Meanwhile, in the day job

Published:

A couple of months ago my role at Songbird shifted a little. Up till then I was working on the core product, fixing bugs and adding features across the whole product as part of the bird engineering team. Since we started working on 0.7 (aka Fugazi) I moved into a group initially called strategic development which then split and merged with the design and product group.

We've been looking through feedback from our users, primarily through surveys to determine what features we can add that will address most users' feature requests. Doing this outside engineering has been great since they can focus on improving the core product, keeping a clear vision of what the product we want should be, while we're working directly from end-user feedback.

My first project was a new Last.fm addon using our new playback history API. It was installed by default for all Songbird 0.7 users so it's had quite a bit of use, some good feedback, some bug fixes and now some translations:

My next project was taking Georges' Seeqpod addon, updating it and getting it ready for inclusion in Songbird. It wasn't ready for Fugazi, but hopefully it'll be ready for Genesis (our next release). Seeqpod is an MP3 search engine and our addon attempts to integrate it nicely into Songbird. I streamed a lot of random music while developing it. I spent a whole day listening to 80s Metallica.

Now I'm working on better music store integration using Songbird's Web Page API.