Call Me Al

Songbird 0.1.1 has been released, so i decided to give it a look. As expected, the application is still very rough. I did import all of my music and was able to kick off songs. Unfortunately, even basic playback has some bugs. I'll probably wait until 0.3 before I take my next look.

The first thing that I noticed when I installed Songbird is that its very black. Then I found the menu option for switching to the alternate theme. That theme is very red. Since I have themed Firefox I decided to take a look at the chrome for Songbird. Songbird is heavy on the images for borders, backgrounds, etc. That switch from black to red actually means a whole new set of images for everything. What really surprised me was that while taking advantage of -moz-radius on some of the inner corners, the outer four corners are all individual ID tags and images. While that design choice functions, its not the choice I would have made. Instead of being able to do a search-and-replace on some color tags, I would have to make images. To satisfy my pet peeve I'll be rewriting the default skin trying to use fewer images and more CSS. Once I've successfully emulated the images, I'll make a skin using system colors so that it can look native everywhere.