Alphabetization: Part III

In what I think may be the first truly novel brow­sing envi­ron­ment deve­lo­ped for Song­bird, ♪Photo dis­plays your library as a pile of artist pho­tos pulled from Last.fm. They can be drag­ged around and rea­rran­ged, and their orien­ta­tion is remem­be­red bet­ween Song­bird ses­sions. In my tes­ting it is unu­sably slow, howe­ver it is remar­kably exci­ting to see inno­va­tion like this before Song­bird is even out of beta. It would be an easy mat­ter to imple­ment a “snap” fea­ture that would clus­ter simi­lar artists together based on Last.fm data, or to pro­vide an alter­nate view by album cover rather than artist photo — honestly, who can recog­nize some of these artist photos?

Any­way, as it’s only a cou­ple weeks old I’m sure it will improve, and it demons­tra­tes just what ama­zing things can be done with the Song­bird plat­form. Hope­fully we’ll see more daring and cle­ver exten­sions like this when Song­bird hits 1.0 next month. I’m con­si­de­ring making it my full-time pla­yer in order to collect more sta­tis­tics (play dates, play counts, added dates, etc.).