Murphy's dashboard

I think the volume slider looks really good there. It will also look better balanced when you are playing a song or artist with a longer name so it takes up more room on the left side.

I just realized where the progress bar is, and I like it a lot. I don't know how much of the interface it is possible to change by coding a feather, but I do like how simple it looks not having the status bar above the player controls. I'm worried though what to do for the add-ons that keep icons there, like last.fm and personas. Maybe you could try to make a mockup of this with a status bar; it wouldn't look as simple, but it might be more practical, and then you could move the service pane buttons back on it and move the album art and song information all the way to the left.

I think it would be great if a feather made it possible to navigate to playlists and other places without the service pane showing. I currently hide my left service pane using the Pane Buttons add-on because it saves so much room and I don't use anything in it too often anyway, but it would be great to still have a way to select playlists and stuff. I'll keep thinking about it and I'll post any ideas if they come to me. Right now I am wondering how exactly the tab bar will come up; maybe the forward and back buttons could be on the tab bar, which would only be visible when you open up a new tab. That could simplify the look even more. – Murphy, on June 28, 2009 03:38

I made a topic a few months ago about integrating a new tab page into Songbird similar to what they are developing for Firefox: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
At the time, they were frequently posting progress about the project on Mozilla Labs, so I was hopeful that it would find its way into Firefox 3.5 and eventually Songbird. They seem to have taken a break from it for a while, so maybe we should wait for a while on the new tab page idea until they finalize it.

As for the feather mockups, they look very nice. It would be interesting to see album art incorporated into the control panel as you have it to free up room in the main service pane (although I'm afraid that it might be a little small. I have always hoped that they will make it possible to have more service panes so that the art could be put somewhere else than the main service pane). Maybe instead of cramming the song info and volume all to the left side of the main controls, you could only have the song info on the left and move the volume control to the right. That way you could also make the volume control straight instead of circular, since it can be difficult to adjust circular dials in programs (I used to have some trouble with circular volume dial in the Winamp skin MMD3). And what exactly are the items up top that say Library, Playlist 1, Playlist 2?

Application launchers, such as Quicksilver and Quick Search Box, and also Firefox's awesome bar I believe, weigh results based on how often the user chooses them. I think this is the best way to order them since it is molded by the user's actions and gives the statistically best choices. You may have a song rated 1 star and a song rated 5 stars, but if you keep picking the one star song after typing in some term for whatever reason, chances are better that you'll pick it again next time you search for the same term.

If anyone wants to work on the realization of this great idea:

Probably the fastes & best way to implement it, is to write a user script for the Ubiquity-Addon (about:ubiquity). I can think only of Pros:

1.) You don't have to worry much about interface implementation & add-on management stuff. You only need Javascript.
2.) It would be available right now through Ubiquity.
3.) Some time after Taskfox hits Firefox final, it probably will be available in Songbird, too. Ubiquity & Taskfox are very similar, so the script probably don't need many adjustments => voilà, we have our tuned awesomebar.

It's gradually becoming possible. :) – Murphy, on June 26, 2009 14:59

I was trying to design it so that you could find whatever you wanted to play from your library quickly, whether it was an individual song, album, artist, or playlist. I'm not quite sure what you meant about the results opening in a tab, because it seems like that would perform the exact same function as the current filter bar in Songbird; if you type a term into the filter bar, it basically gives you a page of results like you suggested. I was trying to make it so that you could play what you wanted to quickly from the drop down menu without having to alter your actual library content like filtering does; basically a souped up jump-to-file dialog incorporated into the awesome bar.

I have a little over 12,000 songs in my library, so I know there can be a lot of items to sift through, but in testing, by the time I typed 3 or 4 letters of the query, it is basically narrowed down to what I was looking for. Just like you said, if you start typing in a few letters of a song named "xyz123", it would be displayed and you could play it very quickly. However, in your first mockup, you started typing in the band's name instead of the song name, which would make it tough to get individual results for songs. I think if I wanted to play a specific song, I would start searching for the song's name, and if I wanted to play an entire artist or album, I would start searching for the artist or album by name.

You said you wanted it to be like Firefox, which is what I was actually basing my design off of. The awesome bar always lists all of the results for the term you type in, and with Taskfox incorporated into the program in the future, the awesome bar will also be able to navigate further into results to get more information about them like I had in the mockup. I was afraid that making a page with results would be more like a Google search than Firefox's awesome bar, and it would be counterintuitive, since the purpose of the bar is to enable you to find something quickly and undisruptively. – Murphy, on June 25, 2009 15:08

Are you talking about typing inside of a filter to get to an item quickly? I have problems with this all the time as well, but I've never gotten a message pop up like you did.
I made a topic with problems I was having:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

There are a few other topics with this suggestion that you can support.

http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

I have been thinking about how this could work, and I've come up with some ideas. I added images to the search results to help you visually find what you are looking for. Albums and songs use cover artwork, and the artist uses last.fm artwork.



The results could include artists, albums, songs, and playlists. I based some of the ideas in this mockup off of Google's Quick Search Box. However, Quick Search Box uses the "more items" method like in your mockup, but I just feel like it makes you do too much unnecessary navigating. In this mockup I use a scrollbar like Firefox's awesome bar does instead. I also added the option to navigate into the items. This is why there are arrows at the right side of the results. You could use the keyboard arrows to go back and forth. For example, hitting right on an artist would display all of the albums.



After hitting right on an album or playlist, it could present you with the list of songs. At any time you could hit enter to play the item. You could even hit right on a song to have some options instead of just playing it. This could help people quickly perform tasks on a song such as adding it to the now playing list, editing the metadata, rating it, and tagging it. Add-ons could even add new tasks such as finding lyrics or a tab of the song.



edit - Damn, I always find some mistake in my mockups after I post them. Pretend I actually have a playlist called "Acoustic Beatles Songs". :P

For Quicksilver fans, check out Google's Quick Search Box, because it is very similar and developed by the person who developed Quicksilver. I also made a GS topic suggesting a module for it: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

I love reading about projects in the Mozilla Labs like Jetpack and Ubiquity, and I am excited that they could be incorporated into Songbird one day because it shares code with Firefox. Maybe when some of the labs projects are further along and eventually integrated with Firefox, the Songbird team will be more likely to add them. Jetpack would be a great way for people to make add-ons for Songbird more easily, and would hopefully make the community more involved with extending it like it has with Firefox.