that’s whacked

Media View Toggle Buttons

Tuesday, Feb 2. 2010  –  Category: Songbird  –  22 Comments

One of the things implemented in Purple Rain (the new Feather in Songbird 1.4) was direct toggle buttons to select the current Media View.  However, we only implemented them for the built in List View & Filter View buttons.  Third party Media Views were still only listed in the arrow-drop-down menu button next to them.  I’m happy to say that we’ve landed bug 18538 on trunk yesterday which will allow Media View developers to create and define icons to represent their Media View.  They will be automatically inserted into the row of buttons to allow users to more easily switch to the available views.

All the Media View developer needs to do is create an icon file.  It must be 22×80, with all four 22×20 states (normal, hover, active, and disabled) vertically stacked in it.  Here’s a sample one I created for John M’s excellent Grid View:

All that’s left is to point to it inside the Media View’s install.rdf file.  In the same <songbird:mediaPage> section we simply define a new <songbird:contentIcon> value, like so:

<songbird:mediaPage>
   <Description>
        <songbird:contentIcon>chrome://gridview/skin/mpIcon.png</songbird:contentIcon>
        <songbird:contentTitle>Grid View</songbird:contentTitle>
        <songbird:contentUrl>chrome://gridview/content/media-page.xul</songbird:contentUrl>
    </Description>
</songbird:mediaPage>

That’s all there is to it!