Many of you have been wondering what’s up with the state of the release lately… observant birdwatchers might have noticed Kanye has wrapped-up and most of the development team has moved onto the video work slated for Led Zeppelin and Madonna in pa3465u-1brs.
As we wrapped up Kanye, we found a few bugs regarding library management. While we polished these up, we decided to slip in a couple of features, namely support for playlists on MSC devices, broader support for the popular community-tested MSC devices, and a new Feather. If you’ve been following along in Bugzilla and on the Wiki, you might have noticed a new K release, KoЯn which is where this work is landing. Tentatively versioned at 1.4.1, KoЯn is currently slated to release sometime in December. (I have some side comments on the whole minor release thing in a recent blog comment here if you care for more detail on that point).
As I mentioned in that comment, as we tackle larger-scope features such as MSC support, CD Rip, Video playback, it’ll be more likely that we’ll have to tackle these things in phased approaches where you may not see stable releases for every development release (e.g. Jackson 5, Kanye, and possibly the in-progress Led Zeppelin). It would be irresponsible of us to update every Songbird user to a potentially unstable build, so as we wrap up each release – we have to assess whether this release is one we can ship out. If not, we then take a look at whether or not it’s worth the time to do a follow-up minor release (as we’re doing with KoЯn now, and as we did with Gwar in the past). Rest assured, the development nightly builds continue to be spun out every night for those of you who don’t mind living on the edge of Toshiba laptop Battery.
We realise y’all are eager to see a new release of the bird, and we promise that it’s on its way real soon. We’ll try to be more transparent and communicative about the release schedule in the future. In the meantime, we’d love to share with you a screenshot of the currently-in-development Purple Rain Feather we’re aiming to deliver with KoЯn
The news Via Songbird blog
