Media View Toggle Buttons

Tuesday, Feb 2. 2010  –  Category: Songbird

Picture 3One 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:

mpIconAll 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!

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24 Responses to “Media View Toggle Buttons”

  1. Felipe Says:
    February 2nd, 2010 at 13:44

    Nice!!! I just wish you concentrate more in the bugs itself than adding features. I love new features, but some bugs in Songbird are so obvious and weird. Like bug 19917 that is a big issue with the icon of the pane properties. Or bug 14288 related to 19545 that affect the behavior of the panes. Thanks for the new features, but again, hope to see improvement on old features that aren’t working quite well

  2. Wes Says:
    February 2nd, 2010 at 15:21

    I have to agree with Felipe. Features are all well and good, but I’d rather be running a stable bird. I’d like to see some time spent going through som of the common bugs.

    One bug I frequently come across is when I delete a file from the library, it will display an error message (although still delete). Or when music being managed by Songbird isn’t named correctly in Windows. Or when songs are selected in the filter view, switching to a different filter causes those songs to stay “stuck” in the library until select+all is used, in which they seem to be “refreshed”.

    I assume these have all been reported before (the bug tracker is a tad intimating to find reported bugs), but they’ve been in Songbird for many different iterations.

  3. santaclause Says:
    February 5th, 2010 at 06:57

    YOU CAN NOT SELECT A SPECIFIC AUDIO OUTPUT DEVICE!!! and this software is called music player??? FAIL!

  4. k Says:
    February 8th, 2010 at 11:45

    Don’t shout here, please!!

  5. Stephen Lau Says:
    February 8th, 2010 at 11:50

    Dear Santa Claus, You don’t exist. thanks, steve

  6. katana346 Says:
    February 9th, 2010 at 19:35

    http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/bigmediaorganizershowdownthreeappscompared

    I was really happy to see Songbird on this list. Seems people are finally realizing the potential there is here. Good job devs. Just need to work on speed issues, as I really think this is the biggest issue in their list. (They don’t know video support is on the way…)

  7. katana346 Says:
    February 9th, 2010 at 19:59

    …or not. for some reason the underscores were deleted when posted…. oh well….

    If anyone wants to check it out just google it or something. To summarize, it’s an article that compares three “top” music players, and the players it compares are iTunes, Zune, and Songbird. Each player is reviewed in a positives/negatives manner, and speed is really the only substantial negative in their list (in my opinion).

  8. katana346 Says:
    February 9th, 2010 at 20:01

    http://digg.com/d31IJU7

    There’s the Digg shortURL. Hopes it works.

  9. Forest Says:
    February 10th, 2010 at 10:58

    The digg link works. It’s an interesting comparison, but I found myself most impressed with the interface of Zune, about which I knew nothing prior. Would it be possible to implement a media-view/feather like this in Songbird? Seems like strays too far from what xul is capable of doing, but it would be cool.

    I agree about speed, although Songbird is plenty fast for me. The speed issue is more with startup speed. I was hoping that the next release would implement CD-Rip and/or MTP/MSC for Linux, but I think it would be best for everyone if POTI focused on fixing the performance issues, and maybe also podcasting.

  10. katana346 Says:
    February 10th, 2010 at 14:41

    I must agree, I really do like the interface for Zune. It flows very nicely, the startup screen is useful, and the visualization options are nice. Songbird could use a visualization addon. There was one for a few days, but I never got it to work and it has since disappeared.

    And yeah, startup speed is really the issue, followed by the search lag. If these were fixed, I think Songbird would dominate.

  11. gryphon Says:
    February 11th, 2010 at 11:06

    I’ve really missed a good visualizer. Cthugha was my absolute favorite of all time… but it’s LONG gone. I want something that actually modifies its colors and patterns to match the music, rather than the rather random barfing of iTunes.

    Speed is my chief complaint about Songbird these days. There’s a few minor glitchy bugs and personal niggles, but by and large it’s doing everything I want. Quite awesome to see Songbird getting wider mention out there, it’s very well deserved.

  12. KotW Says:
    February 13th, 2010 at 16:18

    Man, does anyone know how to hide the left library sidebar? Not being able to minimize pretty much ruins the whole player for me.

  13. katana346 Says:
    February 13th, 2010 at 22:18

    You can no longer minimize the left display pane… I filed a bug a long time ago, but I am not sure if the developers will be implementing anything:

    Vote it up if you want: http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=19293

    …or file a new one for a button if that sounds better. If you do, let me know, and I’ll vote it up:

  14. KotW Says:
    February 14th, 2010 at 14:36

    @katana346 Thanks man, it seems they’ve actually fixed this one! http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=19932

    Looking forward to it :D

  15. KotW Says:
    February 14th, 2010 at 14:46

    Yessiree! Shame I can’t edit my comment above, but I just tried out 1519 and the button is already there. Excellent! http://developer.songbirdnest.com/builds/trunk/latest/

  16. I'mnotacylon Says:
    February 14th, 2010 at 18:14

    I Like the new release, and I like purple rain. I don’t know what everyone is complaining about. (However i did replace the splash screen with that timely add-on: Splish-splosh). All is definitely work in progress, that’s for sure, but still its really good what you’ve done. However, I agree with others, in making the bug fixes a priority. Also, I wonder if it could be possible to include file type (such as mp3, flac, ogg vorbis etc.) in the list of columns that can be chosen when a song’s details are displayed. It would make comparing various versions of the same file very easy, and it seems to me that it would be very easy to do. (I know the same can be done be selecting file location but this is very cumbersome). Keep up the good work, and I look forward to the next release.

  17. katana346 Says:
    February 15th, 2010 at 00:26

    Excellent news. Thanks devs!

  18. Manu_F Says:
    February 24th, 2010 at 09:30

    I love the new songbird skin and the new relase, but there are some features that i want for mac os x, like the flac cd ripping. And, one more things (:-p), the home page of the site isn’t so clear, lacks a page with the software features and specification.

    Emanuele

  19. roger Says:
    February 25th, 2010 at 09:54

    sorry, but as long as you can not select a output device this program is crap

  20. Gryphon Says:
    March 1st, 2010 at 12:16

    Oh, now, I’m sure as soon as output selection is implemented, there’ll be some other shortcoming that makes it crap. :p

  21. Des nouvelles « Frenchbirds Says:
    March 1st, 2010 at 13:42

    [...] aussi prévus : la possibilité pour les développeurs d’inclure leur propre bouton pour les pages média, la recherche de concerts dans plus de pays et notamment la France et une meilleure prise en charge [...]

  22. Chris Says:
    March 2nd, 2010 at 22:05

    So it’s been a month with no updates.. and I hunted around (ever eager for info) and found NOFX as a Target on Bugzilla.. What’s going on? Progress? Public release any time soon?

  23. jiaowohongshenme Says:
    April 11th, 2010 at 08:32

    我是一名中国的玩家，我正在使用songbird，觉得不错，但是和苹果的管理软件相比还是逊色一些…比如在songbird上改变艺术家等信息不会同步到本地文件上….而itunes就可以直接同步…还有就是为什么songbird不能同步索尼的MP3？？比如content…从songbird上不能直接导入歌曲进sony A815。。。希望今后的版本能够实现这些功能….

  24. Joshua Rodman Says:
    April 17th, 2010 at 00:31

    I like that you’ve made other views able to work equally with built in views. However It seems a shame that there isn’t an album-based view built in. The third-party ones are suffering from mozilla-itis where they constantly go out of date. That sort of works for Firefox, where it’s important that the plugins stay up to date, with all the pressures of security modifications, and the need for the browser to change so much to accommodate html5 pressures.

    With a music player UI list though, you really should be able to achieve a more stable means to configure a list of albums, even if you have to do it yourselves.

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