Oct 17, 2007 7:05 pm
RC testers, you will have no doubt notice a few changes to the UI. Among others is a new animated spinner and an animated download icon when you have active downloads. These animations are done using pngs rather than gifs. Animated pngs have full alpha channel support, which means you don’t have to make your animations on a fixed background color.
To see the Songbird slide down the slide, view this blog post in the latest RC version of Songbird.
Oct 1, 2007 2:54 pm
While reading a newspaper, one of the most important things I kept on hand was a dictionary. Sure, today’s published world doesn’t kill itself on word choice but there are words that I frequently forget even though I’ve seen them a million times. Words, like “riposte” used in the headline for a recent story on NYTimes.com aren’t ones I typically carry in my “short-term” memory.
But in today’s world you’ve got the Internet, so I did what I typically do to look up a word, I select it by double-clicking on it and paste it into the Google search box in my browser. But wait, if you’re at NYTimes.com they automatically do a search for a definition and give it to you in a new window. That just saved me at least 4 steps and was exactly what I wanted. Cut-Copy-Paste has been eliminated for an often used case of it, searching.
Being such a great idea, I decided to brainstorm a use for this in Songbird, and came up with:
And if you haven’t yet, you should check out the last blessed nightly build. It isn’t altogether bad (if you think it is, you should file bugs). If you haven’t signed up as a bug filing radical on bugzilla yet, you should. Not only can you file bugs, you can help us test and fix them. We might just send you a free t-shirt.
Sep 12, 2007 6:07 pm
We’ve been in the new nest for a month and it looks like we’ve found a groove. Now that we’re in the groove, we’ve been making up for lost time and reassessing our priorities as we draw close to the next release. We’ve also started planning for beyond our next release and making sure we’re giving our audiences what they want, and more importantly, delivering a more consumer-grade experience. I’ve been excited to see a few of the un-dead bug reports in bugzilla finally coming to fruition and I’m sure you’ll be pleased with the work.
Meanwhile, enjoy some Zombies vs Ninjas wallpaper:
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Aug 23, 2007 3:03 pm
Sorry for the long lapse in posts. We’ve not just been busy with moving, but busy interviewing new birders and, of course, busy getting to the next release. We’ve been cleaning up and documenting our new APIs and we’ve been adding a few more touches of polish on many areas in the UI.
Meanwhile, if you’re in SF tomorrow and if you’re into t-shirts, Songbird t-shirts will be featured in Graphic Content at Space Gallery.
Jul 11, 2007 2:41 pm
In our efforts to improve Songbird’s user-experience, we continually revisit and refine our interfaces to provide the levels of quality you’d expect from a consumer-grade piece of software. Spend too much time designing an single interface and eventually you become numb to its idiosyncrasies. Let it cool and revisit it with a fresh perspective, research, and seek other opinions in the meantime. Each release is an opportunity to refine both visual and interaction design elements.
On the visual design front, we’re continuing to refine the visual design of our flagship feathers, Rubberducky, with new controls, better legibility and contrast, and a new sleeker faceplate.
