Murphy's dashboard

Murphy replied on November 07, 2009 14:50 to the idea "Make a fusion between Miro and Songbird" in Songbird:

I don't think they should fuse their code into one piece of software; I think it would be better if they just formed a kind of partnership where they link to one another and maybe try to share some code or interface design choices so that it is easier for people to discover both and use them side by side. Their goals are so similar that anyone who uses one would probably like to know about the other, so both websites should at least but links at the bottom of their home page just like thepiratebay links to Miro and Firefox to help spread the word.

Murphy started following the idea "Songbird should actively search for missing codecs during imports" in Songbird.

Murphy replied on November 03, 2009 19:23 to the idea "Interface redesign ideas from Firefox 3.7 and 4 mockups" in Songbird:

For those interested, there are finally some Mac mockups available: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_...

I must admit that I abandoned Firefox a while ago because it is just so slow on my Mac, and started using Chrome. But I think both browsers are very respectable. It looks like 4.0 will function more similarly to Chrome, but still has its own identity, both of which are great things.

A comment on the idea "Album art media view ideas" in Songbird:

That is such a neat idea. I've always been unsure about whether or not it would be a good thing to have images of the artists in a media view because I try to not my perception of the artists influence how I feel about their music. They would definitely be fun to try at least, and as I mentioned before, it might not be too hard to do because it could use the images available on last.fm. They wouldn't be nice and cut out of course, but it would be a lot easier. In any case, your mockup looks really badass. :) – Murphy, on October 20, 2009 02:03

Murphy started following the idea "Auto-tag" in Songbird.

Murphy started following the idea "Rip a DVD (yes DVD not just CD's)." in Songbird.

Murphy replied on September 28, 2009 15:57 to the idea "Album art media view ideas" in Songbird:

Thank you for phrasing it as "people" coming up with rather complex concepts instead of "Murphy" =P.

Truthfully, if a really great media view was made I would probably use it all the time and rarely switch to any others, so it might seem unnecessary to have all of these different ones made into add-ons. However, I'm not sure what the perfect media view would be, and I think it is at least interesting to consider different versions and see which ones appeal to people. I continue making mockups to share ideas with people so they might have an easier time realizing an actual add-on one day.

I agree that existing software such as iTunes already has good media views, and I even posted some screenshots of it to show people what it can do in case they don't use the software. But even iTunes has a list view, a grid view, and a coverflow view, which shows that they don't know which one will be perfect for everybody. Which one of the three is your favorite? I know some people who use the grid view, and some people who miss seeing lists of their artists too much and use the filtered list views instead. All of my ideas are basically variations on these two types. In any case, I'm sure that at some point we will start seeing more media views come out, and maybe the team will even work on an official album art one. Until then, we can talk about which ones we like best so that developers might know what to focus on.

Murphy replied on September 26, 2009 01:07 to the idea "Album art media view ideas" in Songbird:

I made this mockup trying to make the simplest media view and interface for a music program I could. Maybe it could give people ideas for simpler feathers and media views.



I realized that the now-playing area of the program doubles a lot of information if you still have the song selected in the media view, so I excluded it and just tried to make the now playing information displayed as prominently in the media view as I could. In case you leave the now playing list and song, there is an arrow in the right side of the title bar that you could click to easily get back. I also wanted to show an album filter like this that is one cover wide because it uses space well, really makes the album you have selected stand out, and it would feel more like any other vertically-oriented list.

I described it in more detail here in case anyone is interested in this sort of thing.

Murphy replied on September 26, 2009 00:39 to the question "Ripping FLAC and cheerleading." in Songbird:

But if it were really random, there would always be the minutely small chance that the exact same song would be chosen again =P.

As for the flac ripping, I too am praying for OSX support. In the meantime though, there are some other programs you could use that are excellent for ripping to flac right now.

XLD is the program that what.cd recommends for ripping to flac in osx, and it is also great for encoding things to and from flac. You can check it out here: http://tmkk.hp.infoseek.co.jp/xld/ind...

And Max is another popular ripping program that can do flac as well: http://sbooth.org/Max/

With 2146 CDs though, you might have to worry about child labor laws when employing your daughter for the job :D. It might be worth it to rip to a few different computers to save time and keep your drives from over heating.

Murphy started following the idea "Call for developer: add-on to play podcasts & audiobook" in Songbird.

Murphy replied on September 16, 2009 23:34 to the idea "Album art media view ideas" in Songbird:

I can't try the Zune software because I use OSX, but I saw this screenshot of it today and I thought it was worth showing because it has a really nice design. I hope that people find all of these screenshots I keep posting as interesting as I do... What? What's that you say? No one does? Oh dear.

I like how instead of a service pane, they use a horizontal strip with all of the locations you can navigate to on top. I find that I spend nearly all of my time in Songbird and iTunes in my library, and the service pane is often just taking room away from the media. And I think the media view that they made is wonderful. It has a tall artist list like iTunes 9 has also added, but unlike iTunes, the album filter looks like it would really be worth using because it displays as an album art grid.



Microsoft doesn't really have have a track record of simple or pleasant interfaces, but I think this is pretty nice.

Murphy started following the idea "Space bar - Pause in Filter pane media view" in Songbird.

Murphy started following the idea "BookBird = songbird + ebooks + manage + bookworm" in Songbird.

Murphy started following the idea "Right click functionality / drop arrow for page back button" in Songbird.

Murphy replied on September 14, 2009 00:24 to the idea "Album art media view ideas" in Songbird:

iTunes 9 was released recently and it features a new media view by default! (although you can still bring back the old way if you so choose)

It lets you have tall vertical filters instead of the stubby ones up top, which I think is good because you can really see a lot of artists at a time.



You can also add other filter columns, such as albums, but I don't like that way as much because you have to find the album by name without the aid of album art.

Murphy replied on September 12, 2009 08:02 to the idea "Album art media view ideas" in Songbird:

I haven't made anything in a while, but I saw this interface mockup by a man named Laurent Baumann the other day, and it inspired me to make something new. It's more of my vision of the perfect music program than it is a media view, but in any case, I tried to do something new with the media view so I figured I would post it here. I posted a full explanation of it on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40804119...



Double clicking an album would make the cover flip around and enlarge to display the song listing.

Murphy started following the idea "iTunes 9 homeshare alternative" in Songbird.

Murphy replied on September 09, 2009 18:49 to the idea "Addon idea - now playing record player" in Songbird:

I saw this image while watching a liveblog of the Apple event today and thought for a minute that they had actually made it possible to play the new "iTunes LPs" on a wooden record player in iTunes. Then I realized that that is just the cover of the Grateful Dead album

Murphy replied on September 01, 2009 12:04 to the idea "Modular Gui" in Songbird:

This would be great. It would be very easy to customize your setup by dragging everything around. And I think you should really be able to drag everything. It would even be neat if you could drag the service pane to the top of the window to make it a thin horizontal pane instead of a thick vertical one to save space and really let people customize the way Songbird looks.

Murphy started following the idea "Modular Gui" in Songbird.