Songbird 0.5

Song­bird 0.5 was relea­sed last week, and, while not tech­ni­cally incon­sis­tent with claims that its RSS par­sing had been “impro­ved,” I was disap­poin­ted to see that two of my three pod­cast subsc­rip­tions still aren’t coming through. The pro­blem has been migra­ted to a new bug tic­ket.

There’s also a new “Media Views” fea­ture, which looks pro­mi­sing. As of now the only add-on to take advan­tage of this is a sim­ple tag-cloud library view, but I ima­gine things could get really ela­bo­rate there. Their line, “Tired of music pla­yers that look like spreadsheets?”, has me anti­ci­pa­ting all kinds of inno­va­tive brow­sing envi­ron­ments; pic­ture a navi­ga­ble mood-cluster terrain, or a pan­na­ble, zoo­ma­ble, clic­ka­ble his­tory wave­graph. I’m seriously con­si­de­ring teaching myself enough XUL to be able to write a hot­ness add-on.

Ama­zingly, 0.1 was first relea­sed over two years ago. And their relea­ses have code-names like Bowie and Eno? Who knew.