Mar 28, 2007 8:55 pm
I just committed the initial tab browsing support for Songbird. To play with it grab a nightly, and middle-click on something in the service pane. We haven’t finalized the tab behavior or appearance yet but we’re pretty excited about the possibilities.
Mar 28, 2007 5:47 pm
Since the Songbird 0.2.5 launch on March 1st, the loft has been inundated by emails from cool Media Web services like stores, subscription, media search, recommendation and locker services that want to integrate with Songbird. The diversity, innovation and polish of the services today is compelling and delightful.
Many of these Media Web services seek support developing a Songbird extension. We want to help them, but naturally we’re busy ‘bird building. Songbird expert Erik Staats of Windjay is an ideal, first choice support resource, but who else is out there?
If you’re a potential Songbird extension developer, please comment on this post with some qualifications and your site URL. I’ll be sure the inbound Songbird extension support requests from Media Web service providers find you. =)
Chirps,
Rob
Mar 28, 2007 12:50 pm
This is a post to provide some deeper context for a post to Mozilla’s XUL newsgroup (mozilla.dev.tech.xul) about a proposal to overlay XBL bindings.
In Songbird, our skinning goal is to enable the underlying media player functionality (exposed through XPCOM) to be expressed by any manner of freeform layouts specified as XUL files. Eventually we hope to achieve near UI-feature-parity with media players like Winamp and Foobar. Instead of Firefox’s single main xul file, we hope to encourage people to create lots of different xul files to describe lots of different ways to generate a media player interface (we already have two, ourselves).
Therefore, we have a very different set of requirements for overlays. These are driven by the need to allow extensions to work with multiple different XUL files in an environment where one cannot ever know beforehand the full complement of ID attributes likely to be instantiated into the DOM at any time.
To meet that need we are making slightly larger-than-normal XBL bindings that aggregate content to provide larger widgets that skin writers can use to create entirely new XUL windows. This allows us to maintain a well-know set of IDs that are available for extension developers to overlay and still use the encapsulation benefits of XBL. In this way, no matter what the page loading the objects may look like or what IDs the page author may choose, an extension developer should always be able to inject functionality into the application.
Mar 26, 2007 7:47 pm
As a part of the 0.3 upgrade, I’ve made a few changes to our feathers to improve performance, reduce the number of .pngs in our repository and fix a bug all at the same time! If you’re a featherer, please pay attention so you too can have wonderfully flicker free hover states on your image buttons.
Mar 22, 2007 2:21 pm
So, I know lots of you had been asking for an extension that would allow Windows Live Writer, etc, access to the currently playing track in Songbird.
Luckily for you all, Jason Tucker had already taken it upon himself to put together an extension to do just that.
Now the Media Blogger Extension is available from the Add-Ons site for everyone’s (or, at least, everyone in Windows’) edification.
There’s starting to be lots of stuff on the Add-Ons site, it’s getting exciting. Maybe not quite as exciting as beach party pirate burlesque, but likely far less hangover inducing.
mig
“Arrrr, me achin’ grog noggin’!”
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