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Growing more (beautiful) plumage…

Monday, Apr 20. 2009 – Category: Linkage, Songbird

It’s been a while since we’ve featured some of the new and creative add-ons Songbird’s add-on developer community have been cranking out lately… in fact, I can’t recall if we’ve done this since post-1.0! Clearly a situation that needs to be rectified… and hence today’s post calling out some of the awesome Feathers that work in the latest 1.1.2 builds. For regular subscribers to the new add-ons RSS feed (which I highly recommend subscribing to in order to stay on top of all the new add-ons) these won’t be anything new… but for Songbird newcomers, hopefully this will turn you on to some cool new Feathers and inspire you to maybe create your own!

YABS continues to be the most popular Feather.. easily one of the nicest of the “dark” Feathers, it’s a complete package featuring mashTape, Pure Player, and LyricMaster skinning (check out the add-on page for a complete list of all the extensions atreiu made look good with this Feather). In addition to Pure Player, he’s got Medium & Mini Player layouts incorporated too!
Sparkle is right up there as the a long-running “dark” Feather favourite. Schwadegan just recently added LyricMaster support to this gorgeous whimsical Feather.
NABS is the “light” Feather counterpart to YABS. Feature-for-feature, it stacks right up there with YABS… some people just prefer something lighter.
Spotbird brings Spotify’s subtle and aerodynamic gray rubber look into Songbird. It looks particularly awesome when you have andreas.f’s accompanying Spotbird Artist Browser add-on media view installed with it.
Aerofirebird is for the Vista users out there who want a uniform look and feel for Songbird and Firefox. It utilises Firefox’s L&F and uses native Vista borders giving you the “glass” effects.
Pure Player is a different take on your regular Feather. It adds a new layout somewhere in between the Main Player and the Mini Player. Featuring ratings, album art, and hover-overlaid player controls, it’s a gorgeous efficient use of space. What’s particularly cool is that Feathers can supply Pure Player skins so you can, in effect, skin your own Pure Player!
BlackfuZZ only further shows how much Songbird users like an awesome “dark” Feather. Incorporating Pure Player, Mini Player, and Medium Player skins, this Feather features contrasting light and dark themes, clean angular lines and a really slick volume bar.
euphoria is a light Feather with some gorgeous light-reflected lime-green highlights. Sounds a little strange at first, but the colour combination looks really great. The default album artwork image looks particularly awesome in Media Flow. This features Mini Player and Pure Player layouts, and skins mashTape, Media Flow, and LyricMaster for completeness.
Walnut2 brings in the lux with some really well done wood-grain finishing. For fans of woodies, it’s particularly nostalgic. One of the more complete Feathers, this skins mashTape, MediaFlow, SHOUTcast, LyricMaster, etc. and incorporates the usual Mini and Medium Player layouts.

That’s all for today’s post… I’ll be covering some of the wicked new extensions that you may or may not have heard of in my next post!

Trust funds for the families of the slain Oakland cops

Monday, Mar 23. 2009 – Category: Linkage

I live in Oakland, and our neighbourhood was pretty rocked this weekend by the murder of the 4 (or 3, depending on your classification of life vs. death) Oakland police officers. This is the highest # of police officers slain in a day in the department’s history.

There’s not much I can say really. It’s f-’d up, and I’m pretty saddened by the events that happened.

The OPD just setup trust funds for the families of the slain officers. We’ll be putting some money in, and I hope you will too.

cliKball

Friday, Mar 6. 2009 – Category: Linkage, Musings

I’ve been enthusiastically using cliKball a lot lately, and have become a big enough fan, I actually sent out a few invitations to friends to use it too. I don’t normally do this (honestly, I tend to get annoyed at all the “Join my new Web 2.0 service!” invites I typically get), but cliKball has been so super cool, I succumbed to the invite thing.

Apologies to any friends I sent invites to that won’t use the service… to the few folks I sent invites to: it was only because you guys make prodigious use of bookmarks, or always have interesting stuff to share with me…

cliKball is sort of a del.icio.us + Twitter, all in one… it sits, unobtrusively, in your Firefox browser – and when you add a bookmark, all your followers see it (and your comments), and everyone can follow and have a conversation directly in the browser about it. There are a bunch of us at Songbird who have started using it, mostly for sharing inane things we find hilarious, but I’m starting to find it useful for more serious things now too. And in the vein of all things Webby, it’s got ATOM/RSS feeds… which I’m looking to pull into my blog at somepoint soon.

Anyway – go sign up.. I’m stevel on it.

awesome animation vid

Tuesday, May 13. 2008 – Category: Linkage

thanks to pvh (fellow birder) for sending me this video… an animation all done via wall painting

it’s unbelievably awesome

penguins can fly!

Tuesday, Apr 1. 2008 – Category: Linkage

as far as April Fools’ jokes go, this BBC iPlayer ad is pretty funny.

better living through open source

Tuesday, Jan 15. 2008 – Category: Linkage, OpenSource

i came across osliving a while ago (and actually emailed the author to see if Songbird could be listed), but hadn’t visited the site in a couple of months. i stumbled across it again yesterday, and wow – it looks great. his redesign is really nice… very nice clean simple layout, with immediate clear navigation and categorisation.

props to andrew on a site well done.

simple pleasures

Saturday, Dec 1. 2007 – Category: Linkage

leeks. spinning.

kept me entertained anyway.

Monday, Oct 15. 2007 – Category: Linkage

Paul Krugman wrote a great piece on Gore Derangement Syndrome today.

What is it about Al Gore that drives right-wingers insane? The worst thing about him, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right.

and quoting one of Krugman’s quotes:

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

I’m sure Gore clubs baby seals secretly.