If I was building an OS today I’d be building what Google just announced. Like most heavy technology users I’ve been moving heavily toward hosted web applications over the past few years. I don’t use Evolution or mutt anymore, I use GMail. I don’t organize my photos on my laptop and use my own hosted …
Tag Archives: songbird
New challenges
So I’ve been at a new job for a couple of weeks now. I left Songbird around when we shipped 1.0 to seek some new challenges. I’ve been doing Mozilla browser development for seven and a half years and I’m sick of it. I still think building browsers is one of the most interesting fields …
Meanwhile, in the day job
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 …
Ten Years
Ten years ago Netscape released the source code to their browser. They called it Mozilla, I downloaded and built it at my work at the time. I didn’t manage to build it immediately, but I worked it out in the end. Somehow I’ve spent most of the past seven years working with the platform. I …
I told you so
Six months ago I predicted: This kind of bundling is often done by the bad guys. If you install Apple’s Quicktime codecs on Windows every update will trigger an iTunes install, even if you haven’t installed iTunes. I’m sure they’ll do the same thing for Safari on Windows. I’m not sure what iTunes’ market share …
API Design
Recently at Songbird I’ve been working on some guidelines to help us build better APIs. One of the most exciting things we’re hoping to offer users and developers are APIs that give them access to their music and the ability to extend their and others’ music players. Getting these APIs right can be hard and …
LUG Radio Live
I’m kind of terrified of public speaking. So I do it as much as possible. I will be speaking at LUG Radio Live USA 2008 in San Francisco in April. I’m going to be talking about Songbird and the Open Media Web focusing on why what we’re working on over at the nest is especially …
Songbird 0.3
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.