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.