David Emery Online

Tuneless

27 June 2006

Finally, a mac version of Songbird – the iTunes clone competitor – has been released. However, it’s only at version “not-yet-ready-to-be-called-0.2”, and boy does it need a lot of work.

Now, I’m quite happy to forgive somethings as it’s obviously alpha software, such as the default setup options failing when trying to install a non-existant extension; or a “Cheesy Video Window” (their title, not mine) appearing with no content on launch.

However, these guys quite obviously aren’t mac users, as the mac interface is awful.

For a start it suffers from all the problems that Firefox – on which it is based – suffers from, such as non-native “faked” interface controls (which almost behave right, but not quite). But on top of that, instead of trying to make a “mac like” interface like the Firefox team have (and they’re doing a pretty good job) they’ve just ported the windows interface whole sale.

To start with, the main window, which looks like the iTunes window, is itself contained in another “proper” window, so that it has two sets of window controls, and two window titles. Of course, the inner window controls are “windows” controls, in both style and position (on the top right, not top left). Also, clicking the “inner” close button quits the app, but clicking the the “proper” Mac OS X close button just closes the window.

Oh yes, a quick tip for anybody that looks in the preferences (which you get at through the File menu, not the standard “App menu” location) – to get out of them, press the “Escape” key. There’s no actual “close”, or “OK”, or “Cancel” buttons.

Why would you need them?

Other then the obvious interface deficiencies, some of which I’m sure are down to the pre-alpha nature of the release, they also really need to get a decent graphic designer in house. The default “skin” is truly awful – who thought having patterned backgrounds behind a list view was a good idea? There’s also problems with bad aliasing on the corners of all sorts of the interface elements – such as the source column.

Interestingly, the Songbird site features some quite nice bird illustrations, so there’s some good talent in there somewhere. Also, if you drag the small “dot” just below the “Now Playing” display screen, you can collapse the main toolbar to something much thinner – it looks much nicer then the standard iTunes-ripoff version.

It’s a shame, as we could really do with a bit of decent iTunes competition on the Mac – if only to keep Apple on their toes – but Songbird has a long way to go…