RIA (the acronym) has jumped the shark. I find that I can no longer use RIA to describe anything anymore. The definition has been watered down and twisted to the point that nearly any application can be called RIA.

I agree. Finkle names names of Adobe and Microsoft software evangelists pushing proprietary app frameworks that have obfuscated the meaning of RIA and, in their wake, the user-centric, community-directed utility promise of the RIA class.

However, I don’t follow Mark’s conclusion to retire the term RIA. The term has currency and fluency; Let’s re-appropriate, replenish and sharpen it. With a new, Firefox, Thunderbird and Songbird are practical and aspirational leaders of the RIA class.

The key to emphasize the I in RIA. The Internet is global network of community-centric client-server systems including the Web, email, DNS, etc. An RIA implements the client-side of at least one of these Internet systems.

Also, the R in RIA should be measured by “richness” found in exemplary IAs, Firefox first among them. The metric is user utility and community adoption of the client. Firefox’s open source, vibrant community, Open Web manifesto, widespread adoption and 5,000+ community-contributed add-ons establish a very high “richness” bar.

With this definition it’s easy to discern the real RIAs from the wishful: RIAs implement the client-side of Internet methods, formats and protocols. In the Web client-server system, RIAs are better known as user-agents or Web browsers. In the email client-server sytem, RIAs are better known as email clients.

By this definition, is Twirl, a useful desktop app for Twitter built from Adobe AIR, an RIA? No, it’s a proprietary app, platform and service integration. However, if someone built an desktop IM-like client from the open source Mozilla stack that posted your Twitter-like status to your OpenID via Attribute Exchange and thus accessible to all Twitter-like status tracking services like Twitter — that would be a really cool RIA.

Your comments are welcomed!

We want to kick off this project with a request for feedback regarding the layout of the application. We’ve reviewed the feedback that we’ve received from the community over the years and identified a few possible directions that we could take. We would love to hear your thoughts - please let us know which option you prefer and for what reasons. Thanks!

Option A - Rhymes with “My Moons”

• Layout of UI elements are similar to a certain popular media player
• Familiar to those who have used Songbird in the past
• All the important controls are at the top of the window
• Songbird looks like a media player with an embedded web browser

Option B - Designed For Songbird

• Navigation (green) and media controls (pink) are separated to minimize any confusion (eg: previous track button and back button)
• Unified navigation elements don’t change much whether browsing through your library or the web
• Location of the back button is consistent with web browsers and OS file managers
• Songbird looks like a media player and web browser hybrid

If you’re reading this post, you’ve noticed that we recently migrated our blog system out of Drupal into Wordpress. This is the first step in our initiative to decentralize our various web properties and replace them with loosely coupled systems. Our aim is to make it easier to publish information and increase transparency into the Songbird project. Stay tuned for more changes to come soon.

In the process of migrating data, we wrote a set of Ruby scripts to facilitate ingestion of content. We’ve created an ActiveRecord model for Drupal 4.5 and Wordpress 2.0 schemas. The scripts take care of migrating user accounts, content, comments and categories. A set of mod_rewrite directive is also generated to help ensure that permalinks are maintained.

In the hope that it will be useful to the community, we’ve released the sources for the scripts. You can find them on the drupal2wordpress Google Code project

Enjoy.

updated: added links to SPARC builds!

Anyone who knows me knows that OpenSolaris is near and dear to my heart, so I was really psyched when Alfred Peng started porting Songbird over to OpenSolaris. For all the nitty gritty details, check out bug 7800 to see the code review, patches, and comments flying back and forth.

Shortly after we cut 0.5, Alfred put together binaries for Songbird 0.5 final and assembled them into a nice binary package as well as a tarball for us. We’re proud to say these are the first community-contributed builds of Songbird (and Alfred’s work and patches are being reviewed and committed into trunk for future builds). Alfred’s work should also help enable ports to other *nix systems such as BSD, so I’m looking forward to a BSD contributed build someday as well.

Until we get a proper contributed builds section up (should be coming soon with a revamped developer centre/wiki), I’m blogging these here.

Without further ado…

• Songbird 0.5 (x86 OpenSolaris) tarball
• Songbird 0.5 (x86 OpenSolaris) SVr5 package
• Songbird 0.5 (SPARC OpenSolaris) tarball
• Songbird 0.5 (SPARC OpenSolaris) SVr5 package

For the curious, the x86 tarball was built on Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) build 80 (snv_80) with Sun Studio 11, while the x86 binary package was built on snv_87 with Sun Studio 11. The SPARC builds (both tarball & pkg) were built on snv_76 with Sun Studio 11.

We thought it made a lot of sense for a few reasons:

• Our frequent release schedule means our nightly users are often unable to run the most recent released builds’ add-ons even though they are quite likely to be compatible. NTT gives you the ability to override compatibility (either individually, or for all add-ons)
• NTT gives a bunch of handy shortcuts for people filing bugs (you *are* filing bugs, right?) such as getting the build ID and list of all installed extensions.
• Putting the build ID into the titlebar so you can see just how out of date you are (”OMG, that build was like, soooooooo three days ago”)

p.s.P.S. Glenn, Conor: Happy? I totally capitalised everything correctly.
P.P.S. Happy now Georges?

ryan seemed to grok things spot-on with accurate critique as well as understanding the premise of what we’re shooting for. i like that he specifically pointed out our upstream work (e.g. our contributions to GStreamer, and Mozilla) and the promise of the webpage API in terms of breaking down silo’d music services.

We encourage any/all to download the build and send in feedback and bugs as we work toward our final 0.6 release by May/June.

I’ll be talking about Songbird, Linux and the Media Web at LugRadio Live USA this weekend. The conference is being held all weekend at the Metreon in San Francisco and you can get in for the low low price of ten dollars!

My session is at 2pm on Sunday but there’s a ton of other exciting stuff going on all weekend. LRL is primarily a Linux conference so there’s a bunch of interesting talks about kernels, servers and all those fun toys, but there’s a bunch of media and free culture stuff going on too. Aaron Bockover is going to be talking about Banshee, our friendly rival open source desktop media player. Mike Linksvayer is going to present on the Creative Commons. Joe Born from Neuros is going to talk about how they’re using open source and involving the community in their hardware player platform. David Schleef, a local GStreamer developer is presenting too - he’s been working most recently on Schrödinger, an implementation of the Dirac codec. And there’s going to be Aza Raskin and Chris Blizzard from Mozilla there as well.

On top of all that there’s going to be a couple of parties - on Friday night at the Thirsty Bear and the official party on Saturday night at Jillians - when Google will be putting money on the bar. I’ll be around for most of the weekend and I think a few other Songbird hackers will be around too. If you’re in the neighborhood come down to the Metreon. Did I mention, only ten dollars!

We hear pretty routinely that web services want a desktop client for helping to manage user uploads/downloads, or as a music-centric client to their web service…. so I was totally psyched to stumble across Ubuket the other day and see a big ‘ol farting bird on their homepage.

Ubuket is building out a music service to help people get their music into
the cloud and then listen to streams of their friends’ music. They wanted a way to help people easily get their music uploaded, and they’ve built a really cool extension for Songbird that enables an upload-area embedded in the service pane display pane. Simply drag and drop your music from your media library into that area and it starts uploading.

How friggin’ easy is that?

• We’ve already started working on increasing speed and response times for large libraries. We’ve heard this request loud and clear and we’ve made it a priority to improve things in 0.6.
• The MTP add-on for Windows will be extended to include sync functionality so you can more easily manage media on your portable devices.
• The iPod add-on will be migrated to our new device API. This will fix a bunch of bugs and allow us to maintain all of our device support in a single code base. It will also give us an opportunity to test the extensibility of the 0.5 device API and allow iPod support to benefit from features and UI improvements we roll into MTP support (and vice versa).
• Songbird will be adding the ability to write metadata changes back to your media files. This will include a new UI and will be our first time managing your data. We’re planning on adding Album artwork write back in a future release.

We’ll also be:

• Adding contextual menus and find functionality in the browser component of Songbird based on your requests.
• Cleaning up the View menu (so that switching Feathers, Views, and Display Panes is clearer).
• Continuing work on UI bugs to polish and improve the overall user experience.

While the goal is to land our MTP and iPod add-ons with the 0.6 release it is worth noting that due to the complexities and dependencies in these projects we might end up releasing them shortly after 0.6 launches. Everything else is scheduled to go out with the release. The current plan is to ship 0.6 final in the late May/early June timeframe. Until then, please continue to send us your feedback and file bugs as you find them.