Date January 2008

GStreamer for all, all for GStreamer.

By Georges Auberger Georges Auberger Jan 30, 2008 5:00 pm
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GStreamer is one of the media core that Songbird currently supports. Today, it is packaged with Linux builds only. On other platforms we currently support VLC (Mac & Windows), Quicktime (Mac) and Windows Media (Windows). We’re considering standardizing on GStreamer as Songbird’s default media core across all the platforms we support.

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Best. Music. Ever. (okay, fine, for 2007)

By stevel stevel Jan 29, 2008 1:38 pm
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… at least according to the blogosphere. I’m talking about the Hype Machine Zeitgeist. They’ve published their listings for:

The best part is the 50 Best Songs totally rocks under Songbird thanks to Hype Machine’s use of Songbird’s Webpage API.

And in other news, we had one more Top 40 extension completion today with bx’s work porting the Faves extension to work under Songbird. Yay! More social bookmarky goodness!

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Extension roundup….yeehaw

By stevel stevel Jan 28, 2008 9:59 am
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The Round Up

My extensions list installed in Songbird just keeps on growing… I’m loving the new extensions people are porting over to Songbird. Some of the new ones posted up so far (in alphabetical order):

  • CustomizeGoogle — adds a bunch of neat-o options to configure and.. well, customise, Google. my favourite? “Remove Click Tracking” which means I can right click on the Google search result links and copy the URL and get a *real* URL rather than a google.com link forwarding URL. yay!
  • Firebug — best. debugger. ever. seriously. Every extension developer who has to muck with Javascript owes ianloic a beer.
  • FoxSaver — who *doesn’t* like cool screensavers? i’ve got this running on a box acting as a music jukebox, and pull photos and rss feeds when it goes idle. this only makes me want REAL full screen support for applications on the Mac even more.
  • JSView — i can’t think how many times i’ve tried to view source only to have pages pull in external JS & CSS. the ability to view external Javascript and CSS source files saves me a ton of time when i’m copying^Wuh… leveraging source and examples from the web.
  • Nightly Tester Tools — i’m actually looking at making this part of the first run bundle for nightly builds. the ability to selectively/individually override version compatibility for extensions is worth it alone.
  • Shareaholic — if you’re a social fiend like i am, then having one-click (okay, two if you count the toolbar drop down) submission to all the big sites (digg, facebook, del.icio.us, etc.) rocks.
  • Stylish — Greasemonkey for CSS. Ahhh beautiful – my favourite CSS is Dark Gray Google which makes google.com totally match Songbird’s rubberducky Feather.
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Top 40 status

By stevel stevel Jan 25, 2008 10:52 am
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I’ve been a little remiss in blogging the Top 40 status lately… I’ll blame it on recovering from the 2 kegs we had at the DevCamp last weekend. :-)

T’was great to meet a bunch of the extension developers that came by like the FoxSaver, Me.dium, VLC, XSPF guys and everyone else who dropped by to hack, say hi, or just hang out and drink.

We actually made some progress on the Top 40, had a few info sessions, answered a lot of questions, and goofed around in front of the HootyCam for all our friends on IRC. Speaking of which, have you seen the progress for the Top 40 lately? Check it out, we’re at 16 completed with another 9 in testing. There are still 14 more in development… and only 6 left unclaimed.

If you want to help work on and port Tab Mix Plus, Tails Export, Video Downloadhelper, Yahoo! Media Player Plugin, AllPeers, or BlueOrganizer – now is the time!!

I should cleanup my profile, install all the completed or in testing addons and take some screenshots… :)

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Remote property modification in 0.3 vs. 0.4

By stevel stevel Jan 15, 2008 4:10 pm
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Just recently, we noticed some of our webpage API tests were failing with 0.4 where they passed successfully in 0.3. Worried that we broke our backwards compatibility policy, John investigated and noticed that we exposed some properties as read-write when they shouldn’t have been.

So 0.4 is now doing the right thing (not the write thing, har har har) by not allowing remote webpages to set certain properties on mediaItems that were previously settable. On the plus side, John found a few things that *weren’t* accessible, and fixed those (so now you can access and modify rating and mediaListName, yay!)

Anyway, apologies if you were relying on the 0.3 behaviour of being able to set properties you weren’t supposed to – but in the interest of making Songbird secure and trustworthy – we’ve now locked those properties down.

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