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.

2 Trackbacks to “mashTape revamp”

  1. google de
    September 16th, 2008 at 22:52
  2. smugmug
    September 17th, 2008 at 01:22

3 Comments to “mashTape revamp”

  1. Question Says:
    November 16th, 2008 at 19:00

    Hi, I have a glance at the mashTape.js and seems that you are making the sliding effect by span + image + offset, could you explain how you reduced the CPU load? Canvas or ..? Just wide guess. :-)

  2. Stephen Lau Says:
    November 16th, 2008 at 19:03

    Part of it was that the old mashTape used a continuously animating photo stream; the new mashTape uses “bursts” of animation instead, scrolling from photo to photo and pausing in between. This lets me do a more frequent (and thus smoother looking)-firing timer for the animation part, and then a “long” (in the sense of animation anyway) delay before firing the next timer to scroll to the next photo.

    I use mooTools and noobSlide to do the animation effects.

  3. Question Says:
    November 16th, 2008 at 20:46

    What do you mean by “continuously animating photo stream” and “bursts” of animation? Any detailed info?

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