Just want to download it?  http://getsongbird.com is for you.  Waiting for your automatic updates?  We’ll post ‘em later today (Tuesday in the US). See the 12/23 update below.

(Kanyebird is gonna let you finish, but he thinks the Gonzo feather was the best feather of all time.)

Update (12/23/09): The Gonzo feather really, really did not want to go away; we fixed yet another Gonzo-related bug (number 19365, if you really want to know) and released Songbird 1.4.3.  Automatic updates will come out early next week.

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.

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!