thoughts on mozilla

On their blog, the Songbird team announced the availability of the first 1.8 beta with device support for Mac and a new service panel. From the blog post:

Oolaa!  We have a beta 1 of Songbird 1.8, a.k.a. Orbital, ready for those of you who like to keep up with our latest builds.  Grab it off the Nightly Builds page.  The big changes in this beta build are:

• Device support for Mac! Our Mass Storage (MSC) add-on is now compatible with Songbird on Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6.
• A shiny new service pane! We’ve totally overhauled the window on the left side of the app.  It’s slicker, more space-efficient, and faster.  We also think it’s going to be easier for add-on developers to work with.

Last Thursday, the Songbird team shipped version 1.7 of their popular audio player. This release includes a few new features and a bunch of bug fixes. From the blog post:

Enhancements with this release include:

• Expanded Device Support – including support for removable memory (SD) cards, the Google Nexus One, and improved support for the Motorola Droid.
• The Return of Video Playback – Now built on GStreamer, and running on both Mac and Windows! Video codec support is a little limited in our general release at this point, but we’ll be working on it.
• The Beginning of Photo Sync – In addition to audio and video, Songbird will now sync photos to your device.
• Official Support for Windows 7 – It worked pretty well before, but now we’ve worked out the kinks and can stand behind it.
• Various fixes to device sync, CD ripping, the UI and more!