that’s whacked

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!

as easy as pie

Wednesday, Jan 2. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

i’ve always hated that phrase. it discriminates against people, like myself, who are not of the baking inclination.

anyway, here’s a post from a Songbird community member mentioning how easy it was for him to create a nice looking Feather^Wskin for Songbird without even any prior knowledge of CSS.