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Songbird the Open Source iTunes?
An anonymous reader writes "Cnet has an interesting story about a company about to release an open source alternative to iTunes. Apparently, the software can be used with a multitude of music services." From the article: "Apple's iTunes is 'like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com,' Lord said. 'We love Apple, and appreciate and thank them for setting the bar in terms of user experience. But it's inevitable that the market architecture changes as it matures.'"
It isn't iTunes that prevents me from "buying" from any of the other online music stores. It's the clients required by those stores that prevent me.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
...I give them about 5 minutes post-release before they are hit with the mother of all cease-and-desist notices from Apple Legal.
I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but come on here. At least try to make your cut-and-paste jobs a bit less obvious.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
This program should be a lesson for everyone who tries to claim that Apple software is nothing special with just a pretty UI skin that anyone could make.
I really hope Apple drops their hardware and migrates Cocoa to Windows and Linux.
The Microsoft and Linux APIs are so jarringly hideous and clunky it is painful to have to use for anyone who has grown up on OS X.
If you are a Windows or Linux application developer, please, if you don't have a Mac or haven't really spent time with OS X. Pick something like a button or text field AND STUDY IT. And I mean really look closely at it and nothing else. Note the timing, shading, feedback, action, EVERYTHING.
It is all there. There is no excuse for Windows and Linux to be so damn clunky in 2006. There are things that Apple nailed down TWENTY YEARS AGO that still are completely missed in non-OS X APIs/GUIs.
There is a reason people rave about the feel of OS X.
I'd feel more sympathy to this cause if it wasn't for the fact that all the other music stores* sell DRMed content that only works on Windows. Apple at least had the consideration to get iTunes working nicely under Windows. WMP still sucks under the Mac (typical of Microsoft though).
* - Well save for the oddball one that sells actual MP3s of some band that I've never heard of and doesn't sound that particularly good or a particular Russian one who gives no money to the artist at all.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I guess that MusikCube fits better in the description of an "open source iTunes" counterpart.
Apple might want a little more than a simple "thank you"... money talks.
The Microsoft and Linux APIs are so jarringly hideous and clunky it is painful to have to use for anyone who has grown up on OS X.
If you are a Windows or Linux application developer, please, if you don't have a Mac or haven't really spent time with OS X. Pick something like a button or text field AND STUDY IT. And I mean really look closely at it and nothing else. Note the timing, shading, feedback, action, EVERYTHING.
First, GUI != API.
API is the application programming interface; usually a collection of objects, which have propteries and methods you can use or extend or override. The API is the roadmap to these items.
As for the OS X button/text fields vs Linux & Windows button/text fields... are you serious? Study them? Timing, action? Let's get real here, it's a bitmap swap. The OS X versions have a pretty glass look to them, the Windows versions look like smooth beveled plastic, and Linux ones look however you want them to look.
I love my Mac, and I think it has the best looking operating system of the three mentioned, but I don't really see where the interface elements are better in any other regard than their outward appearance.
Don't get so hung up on looks. Its a browswer, look at the url-bar. Seems to me they've pushed the apple thing for a number of reasons, but there is no lock-in with the look or style of the thing. Its not even in *any* form of release at this point and it sounds to me like he's trying to generate some buzz, maybe get some developer support. I hope he does because if you look past the immediate iTunes comparisons you'll see it so much more really. He thanks Apple for showing what good design can look like, but he makes it clear (if you read the site) that this project can be so much more then just an iTune's clone.
:)
Anyhow, its early yet.
Quack, quack.
At great risk to my Karma, I partially agree with that statement. Several years ago I worked for the Fink project (fink.sourceforge.net) porting OSS code to Mac OS X. There are some extremely well written open source applications, and they were a delight to port.
However, the bulk of applications available in OSS are indeed bloated and very difficult to port because the C code they were built on was dependant on too many third party shared libraries. The libraries change and change, and unless you keep an App updated it can break. This is what happened with OpenGL when I ported TuxRacer to Mac OS X. The code for the program was also god aweful and could have used a serious rewrite. The data types, pointers, etc. were crap.
Many projects do not suffer from this code bloat, especially with systems like CVS in place to keep everything in one place. I also worked on a Kazaa client called Neo for Mac OS X and, while functional, I changed so many things the original writer could not understand it anymore. I stopped developing Neo shortly thereafter.
People have different coding preferences, I am a minimalist and I like sleek, elegant code that gets a lot of work done in a few lines. Other people prefer to write their code out so that is is more readable to them rather than efficient for the computer. Both systems have their place- don't get me wrong -but for production systems code efficiency is the key. The fewer the number of lines of assembler the compiler must interpret the better.
Anyway, that is my 1 + 1 = 3 cents (Which I do not agree with, 1+1 = 2 dammit).
iTunes is not similar to Internet Explorer what so ever, unless you're on a Macintosh, you need to download it or install iTunes manually, it's a choice you make.
You don't have to buy an iPod or use the iTunes Music Store. In fact you can happily go by using your computer and never have to know neither Apple nor iTunes.
Internet Explorer was the at the centre of a monopoly, it came preinstalled, full of bugs and consumers were crying for alternatives for almost 10 years before the Firefox project came and provided a reasonable "answer".
There are very few people out there crying for an iTunes alternative, the iTunes popularity is rather justly earnt and is only used by people who are interested in listening to music on an iPod or purchasing music from iTMS. Consumers aren't demanding that iPods or iTunes work with other online music stores or other music programs. In fact the only people I actually hear complaining are Real and Creative.
The other online stores are -amazingly- bad, poorly laid out, with pricing models that reflect one theme "greed", the model of "download as many or as few songs as you like, but pay for them until the day that you die otherwise we take them back from you" is ridiculous.
But not as ridiculous as the excessively under-designed garbage pieces of electronics they want you to play them on, where they franchise that a 64kbps Windows media file as a decent alternative to 128kbps AAC audio.
So if those are my "choices", I'm pretty pleased to be giving my attention to iTunes and Apple, as they certainly seem to have a much better clue about what they're doing and are satisfying what I'm asking for in technology vs. music and willing to upgrade their product regardless of what the competition is up to.
A more realistic goal would be for Linux to drop KDE and GNOME and focus on GNUStep. That way you could have a free open source equivalent of Cocoa, with source code compatibility.
Of course, it'll never happen. Too many egos are invested in going in other directions.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Apple allowed Xerox to invest in a large amount of valuable shares before they went public. This, in a sense, allowed Xerox to buy into Apple, and this was the payment for allowing Apple to access their technology. So Apple didn't merely steal someone else's interface. Unlike Microsoft whose gigantic Windows 95 promotion centered around the "Start" menu - which is actually just the Apple menu placed at the bottom of the screen. Further more, when Apple did their own work on the things they got from Xerox PARC, they actually improved upon Xerox. For example, Xerox people had stopped working on getting two overlapping windows to conserve processor power by only drawing the parts of each that could be seen by the user. But Apple figured it out - and the Xerox PARC people heard about it and told Apple that even their systems couldn't do that. So rather than a cheap knock off, Apple took things to a whole new level, and put in plenty of creativity.
For production code, clarity is far more important than anything else, especially in the open source world, which tends to lack design and architecture documentation (and from what I've seen, in many cases there are few if any useful comments in the code either). The whole point of open source is the fact that the source is accessible to all, but there is more to accessibility than simply sticking something in a place where it can be downloaded.
NB: I am not saying that efficiency isn't important, but in most projects it will have a notable effect of at most 10% of the code base. Clearly written code (or the lack thereof) on the other hand impacts all of it.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Technology is irrelevant,
design is all that counts.
Unix technology has been around for decades on end, but people were always using inferior technology with better design. Apple took a highly developed Tech platform and enabled it, made it usable. Before that the technology was worthless for most (by number of users) purposes. Like a car without a steering wheel, there it doesn't matter how powerfull the engine is.