Introducing our brand new Weekly Birdbath, because it all comes out in the wash.
Our amazing Get Satisfaction community was keepin’ it real when they called us out on our sh*t about not updating the blog enough. Sometimes we get so bird brained around here we need a friendly reminder or three to remove our beaks from our butts and chirp outside our cage.
In our all-hands meeting today I made a big bird call for everyone to step up their chirps and tweets so hopefully you’ll hear from the BIG Bird’s soon. In the meantime the Weekly Birdbath is just for you from me, so feel free to tell me what you want me to squawk about after our weekly meetings every Thursday.
Some of today’s hot topics:
What’s for lunch? Pizza–for the third week in a row. We birds can be picky eaters and we’re used to a bit more variety, but the pies came from different places each week so we’ve yet to mutiny. And yes, this is usually the first topic at our all hands meetings.
What’s up with the roadmap? We’ve been pecking away at the roadmap and it’s getting flushed out. What you’ll see now are the building blocks for our next 5 releases. More on that when we finish filling in the blanks.
Where is Waldo SteveL? Taiwan. Seems he migrated to avoid the mini heat wave we had last week. Come back SteveL, the fog is home and we miss you.
What’s the hottest Get Satisfaction thread? Last week the Now Playing List thread ignited into a really intense but useful discussion. At one point the whole room came and read over my shoulder just to watch the fire jump around. While we know we can’t please everyone, discussions like that remind us that we have the most amazing community around. You rock!
What’s the Kreeger Oreo McFlurry count? 17 and counting, with a dismal 3 McFlurry FAILs.
Parental Visit: In case any of you were wondering, Aus does have parents and they stopped by after their long journey from Ottawa to say hello and tour our new digs.
Photo by Kreeger
Gaston (Pa’) and Pauline (Ma’) are clearly very proud of their son, and it seems to me if you need a special piece of code, asking Aus when his Ma’ and Pa’ are around is the way to go.
So that’s your Weekly Birdbath–squawk back!
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[...] names. As you can imagine there are some pretty serious scuffles for naming rights around here as Ali alluded to last week. But there’s no need to hog the fun all to ourselves. This is my favorite thread of [...]
29 Comments
SubscribeGood to hear real life news :p
Hahahaha. Just what we needed. Couldn’t get anymore detailed even if it was on stalkerbook
Any word though on whose idea it was to give Kanye his own release? I’m guessing it was pizza and beer that night?
Hi Laura,
This is a little out of left field but Matt Cuson, Director of Business Development – Streaming Media Business Unit at Logitech commented on a blog post of mine about Songbird and Squeezebox players.
He found the idea of using Songbird as an interface for Squeezebox interesting. You folks at Songbird might not be ready to take Songbird in a direction like that just yet, but I’d kindly suggest making some friendly relations over there on the subject if you haven’t already.
The AirTunes/iPod Remote combo is a killer bullet-point on iTunes’ feature list.
If you’d like the details you can read the whole thing here: http://wayne.mondochrome.ca/2009/04/26/getting-songbird-to-sing-beyond-the-cage/
I haven’t had the time to make another detailed response and likely won’t while I’m traveling next week but I find the whole idea of the two working together to be…. well, awesome.
Thanks,
Wayne
@Andrew Kanye was alllll me. Kreeger’s been hogging the naming-things department for a while and I wanted a turn. I’m hoping that Koshi can whip up some bird drawings that involve Kanye-style shutter shades for the release.
That picture gives me a great idea! We don’t have a name for our P release yet… and *somebody* released an album last year! I’ll have to remember that next time I’m updating the roadmap.
@Wayne Ralph Thanks for the pointer. We actually have a Squeezebox sitting around in the office (sadly, we misplaced its A/C adapter during our recent move…) and we love to talk about cool integration projects like this with anyone who will listen.
The PowerPC build is still being maintained (yay!) so that remains an option for you.
I can’t believe that I totally missed that the releases were alphabetical….*is ashamed*
How far have you got with the names, Ali?
Thanks Laura, its great to hear from the team. For those who haven’t yet checked out the get satisfaction community (http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird) take a look, there loads of great ideas and discussion going on there.
Rob
What a great blog post! Wonderful to hear what is going down in Songbird town. Also nice to see the Roadmap updated
Keep it coming guys.
Is it bad that I read this as “Weekly Bloodbath?”
Anywho, this sounds like a great idea. Keep it up!
@Ali I downloaded and tried out the PowerPC Songbird build which seems to work really well. The only problem now is that I’m proc blocked by the Songbird Remote extension. Intel Mac only.
Doh!
I’m going to think about it a little more before I make a decision, but I’m thinking that I’ll have to go back to a WinXP laptop only this time I can keep it in the basement with the file server and get AirFoil to stream to the Airport Express.
It’ll still involve a iPod Touch which I’d like to avoid (at least until Songbird supports it). But it’ll still be the cheapest and easiest solution that I can think of.
If iTunes supported watchfolders I’d probably just surrender and use it. The hassle of having to login to a headless server just to add tracks is just too much though.
@Tim We’re named up to the N release. Jackson 5, Kanye, Led Zeppelin, Madonna, and Nirvana are the next 5 major releases.
@Ivan that literally made me LOL.
@Wayne Ralph Ack! I didn’t think about the add-on being Intel-only.
We’re working on making Songbird sync really thoroughly with iTunes in this release to ease the syncing pain for those of us with iPhones and iPod Touches. I hope the PPC maintainers are able to get the release ported relatively quickly for you.
@Ali Would the iTunes syncing be possible across different computers on a network? ‘Cause that would kill off a couple of problems of mine. Not least of all would be that all my ratings couldn’t have been backed up on another computer.
I imagine that there would be issues with file paths, but that’s just a guess. (Perhaps you could do backwards matching starting with filename, then directory, and any directories above that… ’cause only the start of the paths will be different if they use the same *actual* files, right?)
If it *can* work across different PC’s, then that might be the beginning of closing off at least two requests at GetSatisfaction:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/syncing_songbird_with_songbird
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/share_library_between_multiple_pcs_and_oss
And even if it doesn’t, what I could do would be have both Songbird and iTunes running, Songbird updates based on watchfolders, then syncs with iTunes and then iPod Remote goodness. A winner is me.
At any rate I guess it would be wise for me to wait until the next release before making a purchase. Let’s see if I can stick to that.
So we get a dose of Laura every Thursday!! This is like Heaven!
Hmm…. what to talk about next week…
-Community-wise:
Lukas_Skywalker has been cranking out some bug fixes for Isan that i saw…
GeekShadow has also been cranking out some sweet add-ons as usual…
atreiu has been kickin butt with Pure Player…
-The Idea Kitchen still hasn’t gotten a blog post yet, and I think SteveL needs some recognition for that..
-And hopefully that Getting Started Doc goes live soon
Great blogpost Laura,
Real fun to read as usual!
But are you sure you’ve thought the Kanye thing through? I don’t want no fishsticks in my bird! ;D
Keep on rockin’
@Lenny Do you like fishsticks?
ps – HAPPY BIRTHDAY LAURA!
The best joke of the world!
@ali; love ‘em
I’ve been thinking, it would be helpful for the community’s morale if we had better explanations about some of the decisions that the songbird team makes. For example, the decision to push CD Ripping off till August and focus on other features like an automatic file/folder organizer and support for compilations. I’m sure this decision was not made willy nilly, but to the public, it seems that way because there was never any announcement or explanation of it on the website, and it wasn’t even until halfway through the development process of Isan that the decision became visible on the wiki. Even if people did not like the reason behind your decisions, it would still help to know why they were made.
Great blog post!
It’s fun and interesting to read about the life behind the software/technical-things. Thanks
PS: The songbird crew moved?! Photos of the new aviary, please! (°v°)=@
Thanks to all for the feedback. It’s all duly noted for upcoming Birdbath posts. Cheep cheep!
What happened to the add on post that was up a few days ago? Hiding something much?
Nice for the blog to get some attention, I always like reading about what’s to come and what you people have been up to!
@Steven I assume you mean this post: http://whacked.net/2009/04/20/growing-more-beautiful-plumage/ and yeah, that’s weird dunno why it dropped off this blog. I’ll ping SteveL about it since he was the author.
Hi, Super post, Need to mark it on Digg
AlexAxe
Hello,
Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day!
Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day!
Have a nice day
AlexAxe
blog.songbirdnest.com to GoogleReader!
Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post.
blog.songbirdnest.com to GoogleReader!
Robor