Songbird the Open Source iTunes? 226
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's not the client, it's the store (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging by their screenshots... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
A Lesson For Everyone Who Claims Anyone Can... (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Songsuck (Score:3, Insightful)
* - 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.
News.Context (Score:5, Insightful)
MusicKube (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess that MusikCube [musikcube.com] fits better in the description of an "open source iTunes" counterpart.
About that... (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple might want a little more than a simple "thank you"... money talks.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Skinnable baby.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyhow, its early yet.
Re:Judging by their screenshots... (Score:4, Insightful)
You do know that Apple bought NeXT, don't you?
Re:Judging by their screenshots... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Songsuck (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't support FreeDOS, NeXT, QNX, WinCE, SkyOS, OS/2, OS/9, SGI, Sun, BeOS, AmigaDOS, or my old Commodore 64, either. What's your point? Apple went after two markets: It's own, and the largest one. When Linux becomes important to Apple and to consumers, iTunes will magically appear. Right now Linux is not a factor to either. It's the same chicken-and-egg situation that Linux people have been dealing with since its inception. If people suddenly started buying Amigas by the thousands, iTunes would become available. I hate to break it to you, but in spite of the Slashdot hype, Linux is still far from critical mass.
Re:Hopefully its efficient (Score:2, Insightful)
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).
No one really wants an iTunes copy. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:MusicKube (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows only? C'mon.
OpenStep (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:oh, please (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm a Linux user, but I have to agree that the Mac OS X widgets are much nicer -- even a plain ol' text field, for example:
* Mac text fields have emacs-keys *by default*
* Mac text fields have system-wide shortcuts like option-shift-arrow that make sense (command = bigger modifier, option = smaller)
* Mac text fields have a slight glow to indicate when they're focused
* Mac text fields used for searches have a special icon and rounded corners, so you can differentiate them without thinking about it
* on the Mac, tab *always* goes to the next field (try Save-As in a Gnome app and press tab, and try to figure out what it does -- I couldn't)
* if it's a multi-line field and you drag off the edge, it scrolls (on Gnome I have to keep wiggling the mouse around for it to keep scrolling)
* you can press option-(letter) to get most common Latin-based letters; you can get these on Linux and Windows, too, somehow, but it's so awkward I always just use the character-map app, or use the ASCII version of the letter I really want (alt+129 for lower-case, alt+154 for upper-case, WTF?)
Other widgets (esp. lists and trees) have similarly nice feature sets.
This is why he told you to study them: so you could pick up on all the things that you apparently don't see. If you think that Mac widgets are the same as Gtk/Qt/Win32 widgets with a paint job (I've written real programs with all of the above), you're really missing out.
Re:Hopefully its efficient (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:oh, please (Score:1, Insightful)
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.