I’ll list some pros and cons:

Pros:

• The title bar will inherit styles defined by the OS – eg: rounded corners, title text beveling, aqua/graphite buttons.
• The window will behave like any other window – eg: resizing is faster, dragged between spaces works, window shadow is native, ability to show/hide the tool bar.
• Modal dialogs appear as sheets that are attached to the window which means that modal dialogs will always be modal. (this is specific to Mac OS)

Cons:

• Lose the ability to right click on the title bar to toggle between layouts and feathers. You can still switch feathers using the View menu. The default key combination for toggling between layouts on Mac OS is command + shift + m.
• The title bar will look out of place if the rest of the application is not styled to match the OS. Gonzo’s current visual design matches Mac OS pretty well so no worries here.

Given these points, how would you feel if we turned on the native title bar on Windows and Linux? Keep in mind that turning on the native title bar would mean that the rest of the application would need to be updated to reflect the OS theme to match the title bar. So the real question is: Would you like it if Songbird matched your OS theme by default just like Firefox? Here’s a sneak peak…

By the way, we are just talking about the default feather here. We’ll make sure that any decisions we make wont affect feathers developed by the community.

• New UI – We are still adding the final touches to the UI but we went ahead and made it the default in the hopes of getting more eyes on it. The new UI includes significant visual and functional changes such as:
  • A new dedicated tab that contains all of your media content
  • Ability to show/hide the service pane when viewing webpages (it’s automatically hidden when viewing web content, but a button will allow you to toggle show/hide)
  • Ability to choose where the player controls live, the top or bottom of the window, based on user preference (View menu -> Player Controls or right click on the player control pane)
• Faster Media Scan – Scanning for media on your local drive should be super fast now. We did a quick test and saw that scanning in 1,000 tracks took half as much time as before. We’re curious to hear what kinds of improvements you see when scanning in your music collection.
• First Run Wizard – The wizard will walk you through EULA, media scanning, and installing recommended add-ons when launching the application for the first time. You’ll need to create a new profile to be presented with the wizard.
• Drag & Drop – You should be able to drag and drop all sorts of things in the application now. Give it a try and let us know if you think we’ve missed anything that you think you might want to drag and drop.

Any feedback or bug report that you send us is going to make the final release build that much better – please keep them coming!

1. Right click on player control area in Gonzo
2. Select “Display at Top”
3. Player controls move to the top of the window!

Kreeger landed the code earlier today so you should be able to try this out in tomorrow’s nightly build.

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!

We want to kick off this project with a request for feedback regarding the layout of the application. We’ve reviewed the feedback that we’ve received from the community over the years and identified a few possible directions that we could take. We would love to hear your thoughts – please let us know which option you prefer and for what reasons. Thanks!

Option A – Rhymes with “My Moons”

• Layout of UI elements are similar to a certain popular media player
• Familiar to those who have used Songbird in the past
• All the important controls are at the top of the window
• Songbird looks like a media player with an embedded web browser

Option B – Designed For Songbird

• Navigation (green) and media controls (pink) are separated to minimize any confusion (eg: previous track button and back button)
• Unified navigation elements don’t change much whether browsing through your library or the web
• Location of the back button is consistent with web browsers and OS file managers
• Songbird looks like a media player and web browser hybrid

Here’s a screenshot of a quick demo – it uses HTML but the same can be done in XUL. See how the corners of the background image don’t show through the edges of the porthole like before?

Download example source code.

Download Songbird 0.5rc1 (release notes)

For all the Windows users out there, we have a shiny new treat, MTP Device Support! Most portable media players and cell phones integrate the MTP spec so try plugging in your device and share your findings on the MTP Device Compatibility Wiki Page. FYI – the extension requires Windows XP-SP2 or Vista, as well as WMP v11.

Songbird 0.5 includes a new Device API that allows developers to easily add device support to Songbird. Our new MTP support is built on it, and we are in the process of porting our iPod Device Support extension to it. In the interim you may notice some issues with iPod support.

This release also introduces the ability for developers to create alternate graphical presentations for Libraries and playlists, called Media Views. Mig created an example Media View called the Artist Detail List which can be installed from the Add-on Site.

Add-on developers – Now would be a good time to make sure that your add-on is compatible with 0.5.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 0.5 final makes it out the door.

Here are some additional resources for developers:

• API Changes Since 0.4
• Getting started with Media Pages
• How to update 0.4 Feathers to 0.5
• Full list of bugs fixed (200+)