David Emery OnlinePlagiarism looses marks
9 February 2006
Songbird is the very definition of bloatware.
It’s also a perfect example of software design without imagination.
“I know”, says one slightly bored programmer to the other, “Let’s make a music player like iTunes”
“Great idea! Why don’t we build in a web browser too, ‘cause every music player needs to browse the web”
“Brilliant!”
Quite why songbird is based on firefox and has a whole browser built in possibly nobody knows – my only guess is that they were so busy copying iTunes when they came to the music store they decided they needed something similar.
Don’t get me wrong – I would really quite like to see a credible alternative to iTunes; decent competition always works best for the market, and we’d no doubt get more interesting new features because of it. Songbird, however, is just a simple rip off – quite nice in the places they’ve directly copied iTunes, but abysmal where they’ve done something on their own.
Also, their site doesn’t fit on 800×600…
C-, Please try harder