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.

Here’s what we’re doing and why…

We want to make it super easy for people to find and install add-ons they find interesting. To that end, we’ve simplified the UI and added search, tags, and categories.

We also want to improve the overall exerience for add-on developers. We’re extracting and displaying more of your add-on’s data – your icon, your homepage url, friends who’ve contributed, and more. We’ve also improved our upload validation to better adhere to Mozilla’s spec. This should make it dead simple for Mozilla devs to port their add-ons to Songbird. We’ve added feeds for add-on comments and you can now include HTML in the “Description” that appears front and center on your add-on’s detail page. Anything goes (within reason), so have at it!

When we began this project it quickly became obvious that we needed to rewrite the site from scratch. This took longer than we would’ve liked, but it was totally necessary. There was just too much stuff that needed to happen under the hood. The good news is we’re now in a great position to be able to add new features more quickly and more easily. Hold us to it!

We’re also trying out a new visual style. Please let us know what you think. We’re excited to hear your thoughts on the new look.

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