… 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. Not 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

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.

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?

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

Those of you with high visual acuity might note that a few of the Top 40 disappeared today. *gasp!* No no, I didn’t take anything off that people are working on.

Looking at the 6 that were remaining, I removed 4. I know what you’re all thinking… “You lying cheating bastard!”

As with the last time I was accused of being a lying cheating bastard, let me explain myself. I removed 3 of them (Allpeers, BlueOrganizer, & Yahoo Music Media Player) because given that they don’t even work with Firefox 3 yet, it will be decidedly non-trivial to port them over to Songbird. I removed Tails Export because microformats are now a first class integrated object in Firefox 3, so it’s not likely that it will be brought up to date with FF3 (and certainly not with Songbird).

There are still 2 left unclaimed: Tab Mix Plus (which is still non-trivial, but would be cool to have certainly), and the Video DownloadHelper. The second is probably negated somewhat by YouPlayer being worked on, but if someone wants to give VDH a go – let me know!

• 50 Best Songs
• 50 Best Bands
• 50 Best Albums

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!

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.

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…

Due to the way Songbird is drawn as a frame-less window, we make portions of the app draggable so the user can move the window around. Unfortunately, this currently extends to the status bar – meaning extensions that add icons to the status bar don’t get mousethrough events passed to them. You may have noticed this if you have an element using onclick or ondblclick (or any other capture events) in your <statusbarpanel> element that doesn’t seem to respond to your clicks.

The workaround is, fortunately, very simple. Just add the mousethrough="never" attribute to your element, e.g.:

<statusbar>
    <statusbarpanel>
        <image id="foo"
            src="chrome://foo/skin/bar.png"
            onclick="alert('yay!');"
            mousethrough="never" />
    </statusbarpanel>
</statusbar>

Apologies for the inconvenience… we’ll try to see how we can address this in a future release – but for now, this should get you up and running!