For the past couple of weeks we have been making progress on the new UI layout and feather. Internally, we call it Gonzo. Yesterday, we managed to check Gonzo into our subversion repository. This means that if you download today’s nightly build you’ll see an option in the view menu to switch to Gonzo. (View > Feathers > Gonzo)
I’m eager to hear your feedback but please keep in mind that Gonzo is going to undergo *significant* visual and functional changes between now and the end of the release. When we have a bit more bandwidth we’ll be posting more details around the specifics of the redesign work that is underway. In the meantime, we’re landing code early and often – you should see Gonzo change on a daily basis. Since we know this feather is still very rough please no nit-picking for the time being. 
Thanks!
33 Comments
SubscribeUhh, exciting. Nice colour scheme so far. The black default feather was a always a bit problematic for me though I like black.
Looking stellar so far! I especially like how prominent the “Now Playing” area in the lower right is, like in the big size, and how it’s entirely black and contrasting against the other colors. I think it’s great that way!
Plus I think the gradient of gray in that bottom media pane is about perfect. Perhaps the whole UI could use that gray, unless you have other ideas…
@Hoshi: I think you can’t rely on this color scheme. It will probably stay black.
can i get that site on my pc
Looks okay I guess. I prefer the current style.
Having said that, I’ve been using the Zune software since it’s 2.0 update and it makes just about every other media player look like spreadsheet software.
I have to say I prefer the original layout with the player at the top. IMHO in most applications the most important things are at the top (tool bars etc) so it doesn’t feel natural to me to look at the bottom for the most important thing in Songbird.
Just my knee jerk reaction.
From what I can see from here, I like it
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The layout looks really clean and clearly arranged, very efficient and compact with no waste of space. (With all the panells and tabs in my songbird, I need every pixel of screen I can get
And finally there’s the horizontal scroolbar in the library.
Can’t wait to try it!
Gonzo rocks !
I’m guessing all those funky colors are for debugging purposes.
I lurv pink
@darrel trowel
You can try out Gonzo in nightly builds for any platform.
@Slate8
We gathered that different people are going to have different preferences for where they want their media controls so we are planning on making it customizable.
Please do not start a discussion about colors.
The official color is black.
Songbird is black and this is default.
Use themes for this.
I’ve tried Gonzo, and well – I like it. The Layout is even more costumizable. More scroolbars, more resizing, (even the resizing auf the “Now Playing”-Addon works finally better).
Although it’s still very rough and buggy (my first bug-report to the new skin: mouse-scrolling in track-info-pane changes the volume too.), we can see, that you’re moving in the right direction.
A few suggestions, what I missed in the old skin:
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- an “always on top”-function in not only in the mini media player, but in all player modes. “always on top” is no problem in linux, but the windows desktop environment still doesn’t know it.
- Buttons to show the hidden panes again, after I’ve closed them (f.e. make the hide-button to a hide/show button and don’t let it disappear), so that I don’t have to go always to the menu to open the pane again.
- I liked the option the fold the player section even smaller in the old skin (hey! more room for the service pane!
But I’m sure, you’ve thought about these details by yourself already!
Can’t wait to see the next changes
And to the people who don’t like the player at the bottom:
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On windows I’ve used always winamp: their old standard-skin had the player on the right top corner.
For one year the new standard-skin has the player on the left top corner.
On linux I use amarok: the player is on the right bottom corner.
It never occured to me, that this (sometimes daily) change could be in any way annoying.
It’s just a matter of habit.
(Since you make it costumizeble, I will leave it in right bottom corner: that’s a first for me
yeah i like the new favorite menu but green pink um … not a fan. i think that the play pause should be up the top because its a media player first. but at the end of the day i prefer the old RubberDucky
I think i prefer the older layout
@Irbabe: Well, anyways always though the default feather needs more contrast and Gizmo already seems to accomplish this.
Will it be possible to switch between the old layout and this new one, or is this the new layout with no other alternatives?
Theme is really going to be ugly black? It’s insanely ugly and doesn’t fit in anywhere. And no good themes for mac either. Not good… not good…
I personally love the default black theme and also the current layout. Gonzo is definetly a good layout alternative. The color shemes can be more easily modified in comparison to a layout. So maybe some of the unsatisfied users with some CSS skills are able to create a color sheme fitting the OS X , Windows or whatever (Ubuntu) environment. Once again very community orientated process… making the hard stuff in the developer area (layouts) and leave it open to the community (colors)
I never thought of this until now, but the new layout really reminds me of the layout in Miro…and I like that layout so maybe this will work for me.
I agree that the player should be at the top by default. I like the way the older layout looks better.
Sweet!! That brought an Idea to my mind. I’ll let my kid paint me some Arrows and all that, that I could use in Songbird.
Hell yes. A kiddo feather drawn by my own boy. Sounds fun.
On Topic:
I like the new approach. The differentiation of the player and the browser is a obvious choice. Everyone, that has used my songbird install, when visiting me at least once hit the back button of the player, when they wanted to navigate back on a website.
The updated feathers should prevent that.
I like it a lot.
To integrate the rating system into that area, too is a highly useful improvement in my opinion. Up until now it wasn’t that useful to do that. You had to either scroll through your library, or hit the name on the top, to see, what was playing, just to rate it.
This will make it far more easy.
I’m not saying, that songbird shouldn’t have the option to always scroll to the playing song, but its a step in the right direction.
Rock on!
Tyler out!
I have downloaded latest nightly. don’t see Gonzo as you said.
@Jigar: Rubberducky is still the default feather. You can view Gonzo from the View -> Feathers menu. Is it not an option for you in that menu?
@Dani, @stove_pipe
Care to elaborate on why you prefer Rubberducky? We want to make sure that Gonzo takes advantage of everything good about Rubberducky and your input would help us greatly!
Problems running it on Ubuntu 8.10: “mainWinInit.js – SBInitialize – ReferenceError: windowPlacementSanityChecks is not defined”
After clearing that I managed to get it up and running.
If lime green, pink and turquoise remain as part of the design, it will get a big thumbs down from me. IMO apps should be neutral and non-intrusive, which generally means monochrome – I want to be able to focus on the colors in images and videos and not be distracted by eye-searing colors in the application.
Or is that too much nit-picking for this stage?
Also, another vote for controls to be at top by default. Locating them at bottom just moves them away from all the other commonly accessed menus. It therefore increases mouse movement with no counter benefit.
Gonzo looks good but seems to be just a(nother) big list of tracks.
How about some structure? (ie. more like a database report than a spreadsheet!) Having, e.g., tracks grouped under the album they belong to (and the albums under artists or composers or genre etc.). would allow you to click on the album to show/hide the tracks etc.
@maddogeco, @MonoApe
I invite anyone to come visit the San Francisco office and hit me over the head if you find any in the final release of Gonzo.
@Simon Hill
Can I suggest you try out one of the media views on the add-on site?
Is Rubberducky going to be available by default as well? I actually prefer the look and feel of the new feather, but I think it would be really good if Songbird came with a couple of different feathers that were truly unique in order to really show off how customizable it is. Right now, all of the feathers that are available are basically just blue Rubberducky or pink Rubberducky, etc.
@ali no. I am on linux and today also i downloaded latest nightly. Might be i need to create another profile.
another profile does not work…Is is because of linux ?
The nicest looking skin ever. Thank you for this
Any chance that Gonzo will be also released as Firefox and Thunderbird themes?