Songbrid 1.1 beta2!!

•February 26, 2009 • Leave a Comment

Time to rock the web even harder! Songbird 1.1 beta 2 is out with some pretty cool new features, like Watch Folders and Album Art Scanning!
Check out the blog at: http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2009/02/25/songbird-11-beta-2-is-available-for-testing/

and if your not ready to test betas you can grab 1.0 at http://getsongbird.com

Songbird RC1 for 1.0!

•November 10, 2008 • Leave a Comment

That is right we have released Release Candidate 1 for Songbird version 1.0 and it is looking pretty hot!

SlashdotArs Technica, Songbird

A lot of people are still complaining that Songbird is bloated and uses to much memory. I am not sure what kind of drugs these people are on but with the same libraries my Songbird runs at the same amount of ram as iTunes, and gives you so much more! It sits around the same or less memory as Firefox, Thunderbird, Mail, etc. People expect applications to run in like 8-10 megs which is totally unreasonable now a days, the applications need to do more and there for need to be bigger.

And yes we are a bit buggy, lacking some features etc, but remember we are just reaching 1.0 and in only 2 years, iTunes is at version 8, and Windows Media player is version 11. The last several versions of each of those has had very little new features added to it. We will be adding tons of new features at a very quick pace and other people will be able to add features through the plug ins.

Before people jump on software or companies they should really look at the full product, and what it is capable of. If they don’t then they are just denying themselves the opportunity to possibly use a great program. I wonder how many of these people complain about Windows on a daily basis, but still use it every day as well :P . Time for them to grow up and get with the reality of software.

Rock the web! Songbird.

My Songbird Look

•August 29, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Here is what my songbird player looks like today:

New Album Art manager

•August 23, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Here is a preview of what the new album art manager is going to look like:

Komodo 5!

•August 22, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Woot! The alpha for Komodo Edit 5 is out and looks great! Get it here.
They are now on the 1.9 base and it looks pretty nice!

Adding year to the filter pane.

•August 22, 2008 • Leave a Comment

So I like to be able to filter by year as well as genre, artist and album. This is very easy to add with a simple change to a preference.

  1. Open a new tab and enter “about:config” in the address bar.
  2. In the Filter type “songbird.library.filterset”
  3. Double click this entry and you can now add the year property. “http://songbirdnest.com/data/1.0#year;”

Add this to any position you want, they will appear in the order they are in here.

Mime Service problem on Album Art

•August 21, 2008 • 1 Comment

Apparently the nsIMIMEService doesn’t work as I expected. I use it to determine the extension for the artwork file we create when reading the meta data image from a media file. Using the following code you should be able to get the extension from valid mime types:
// grab the extension from the mimetype
var mimeService = Cc["@mozilla.org/mime;1"]
.getService(Ci.nsIMIMEService);
var mimeInfo = mimeService.getFromTypeAndExtension(aMimeType, “”);
if (mimeInfo.getFileExtensions().hasMore()) {
ext = mimeInfo.primaryExtension;
}

Using a mime type of “image/jpg” however does not seem to return a valid extension? So we are going to do a small work around that will parse the aMimeType to try and get an extension out of it if the nsIMIMEService fails. And of course we are going to check that we get only valid image extensions (no exe or bat ones please).

Songbird Beta is Released!

•August 21, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Mozilla here, Mozilla there, Mozilla everywhere!

•May 15, 2008 • Leave a Comment

So I have been trying my hardest to make all my primary apps to be Mozilla based apps:
Web browser – Firefox (of course!) 3.0b5
Email – Thunderbird 3.0a2pre
IRC – Chatzilla 0.9.82.1 on XULRunner 1.8.0.9
Editor/IDE – Komodo 4.4.0-alpha2
Media Player – Songbird (without a doubt!) 0.6pre
Bittorrent/Internet TV – Miro 1.2.3

What I want to do:
1. Get Chatzilla to run on XULRunner 1.9
2. Make an extension on Chatzilla to show the text from all rooms at once
3. Instantbird (get this going with style :) )
4. Mozilla based terminal program

Idea for a Chatzilla extension

•May 2, 2008 • Leave a Comment

I have an idea for a chatzilla extension, MultiRoom chat window. Basically it is a new window pane below the current single room window that will show text from all channels (rooms).

I join a few rooms, only about 6, and I would like to see text from all the other rooms that I am not currently in. There are a few steps to this I have planned out so far:

1. Make an extension (little harder to do since there is no api for it really :P )
2. Throw a pane into the UI (probably the same as the single room pane in there now (I hope it’s a binding or something XD)
3. Monitor the text coming in for the rooms (probably ignore the server/client ones)
4. Display the same as in the single room pane except add a room column like
[12:35] {#xulrunner} <bob> Hey the man!
5. add a new command so that you can send text to any room even if it is not the one showing up:
/mmsg #xulrunner bob: how are you doing?
(need to check if this already exists :) )
6. spread the love!