Month: October 2008

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.).

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