I posted about Songbird when it was released back in February, but to be honest I’d sort of forgotten about it since then. A discussion of it popped on the Well today and I downloaded 0.2rc3 to take another look.
Lots of progress has been made. It imported my iTunes library (it takes just the metadata, not the audio) and it works well. It’s really a CPU hog, though. On my 1.67GHz PowerBook, xulrunner is taking 10-15% CPU when it’s silent, 25-40% when playing.
The venerable Eudora e-mail client is going open source, Mozilla style. I was a devoted Eudora user in the ’90s, but I’m not sure what their, you know, unique value proposition is today. It seems like even the developers don’t quite know what it’s going to be, but if you want to stay in the loop keep checking the Penelope project (including the discussion page) at Mozilla.org.
Via ArsTechnica
Despite their adoption of Big Green Download Button technology, SourceForge still has an absurdly cumbersome download process. I know it’s annoying to just gripe (I try to see the positive side too); I’m just surprised that it’s still this crufty. According to the OSTG site, “SourceForge.net hosts more Open Source development products than any other site or network worldwide.” But if the pace of modernization doesn’t pick up, I’m afraid that won’t be true for much longer.
Kiko, a Web 2.0-ish calendar company, recently sold itself on eBay. The buyer was Tucows, a company that you may know from their venerable and giant software download archives. Their CEO, Elliot Noss, says in his blog:
[There is] one big reason why we bought Kiko. We needed the functionality, quite desperately, inside of our email platform and it was going to take us a long time to get it. Especially at the level of sophistication Kiko has.