cosmia's dashboard

cosmia marked one of Murphy's replies in Songbird as useful. Murphy replied to the question "Ripping FLAC and cheerleading.".

cosmia started following the idea "Songbird Vista Aero style feathers with transparency" in Songbird.

cosmia started following the idea "Proposal: unskinned mode "Songbird Naked"" in Songbird.

Murphy's reply to "Interface redesign ideas from Firefox 3.7 and 4 mockups" was just promoted to the most useful! cosmia and 3 other people think it's one of the best replies.

Okay, I think it is pretty much finished now. I wanted to make a few final changes, and I thought I would post the photoshop file of it so that people could move things around if they wanted to test anything out. Or if you just want to see all the layers that I end up having after making one of these things =P. I organized them all nicely for the occasion. It also seems fitting in a community for open-source software; if anyone ever wants me to post the .psds of any mockups so they can try something out, just let me know and I will post them.

Here is the .psd file: http://www.mediafire.com/?manzhy3hhdz



I added the Songbird icon to the top left to give the interface some branding, just like CS4's. I think it makes the window a little easier to identify when you switch to it. Maybe people could even change it for their feathers to make the songbird fit into to their design scheme. I removed the "Tools" and "View" text on the buttons, because I think people would be able to figure them out by icon, and Chrome doesn't have text on theirs either. It also makes some room for the awesome bar so it can be more centered in the title bar. I added some simple instruction text in the awesome bar so that people know what it can do. Finally, I changed the min/max/close buttons, because it appears that in Windows 7 they are (conveniently for this mockup) centered in the title bar rather than attached to the top.

One good thing about this interface is that I think it would be easier to skin using either personas or feathers, since the interface has larger, simpler surface areas. Especially since some programs are trying to make theming easier for everybody.

Maybe one day, if they release Firefox 4 mockups for OSX, I will attempt to recreate the interface for OSX too. I think it would look very neat with the OSX metal on the title and control bar, and like Chrome on OSX, it wouldn't even need the Tool and View buttons because the menu bar is always showing in OSX anyway.

cosmia marked one of Murphy's replies in Songbird as useful. Murphy replied to the idea "Interface redesign ideas from Firefox 3.7 and 4 mockups". cosmia and 6 other people think it's one of the best replies.

cosmia started following the idea "Interface redesign ideas from Firefox 3.7 and 4 mockups" in Songbird.

Murphy's reply to "Import assistant- helping you import media into your library" was just promoted to the most useful! cosmia and 3 other people think it's one of the best replies.

I thought about this a little more (I do like this idea quite a bit) and thought of a small problem: what happens when someone clicks the edit metadata button? Currently, the metadata editing window slides down just like this import assistant window would, so would it just slide out on top of the import assistant window? No, I think that would be too confusing. I wanted to make it so that you could quickly edit the metadata of the tracks you are about to import without leaving the window.

How about this: when you click the "edit metadata" button, the import assistant window would just expand to accommodate the metadata fields. An added benefit of the solution would be that when you select songs, you wouldn't even have to hit the shortcut to open the metadata editor; it would just stay open and update the fields for whatever songs are selected.

I removed the album art part from the metadata area to make it fit better, and because I figured you could just drag album art into the the album art wells that are in the song list. I also added a tags field because I figured that importing would be a great time to tag your tracks if it is one day possible in Songbird.

I think it looks nice. :)

cosmia started following the idea "Import assistant- helping you import media into your library" in Songbird.

cosmia started following the idea "Rebuild profile Tool" in Songbird.

cosmia started following the idea "Standardized artist image database from last.fm" in Songbird.

cosmia started following the question "Are there plans to make a Songbird discussion forum?" in Songbird.

cosmia replied on July 15, 2009 17:55 to the update "Introducing Get Satisfaction 2.0: A New Take on Customer Community" in Get Satisfaction:

I agree with Murphy and Alex. I feel like this new design is a step backwards, making it harder to navigate, find new discussions, and it just looks overall unwelcoming. When you are accustomed to a certain look and feel of a website, any changes can take some time to adjust to, but these don't just change the look and feel, they change the functionality of the website. It is hard for devoted users of a product to keep up on topics when the main page is such a summarized version of the community activity.

At least, you should definitely bring back the backdrop colors of topics to liven this place up a little. I think it would also help if the company could decide what content their main page displays, so they can decide how much it is just an overview of topics, and whether it shows the newest topics in each section or the most popular ones. It is not very helpful to returning users to see the same popular topics displayed in each section.

cosmia started following the idea "Starting a new Add-On Project" in Songbird.

cosmia marked one of Murphy's replies in Songbird as useful. Murphy replied to the idea "Awesome Library Bar!". cosmia and 5 other people think it's one of the best replies.

cosmia started following the idea "Google Quick Search Box plugin for Songbird" in Songbird.

cosmia started following the idea "A listening history page with better integration and more information than last.fm" in Songbird.

cosmia started following the idea "This is what the Songbird official release icon should look like." in Songbird.

cosmia started following the idea "Make a custom media view without any coding abilities" in Songbird.

cosmia started following the idea "Import Bookmarks from other Web Browsers" in Songbird.

cosmia started following the idea "Songbird Toolbar for Taskbar?" in Songbird.