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!

OSDC.tw: making conferences fun again

Sunday, Apr 19. 2009  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird, Travel

I spent yesterday at OSDC.tw (Open Source Developers Conference, Taiwan), organised by Hsin-Chan Chien.  I presented Songbird, giving an intro to the app, talking about the ways it could be extended, and demo’ing the app and some of the extensions/Feathers available.  (If you look at the slides, there are a good number that I included that I didn’t get to speak to as I was trying to plan for the contingency of not having Internet and needing to fill in the demo time).

What struck me about the conference was the community feel.  This is easily up there with FISL and FOSDEM as one of the best conferences I’ve been to.  It was grass-roots organised, staffed by volunteers, and though it had some corporate sponsors, it didn’t feel corporate in any way.  There were (IIRC) 230 attendees, with two talks going on any given time over the 2 day weekend (with in-depth tutorials on Friday).  While this is a far cry from the thousands of people at OSCON and multitudes of talks going on at any given time… but IMHO, it was far far better.  Having only two talks at a time ensures that each talk has a good # of attendees (avoiding the OSCON scenario of talks with only 5 or 10 attendees which sucks).  OSDC.tw also really fostered more of a community feel; I saw people chatting and meeting new people, hanging out and discussing technology and having Q&A over tea-time.  Having the regularly scheduled tea-time breaks in one central area really fosters a nice sense of community as well.

In addition to my talk Sunday morning, I got to meet Tim and Bob of the Mozilla Taiwan Community, and went to lunch with clkao, gugod, obra, and a few other folks.  During the afternoon I had a discussion in IRC (#osdc.tw on Freenode) with some folks on ZFS, and ended up giving a lightning talk in conjunction with in2.  She gave some quick slides and introduced ZFS in Chinese, and I followed up with a rapid-fire 5 minute demo (managed to throw up a Virtualbox install of OpenSolaris (snv_101b) quickly) of snapshots, cloning, rollbacks, sends and receives.  My demo was particularly well-illustrated when I accidentally rm -rf’d an SVN directory before snapshotting. 

I also saw Rasmus’s talk on PHP performance and scaling… his example of profiling and optimising Laconica was particularly interesting given our use of Laconica for Songbird’s murmuration project.  But the best talk of the day, by far, was Yusuke Kawasaki’s talk on JSAR (Javascript Augmented Reality).  I can’t even begin to describe his demo of Air Xiaolongbao and Air Pudding, but it was very akin to his hilarious Air Yakiniku video on YouTube.

After the conference we had a great speaker dinner… I can’t think of any other conference where every speaker could get together afterwards and have a big dinner.  I got to chat some more with obra, xdite and met Paul Bakaus (the undisputed and renowned jQuery UI world expert ).

I’m really hoping I’ll be able to attend OSDC.tw 2010 next year, and I’d certainly encourage anyone organising conferences to pursue this sort of community grass-roots feel.  It was a far far cry from the huge corporate conference feel, and if anything felt more like a huge user-group get-together.

Update: Photos from Yusuke’s talk here, and photos from dinner here

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.

SHDH: Getting Songbird to sing on OpenSolaris

Thursday, Dec 27. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Songbird

Contrary to much popular opinion, I’m not actually employed at Songbird to work on porting it to OpenSolaris… so I haven’t had any time to really work on it at all. Fortunately, next weekend looks free, and coincides nicely with SuperHappyDevHouse, yay!

So with that, I’m planning to be at SHDH 22 next weekend Jan. 5th… if anyone in the SF Bay Area wants to meetup to hack on getting Songbird running on OpenSolaris, t’would be grand. If you’re not in the area, we should try and coordinate via IRC. I know there are at least 3 people (Triskelios, Ken, & dynamicproxy) who have given this a shot already – so let’s try and coordinate efforts and get this thing singing.