that’s whacked

OBAI

Thursday, May 13. 2010  –  Category: Musings, Songbird

I’m leaving Songbird.

It’s been a blast, and I’ve loved working here.  I think Songbird is in a great position now, what with the Philips partnership, and the upcoming partnerships that are in the pipeline waiting to be announced.  It’s hugely gratifying to be able to walk into Target, pick up a Philips MP3 player and see the Songbird logo on the back.  It is partly because of where Songbird is now that I feel comfortable leaving, knowing it’s in the capable hands of all the birders involved.  I’ll continue to follow Songbird’s progress with a fond eye and a tuned ear.

I wish the Songbird and Mozilla communities all the best, and hope that I can still be involved in both.  I think the Mozilla community is amazing, truly one of a kind, and it’s been really awesome to have the chance to work and be involved with it.

So what’s up for me next?  I’m finishing up my work on the servicepane until the end of the month, and then I’m off to go join Rdio… obviously the music bug has bit me.

new servicepane!

Thursday, May 6. 2010  –  Category: Songbird

My project for the last month or so has been implementing the new servicepane for Songbird: Our old tree-based widget was horribly inflexible for… well pretty much anything.  Our new binding uses XUL elements to build up a much better looking widget (IMHO).  We’ve now divided top level nodes into groups, collapsible by clicking on the group headers (with bonus whizzy animation to boot!).  We’ve also made badges, and an API for adding them which should allow add-ons to have nice count badges like the Concerts & New Releases add-ons do above.  The badge API will also allow you to have arbitrary image badges, which is how we implement the eject button for devices.

Perhaps the best part of the new servicepane is the fact that it’s all just XUL elements and widgets, which means you can get your node, and tweak it via JS as much as you like (within reason).  Additionally, since all the styling is just CSS, Featherers have a lot more flexibility to change the layout and style the way the servicepane looks now.

It’s in trunk now so should be in tonight’s nightly builds.