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Murphy replied on July 28, 2009 18:53 to the idea "Interface redesign ideas from Firefox 3.7 and 4 mockups" in Songbird:

That's what I aim for Laura :-D. I'm so sorry to have stolen your thunder Tim! I hope I did it justice. Do post any remaining ideas if you have them! Hopefully I will get around to making some super-cool mockups of Songbird with these changes. And I actually did discover it from the Lifehacker article! Although I don't usually go to Lifehacker, it was just a fluke that I got linked to that article.

edit- Well, I see you already posted some suggestions while I was writing this. :-)

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Murphy replied on July 28, 2009 18:22 to the idea "Songbird should help clean/manage your music library" in Songbird:

I'm all for the program helping you organize your music. In the import assistant topic that I posted a few days ago, I included the idea to retrieve metadata and album art when you are importing tracks so that they appear in your library correctly right away. It would definitely be beneficial though to be able to retrieve this information any time, such as after you have added music to your library as well, in case you didn't get the chance to do it properly upon importing.

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Murphy started following the idea "Songbird should help clean/manage your music library" in Songbird.
Murphy shared an idea in Songbird on July 28, 2009 17:13:

Interface redesign ideas from Firefox 3.7 and 4 mockups
Mozilla has recently added pages to their wiki showing off mockups for the next release of Firefox, 3.7, as well as the next major release, 4.0.

3.7: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/3.7_...
4.0: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_...

I think that the design changes, especially the 4.0 ones, are really great. Many of the changes, such as removing the menu bar and status bar, possibly having tabs on top, and removing the bookmarks bar by default, seem to work toward making the interface less cluttered like Google Chrome's. I think I just wanted to share these with people because I find them interesting, but some of the design changes could really help simplify the interface of Songbird and make it more unified with Firefox. Many of these changes wont even come to Firefox for a while though, so I really just want to share these ideas so that people can think about them in the meantime and maybe get new ideas about the interface in Songbird.

The first notable change is that they removed the menu bar from the window, which reduces a lot of clutter in the interface and could be adapted in Songbird. Menu bars take up some space, but most importantly, they add a lot of text that makes any interface more intimidating; I think that is why Microsoft's ribbon interface and Google Chrome replace the menu bar with more visually identifiable buttons for the user to access program options. In the case of Firefox/Chrome, they use buttons like Tools and Page ones to consolidate the important program options.

Firefox also sports this new bookmarks button to replace the bookmarks menu/bar. This could be useful in Songbird as it has no bookmarks menu bar, which makes it difficult to save pages for viewing later without taking up a lot of space in the main service pane.

I think it would also be a good idea to remove the stop/refresh and home button currently in Songbird, so that only the back and forward buttons are visible both in the library and in the browser. Then, it could use the consolidated go/stop/refresh button from the Firefox mockups. The add-bookmark button in Songbird could also use the star-in-the-awesome-bar design from Firefox.

Think of how simple it would be: if Songbird also showed the awesome bar while in the library, the navigation bar would be exactly the same while in the library and the browser, with just the forward and back buttons, awesome bar, and go/stop/refresh button at the end. This could make the transition between viewing the library and browsing the web much easier on the user.

The navigation bar could further be simplified by combining the awesome bar and search bar as shown in one of the mockups.

I think these changes could make the interface in Songbird soooo much simpler, and also more similar to Firefox's, helping the large number of people who alternate between using both programs to browse the web.

If any of you guys are interested in the Mozilla/Firefox community, I recommend reading about their developments to get new ideas for Songbird as well. You can subscribe to their weekly newsletter, about:mozilla (although inferior to the weekly birdbath): http://list-manage.com/subscribe.phtm...
Or, you can read the about:mozilla news on their blog or its rss feed: http://blog.mozilla.com/about_mozilla/

You can also read the blog/subscribe to the rss of Mozilla Labs, which posts updates on more experimental projects that the Mozilla team works on: http://labs.mozilla.org
A comment on the idea "Awesome Library Bar!" in Songbird:

Awesome! I can't wait to see what it actually looks like. – Murphy, on July 28, 2009 14:55
A comment on the update "Talk to us." in Songbird:

http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
I sees it. hehe – Murphy, on July 28, 2009 00:40
A comment on the idea "Author profiles on add-on website" in Songbird:

Definitely, Laura. I liked all of the discussion that was going on in the Songbird Bounty Center topic. – Murphy, on July 28, 2009 00:20
A comment on the idea "Put which Songbird version supports an add on please" in Songbird:

I definitely agree. I think Mozilla's add-on site is greatly improving how easy it is for users to use and share add-ons. I would like to like to see something like collections, so that we can easily share our add-ons with friends or find them again in one place if we need to reinstall Songbird on another computer. – Murphy, on July 28, 2009 00:18
Murphy started following the idea "Put which Songbird version supports an add on please" in Songbird.
A comment on the update "Talk to us." in Songbird:

I wish there was a SteveL to my brain. :-P – Murphy, on July 28, 2009 00:11
A comment on the update "Talk to us." in Songbird:

I just tested it by linking to the bug in the custom media topic and it showed up in the idea kitchen instantly... steve really is a magician, isn't it? – Murphy, on July 27, 2009 21:56
Murphy replied on July 27, 2009 21:53 to the idea "Make a custom media view without any coding abilities" in Songbird:

I just thought I would post the link to bugzilla bug I filed for this so it is linked to in the idea kitchen: http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...

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Murphy replied on July 27, 2009 21:39 to the update "Talk to us." in Songbird:

Laura, is there a way we can link an Idea Kitchen item with a bug ourselves? When you say they just need to be linked to in the thread, do you mean we can just post a link to the bugzilla post to the GetSatisfaction topic and the idea kitchen will automatically recognize it?
Murphy replied on July 27, 2009 18:39 to the idea "Create an undo for the remove option" in Songbird:

I agree, there should definitely be a way to undo after removing songs (and maybe even after editing metadata). I accidentally permanently removed an artist from my computer because I had manage media turned on and after removing the artist, Songbird didn't even send it to the trash, it just completely removed all traces of the files. It would be much less of a problem if a user could just hit apple/ctrl+z or go to edit>undo.

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Murphy started following the idea "Create an undo for the remove option" in Songbird.
Murphy replied on July 27, 2009 17:40 to the idea "Import assistant- helping you import media into your library" in Songbird:

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. :)

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Murphy replied on July 27, 2009 03:54 to the idea "Can we have a link to the Idea Kitchen under Additional Support Links, Laura?" in Songbird:

Sounds like a good idea to me too. I love the kitchen.

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Murphy started following the idea "Can we have a link to the Idea Kitchen under Additional Support Links, Laura?" in Songbird.
Murphy started following the question "Songbird Engineers" in Songbird.
Murphy started following the idea "option to choice to move or copy musics from Media Management" in Songbird.

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