Songbirdnest.com - Songbird Media Player

The Top 3!

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:15:27 -0800

... and then there were 3.

A small group of us got together in a room, with a laptop, a projector, and the Top 40 add-ons. Together we assaulted my poor Songbird profile with a myriad of extensions, argued, debated, and eventually whittled the many many awesome add-ons down to the 3 winners.

In alphabetical order, please give a huge congratulations to ChatZilla, Me.dium, and Stylish.

ChatZilla was done by Mitch_1_2 (well known to any #songbird peeps), and while on the surface it may appear to be a straight-forward port of the Mozilla codebase, if you dive deeper into the bug tracker for it you'll find Mitch_1_2 actually uncovered some bugs with ChatZilla, as well as Songbird. Don't only did he uncover bugs in Songbird, he submitted patches and has since become a thoroughly engaged developer. Additionally, he's working on pulling in display pane integration. We also see a lot of promise for music-related chat, displaying what you're currently listening to, etc.

We've blogged about Me.dium before, but needless to say - we're big fans. Socialising, sharing, and music all go hand in hand with each other. Me.dium's integration into Songbird looks phenomenal, and fully takes advantage of Songbird's unique media playing + browser heritage allowing Me.dium users to join their friends at webpages, as well as search for music their friends are currently listening to.

One of Songbird's most powerful features is its ability to completely change its look and feel via Feathers. Feathering the media player is huge, but taking an add-on like Stylish and letting it style the entire Web to match Feathers takes it even one step further. Check out this screenshot of Google in Songbird with a matching Rubberducky style.

Congratulations to our three winners, and a huge thanks to all the other Top 40 developers. Your efforts and accomplishments are amazing, and we love and appreciate all the work you guys put in. Y'all will be getting a thank you gift in the mail! :)

(a special honourable mention goes out to bard for uploading his SamePlace & xmpp4moz extensions over a painfully slow 33.6kbps GPRS modem connection while traveling through Europe in order to get them submitted in time for the Top 40 deadline! :-))

cheers,
steve and the rest of the Songbird team

[2008.03.04] Blessed (mini-Super) Tuesday

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:56:45 -0800

So 28 days later we find that the political season keeps on its inexorable course, as does our progress toward this fantastic 0.5 release:

http://publicsvn.songbirdnest.com/wiki/Nightly_Builds

So, then, what's been done for 0.5, you ask? Well, you can examine in detail all 300ish fixed items straight from our Bugzilla, or you can just read the following bulletpoint list:

New MTP Device Support Add-on (for Windows)

Supports MTP and USB Mass Storage devices
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/extensions/detail/172
(Requires XP-SP2 or Vista, as well as WMP v11)

Better iPod Device Support Add-on (for Everybody)

With full featured status page and sync function
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/extensions/detail/52

Extensible Views for your Library and Playlists

Built into the app, but activated by add-ons:
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/extensions/detail/170

Now, you should all know what "Blessings" mean -- these are still not done yet, not even "Beta," and we announce them because we need your help testing out the functionality before we release it fully.

We especially need your help with MTP devices under Windows, since we only have so many available here for testing (lots, actually, but still only a small percentage of all the possible players, phones, memory sticks, et al, out in the world today).

We've made a page on our wiki with instructions for people to test their MTP devices and either fill out bugzilla bugs or report that everything is working fine:

http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/index.php/MTP_Device_Compatibil...

If you have an MTP device, please check that page and help us out!

ALSO, remember, tomorrow and every morning thereafter will find even newer (and hopefully better) Nightly builds of the application and the default set of add-ons. So if it's Thursday or later when you're reading this, do please try to get the latest Nightlies and not the blessed build. We're at the point where we're fixing lots of little things (and the occasional big monster) every day, so it's worth updating to see if the bug you're about to report has already been fixed, right?

http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com

mig

ps: Oh yes. One last humble request. Please try to set the 'version' field in Bugzilla to either 0.4 Final or 0.5 Nightly, depending on the one you're testing. It's somewhat confusing to us when the cookie is remembering that the last bug you submitted was for, say, 0.3 RC1 or something. Thanks!

Top 40 Wrapup

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:12:57 -0800

... and so it ends!

The Top 40 has concluded. We had 32 completed ports, with another 8 in development still. Everyone did an amazing amount of work to get all these extensions up and running on Songbird.. I'm in awe.

We'll be judging throughout this week and will try to have winners announced by Friday.

MTP Device Support for Windows

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:56:49 -0800

One of the big features we'll be releasing as part of Songbird 0.5 is MTP device support.

MTP, or Media Transfer Protocol, is used by many types of devices these days. It ends up being pretty awesome because it enables device manufacturers to create devices that can all have the same great user experience when interacting with the contents and managing it from Songbird! Sweet.

Initial support for MTP devices includes manually managing the contents of your device, managing playlists and transferring media files to/from your device.

So far we've gotten Sansa, Creative, Nokia and HTC devices to work within Songbird. Awesome.

I'd also like to mention the names of all of the engineers that worked on this feature, without their dedication, none of this would've been possible. So, without further adieu, here is your MTP device team: Aus, David, Erik, Keisuke, Mark and Steven!

Tell us what you think! :) You can try it out by getting the latest nightly and add-on here.

Aus

P.S. If you are a device manufacturer and you would like Songbird to support your MTP device, do get in touch with us.

Crash cart stat! We have a dead lock!

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:35:21 -0800

I spent the better part of the last 2 weeks tracking down a deadlock in our
Database Engine. It's a little disheartening spending so long on a problem and then having the fix be a simple 'move this line of code 4 lines higher' kind of thing. But on the good side I learned a LOT about how our dbengine code works and refreshed my memory on locks and monitors.

For more details follow on to my full post...

Socializing Songbird

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:43:47 -0800

The social aspects of Songbird have always been intriguing to me. Some of our recent add-ons (such as Shareaholic, and the newly uploaded Me.dium) have started exploring how social networks can start to be tied into the Songbird experience. Songbird's browser aspect can, of course, naturally do the usual web browser interface to social networks... but an extension like Me.dium that makes browsing the web a social experience has always seemed more interesting to me in that it requires less *conscious* effort to share what I'm doing.

I was super-psyched to meet a couple of the Me.dium devs when they came out to our last Songbird DevCamp where they, armed with our Developer Centre references, and documentation, made quick work out of building in Songbird support.

Music is inherently a social activity... we discover new music by seeing what artists our friends are listening to, and by recommendations from trusted sources. With Me.dium, you get that in both the browser context, and now in the media library context. Anyway, go check out Me.dium at their Me.dium site, or install their Songbird add-on and add some friends (I'm 'donuthole' on the network), and start exploring and sharing your music listening and browsing experience.

Cygwin Win32 build environment deprecated

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:45:31 -0800

As part of fixing bugs 7555 & 7707, we've deprecated our Cygwin Win32 build environment.

Everyone here is building on MSYS (and you should be too!), and longer term it will just be a lot easier for us to support one build environment.

We've updated the build instructions, and it's likely that Cygwin will continue to work for a little while longer, but don't expect it to be supported. Now would be a great time to start looking at MSYS, the build environment is simple to setup, and we've got detailed instructions. As always, post on the forum or ping us on IRC if you're having problems.

Top 40 drawing to a close!

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:32:06 -0800

The Top 40 is wrapping up on Saturday, so add-on developers: please finish up soon! Upload your add-ons to the site so we can get them counted for the Top 40!

Your library in a tag cloud

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:42:12 -0800

One of the uses of the WebpageAPI that wasn't part of our initial thinking was being able to provide webpage hosted library navigation. But shortly after we got some pieces of the API working it became clear that was going to be a really interesting application. It is easy to get locked in the mindset of a 4 pane library view with the 3 top panes being filtering on the one big list of media at the bottom. To be sure that is an efficient way to find the tracks you want to play, but there can certainly be other, more engaging representations.

A few months ago Keisuke came up with one. He demo'd a tag cloud web page that displayed the users library in a tag cloud. I loved it but it required some php setup on a server so I sat down and re-wrote it to only use JavaScript.

You can load this url in your Songbird and bookmark it to use it as a way to view your library.

It does a little caching right now and isn't smart about dynamically pulling in new tracks if they get added while you have the page showing. I plan on adding some smarts to the caching and will probably wind up filing a few bugs from this experience (and then fixing them!).

The next thing I have in mind is a dynamic html menu based version this. Basically working like filters: genre->artist->album->click loads a playlist.

Application (and version!) specific chrome/skins/styles

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:32:54 -0800

Here's a nifty trick forwarded to me from Eric Jung of Foxyproxy fame. Like many of the Top 40 developers, he's building in Songbird support into the same XPI that also supports Firefox, Flock, etc.

He wanted to not only bind chrome and styles to specific applications, but to also be able to support multiple versions of multiple applications. Specifically, due to the deprecation of mainScriptsOverlay.xul in favour of layoutWithBrowser.xul & layoutWithoutBrowser.xul in 0.5, he wanted to target the right overlay for the right version.
(Yes, we kept mainScriptsOverlay.xul backwards compatibility, but Eric is being a conscientious developer and removing obsolete/deprecated dependencies as soon as he finds out about them. Yay Eric!)

What he ended up doing was using the application and appVersion modifiers for chrome/skin/styles lines and doing something like:

overlay chrome://songbird/content/xul/mainScriptsOverlay.xul chrome://foxyproxy/content/firefoxOverlay.xul application=songbird@songbirdnest.com appversion=0.4

overlay chrome://songbird/content/xul/layoutBaseOverlay.xul chrome://foxyproxy/content/firefoxOverlay.xul application=songbird@songbirdnest.com appversion>=0.5pre
(those should all be on two separate "overlay" lines - but I let them wrap for the sake of readability)

Cool, no?

Extending the extensions

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:53:06 -0800

We've got 23 out of the Top 40 completed, which is pretty good. We've got 7 more which are imminently close (i.e. in testing), and a few more drawing close in development. Due to popular demand, we've decided to extend the deadline for the Top 40 to March 1st. This gives another 2 weeks for people to finish up and help draw the Top 40 to a close.

So join #songbird, ask questions, and cheer on the remaining Top 40 developers as they get close to the finish line!

Media Web Meetup tonight!

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:50:16 -0800

Holy crap, I totally forgot to blog that we're having the fourth Media Web Meetup tonight at our nest!

This month we've decided to talk about mashups from a musical point of view. We're bringing in some pretty awesome DJs (DJ Earworm and Kid Kameleon) to demo, talk about what tools they use online to find, create, mashup, distribute and promote their music and what really irks them about the current state of the web.

Rob Lord will help tie this back to technology, the open media web and mashups online and how this can address some of this.

6pm (yes that's in 2 hours) at our office!

Songbird Development 101

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:52:48 -0800

I’ve been working on this “Songbird Development 101″ slidedeck for the past few weeks as kind of the general intro to Songbird development. it, at a very high level, introduces the terminology we use for the various UI components, and covers (at an even higher level) extension development, Feathers creation, and webpage API development.

It also has an absurd amount of links to various helpful (IMO, anyway) resources.

More importantly, it has 10 images of farting birds in it.

poot!

What I meant to say...

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:33:18 -0800

FYI, a recent and otherwise on-point LinuxWorld article on Firefox and XULRunner article misquoted me at the end.

My comment was that Mozilla Firefox browser gained market-share at the expense Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox's early success was propelled by its open source, open standards and Open Web approach, while Microsoft Internet Explorer's proprietary, single vendor solution stagnated. Duh. =)

Thanks to Paul Kim at the Mozilla Foundation for catching it.

Rob

Introducing your new friend, iconURL

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:25:53 -0800

Attention add-on developers. It's come to my attention that a number of you are ignoring your good friend: <em:iconURL>

Firefox and Songbird have long supported showing icon representations of add-ons in the add-on manager, but one of the upcoming changes to the Add-ons site is to support extracting the <em:iconURL> field from the add-on's install.rdf, and use that to represent the add-on in listing and detail pages.

If you have a whole bunch of add-ons installed, it's way nicer for users to browse their installed add-ons when each one has a snazzy icon associated with it, e.g.

(booooo shame on the mashTape developer for not using an iconURL!!! ;-))

So if you've got an add-on on our site, go update it and use a cool icon!