We got a pretty good review in MacLife recently on an article they did covering music blogs, and the best user agents for consuming them. It’s nice to see some more in-depth coverage of the bird in some commercial press beyond “it’s an iTunes rip-off!”
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6 Comments
SubscribeIt’s not an iTunes rip-off but a Firefox rip-off :p
I love Songbird to death, but the UI is an iTunes rip-off. It just looks like a black iTunes. Please accept that 85% of the computing public will judge it by this.
The staid UI is my biggest complaint against Songbird. Look to Amarok, then far into the future, and that’s what you guys should be working on. No sense in dwelling in the 5-years-ago for such a groundbreaking player, right?
Itunes is simply not original, like Songbird. It is not a iTunes rip-off. And Songbird is totally different than iTunes: iTunes is meant to play en synchronise music with your iPod and Songbird is a media platform between devices, the web, and other people.
@ Conor, Your points are certainly well taken, but as dasndjao also points out, Songbird’s current UI reflects, as Rob put it in an early post, “a broad confluence and settling of best visual, interface and experience practices.” While Songbird is still active development toward 1.0, this UI best serves the immediate needs to communicate our open media player concept. Rest assured, product development is working diligently on a number of new interfaces. Check out komi’s latest experiment, Highlighter, for glimpses into this ongoing research and design.
From what I’ve seen so far, the Songbird team are listening to the user base … so the bird should turn in to a rip-off of nothing, but ‘borrows’ the best ideas from iTunes, J.River Media Center, Firefox 3 and anything else that does a good job of UI design and functionality. And all rounded off with some original thinking.
Similarities? Yes. Like a Ford has similarities to a Chevy. Improvements? Many (fully functional web browser, intuitive downloading, to name a few). Rip-off? Not by a long shot. To qualify for that dubious distinction, there should be visually and functionally very little difference. There are too many differences to class it that way.
Keep up the great work guys.