that’s whacked

♪Photo

Thursday, Oct 23. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

I’ve been hacking on a new Media View for Songbird this week… partly as something fun to do since I’ve wrapped up mashTape, and partly as an excuse for me to play with Canvas.

Here’s a screenshot of my asian pop playlist that doesn’t have too many artists in it. Basically this is a way for me to visualise a playlist or library by artist and album images. It’s handy for me since I tend to recognise things spatially and visually… especially for international artists in languages I can’t read or speak (Chinese, Korean, and Japanese being great examples). For instance, I know that if I place my artist image for 伊藤由奈 in the top-right and scale it bigger than the rest (since I’ve been listening to her a lot lately), it’s easy for me to jump to her music quickly.

Of course this becomes less useful (but makes for a cooler screenshot!) when I do it with my entire library.

update:

I’ve uploaded my first prototype of the view to our add-ons site. Be warned, it could leak memory, and it takes a while to startup the first time you install it since it’s seeding the database, scanning your library, and making requests to Last.fm for artwork

Tags: media view, photo