird! Sweet.
Initial support for MTP devices includes manually managing the contents of your device, managing playlists and transferring media files to/from your device.
So far we’ve gotten Sansa, Creative, Nokia and HTC devices to work within Songbird. Awesome.
I’d also like to mention the names of all of the engineers that worked on this feature, without their dedication, none of this would’ve been possible. So, without further adieu, here is your MTP device team: Aus, David, Erik, Keisuke, Mark and Steven!
Tell us what you think! 
You can try it out by getting the latest nightly and add-on here.
Aus
P.S. If you are a device manufacturer and you would like Songbird to support your MTP device, do get in touch with us.
By redfive 
Feb 29, 2008 11:35 am
I spent the better part of the last 2 weeks tracking down a deadlock in our
Database Engine. It’s a little disheartening spending so long on a problem and then having the fix be a simple ‘move this line of code 4 lines higher’ kind of thing. But on the good side I learned a LOT about how our dbengine code works and refreshed my memory on locks and monitors.
For more details follow on to my full post…
By stevel 
Feb 29, 2008 11:01 am
Just a quick headsup. Francis worked on 7510 which resulted in a minor API change for 0.5 nightlies.
Specifically, the bug addressed making the ‘playable media link’ effect generic, so rather than just showing in bold, it would actually change classes so that Featherers can style to their liking. (<blink/> FTW!!!)
The side effect this had is that where previously the style could be set by a remote (faceplate.status.style remote), the type should now be set by setting faceplate.status.type. And instead of targeting the faceplate.status.override.style, they should target faceplate.status.override.type.
The 3 types available are: normal, playable, and report.
normal is used for normal links, playable is used for links to media that Songbird can play, and report is used for temporary statusbar overrides, e.g. when reporting the result of drag and drop operations.
By stevel
Feb 28, 2008 7:43 pm
The social aspects of Songbird have always been intriguing to me. Some of our recent add-ons (such as Shareaholic, and the newly uploaded Me.dium) have started exploring how social networks can start to be tied into the Songbird experience. Songbird’s browser aspect can, of course, naturally do the usual web browser interface to social networks… but an extension like Me.dium that makes browsing the web a social experience has always seemed more interesting to me in that it requires less *conscious* effort to share what I’m doing.
I was super-psyched to meet a couple of the Me.dium devs when they came out to our last Songbird DevCamp where they, armed with our Developer Centre references, and documentation, made quick work out of building in Songbird support.
Music is inherently a social activity… we discover new music by seeing what artists our friends are listening to, and by recommendations from trusted sources. With Me.dium, you get that in both the browser context, and now in the media library context. Anyway, go check out Me.dium at their Me.dium site, or install their Songbird add-on and add some friends (I’m ‘donuthole’ on the network), and start exploring and sharing your music listening and browsing experience.
By stevel
Feb 28, 2008 8:45 am
As part of fixing bugs 7555 & 7707, we’ve deprecated our Cygwin Win32 build environment.
Everyone here is building on MSYS (and you should be too!), and longer term it will just be a lot easier for us to support one build environment.
We’ve updated the build instructions, and it’s likely that Cygwin will continue to work for a little while longer, but don’t expect it to be supported. Now would be a great time to start looking at MSYS, the build environment is simple to setup, and we’ve got detailed instructions. As always, post on the forum or ping us on IRC if you’re having problems.
