Monthly Archives: November 2007

Songbird 0.3

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Last week we release Songbird 0.3. It’s the release I’ve been working on since I joined the Pioneers of the Inevitable in January. There are a whole lot of improvements in there to various parts of the application – the database engine was rewritten to be faster and more extensible, we added tabs to the browser, etc – but that’s not what’s really cool. What’s really cool is the new Web API we’ve developed.

Web pages being displayed in Songbird can (with the user’s permission) interact with pretty much the whole music player. We’re exposing both basic playback controls (what’s the current track, play, pause, next, etc) and access to the music library (see what’s in the library, add to it, etc). This means any music web site can offer a really rich integrated experience. Sites like last.fm or Pandora could offer recommendations without requiring you to download a plugin or desktop application, music stores like Emusic or Amazon.com wouldn’t need to provide a separate desktop applications and could offer the kind of seamless player / web-service integration that only Apple is providing at the moment, and there are a million other possibilities that we haven’t even thought of yet. Right now you can see this at work on The Hype Machine.

Steve and I have been hacking on Greasemonkey, getting it integrated with the bird and writing userscripts that add new functionality to web sites that don’t yet know about Songbird. My most complete hack is one that adds album previews (courtesy of Amazon.com’s music store) to album reviews on Metacritic and Pitchfork. It’s useful and its fun!

PS: yes, it supports your bloody iPod…

Flock 1.0

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Flock 1.0 has finally shipped.

Almost two and a half years ago I met up with Bart Decrem for coffee in Palo Alto. He was working with Geoffrey Arone to build a company to write a new browser. Bart wasn’t fully clear on exactly what it would look like or exactly what it would do but he believed that it was important to build a web browser that would break new ground in functionality and experience. He showed me a prototype that showed off two pretty amazing features: really simple bookmarking shared bookmarking and the ability to take pieces of web pages and store them for later reuse. I was excited so I quit my job and joined up.

The first day we were working out of the Bessemer offices in Menlo Park. Beyond Bart, Geoffrey and myself the team included Daryl Houston, Chris Messina, Andy Smith and Anthony Young. Pretty quickly the vision came together. Even though Daryl is the only one of us left at the company the 1.0 product that was just released this week is pretty much what we wanted to build.

In the past couple of years the company has had its ups and downs. There were personality conflicts that were handled pretty poorly (especially by me). There were times of hyper-productivity (I hacked for basically 24 hours straight in a hotel room in Portland to get a feature ready for 0.1) and unproductivity (what did I actually do in the last half of 2006?). But the high-level vision remained clear and nobody working on the product ever doubted that what we were doing was important.