that’s whacked

mashTape revamp

Thursday, Aug 28. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

komi and i have been re-whacking mashTape for our next Songbird release. for anyone interested in following along, you can pull my in-development versions from my handy dandy Mozdev Mercurial repo @ http://hg.mozdev.org/mashtape

at any given moment, it may be working or broken; but as of right now (35:c885f305f9a6), it’s working… and working quite well. the visual design hasn’t been finalised yet; komi is working through more wireframe ideas, and i’ll start implementing those tomorrow - but i’ve got some basics in and working in order to test my functional pieces.

specifically, i’ve got my architecture in place for add-ons to provide additional XPCOM components of their own as drop-in service providers. the new mashTape has a few different classes of providers:

• artist bio (e.g. Wikipedia, Last.fm, AMG..)
• RSS feeds (e.g. Digg, Google News..)
• photos (e.g. Flickr, SmugMug..)
• flash/video (e.g. YouTube, Yahoo Music Videos..)

so far i’ve implemented a Last.fm artist bio provider, Flickr & SmugMug photo providers, and Digg & Google News RSS providers. the new mashTape will allow users to more dynamically configure which service providers they want to see (and disable ones the user doesn’t care about). as part of the new mashTape redesign, i’m making more use of iframes and JS libraries within the XUL tab panel to get some nice animation effects (cheaper too!). you can see this if you try out the in-development release… the Flickr pane animates considerably smoother now with significantly reduced CPU load.

the screenshots don’t do the new Flickr pane justice, but here are some obligatory screenshots:

if you have any comments, i’d love to hear ‘em.

Web Media History

Tuesday, Aug 12. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

In previous versions of Songbird we had a “Web Media History” node that was basically a media library of all the media you encountered on the web. It was somewhat confusing to new users, so we took it out of Songbird 0.7. Past users of Songbird seem to be missing it though, so I built a quick add-on this morning to re-enable the node.

Right now there isn’t an icon that makes it look good in Gonzo, but komi assures me he’ll fix that

You can download it here

mashTape @ mozdev

Monday, Aug 4. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

For Songbird 0.6 I built the SHOUTcast add-on, and for Songbird 0.7 I put together the Concerts add-on. Now that 0.7 is wrapping up and (knock on wood) I think I’m done with Concerts, it’s time to move onto my next add-on project…

For our next release my plans are to revisit and completely re-whack my very first Songbird add-on: mashTape. When I joined Songbird, one of the first things I thought was über-cool was going to be how simple it would be to pull this sort of contextual information into your media player from the web. Unfortunately, when I first joined Songbird - my XUL/JS was… well… about what you’d expect from someone who’d been doing systems/kernel development since undergrad.

mashTape has been in need of some serious love for a few months now, so I’m looking forward to getting the chance to rewhack it. as part of that, i’m moving mashTape over to Mozdev, so you can find it’s new home at http://mashtape.mozdev.org

you can see webpage design is clearly not my forté, but, ATM, all i’m interested in is some solid good Mercurial extension hosting (and having access to their project-owners mailing list ;-)). maybe when i get some free time (hah), i’ll make a better webpage for it.