Heads up Songbird developers!   (Non-developer Songbird users, feel free to move along… nothing to see here, etc. etc.)

We’re planning to push our next public release of Songbird (1.4.1) next week, and wanted to give you a quick rundown of what’s new for the release and what changes you’ll need to make in order to bring your extensions and Feathers up to date for 1.4.1.  The major change is a brand new Feather called Purple Rain.  One of the consistent pieces of feedback we had regarding Gonzo was that there was a lot of confusion between the concepts of collapsing/expanding (using the splitter/grippy) a display pane vs. showing/hiding (using the buttons).  We’ve done away with the concept of showing/hiding, and moved to large more obvious splitters.  Users were also having trouble with the small display pane header buttons/tabs (used in Album Art, mashTape, etc.) so we’ve changed that functionality as well.

For extension developers, this means if you’ve previously utilised the display pane header navigation elements, you’ll need to change to our new model which uses sub-menus available via the display pane add-on picker/drop-down menu.  The good news is it’s fairly straightforward, and is super extensible to allow your extension to create entirely unlimited sub-menus/menuitems.  We’ve got this all detailed in our Extension Update Guide for Songbird 1.4.1 available on the developer wiki.

For Featherers, things are somewhat more involved.  We listened to a lot of the usability feedback we got from our users.. so on the plus side, we think the Feather is much more straight-forward and obvious to use for new users.  The downside is it’s a fairly major update to get your Feather working.  You’ll want to take a look at our Feathers Update Guide for Songbird 1.4.1 to get all the salient details.  The easiest thing to do is to startup the Feathers Creation wizard and create a new Purple Rain based Feather to get all the layout and widget changes, and then pull any existing images.  If you’re trying to migrate a Gonzo based Feather, keep in mind a lot of dimension sizes have changed, so your graphics probably won’t drop in one for one.  It may be possible (though untested) to keep your Gonzo based Feather, and just update the CSS with the changes done in Purple Rain, and then create new images for the new elements (such as the new Media Views and display pane images).  If you’re having trouble with updating Feathers, please drop by our songbird-dev Google Group for more info and some help!

(many many thanks to Michael Purses, one of Songbird GetSatisfaction champs for pitching in this weekend to help put together the Feathers Update Guide)