Topic: Mozilla

Songbird 0.6rc2: Finally, editable metadata!

Brian Dillard, Monday, June 2, 2008 @ 11:13 am

Songbird, the Mozilla-based, web-enabled media player and mash-up tool, grows ever closer to its 0.6 release. Version 0.6rc2 went out over the weekend, and it's packed with goodies. Of particular interest to yours truly, 0.6 includes improved performance for large media libraries and a spiffy new metadata editor that actually writes back to the individual music files. Until now, the absence of these features has kept me from adopting Songbird as my day-to-day media player; I'm now anxious to see whether Songbird can become, for me at least, an iTunes killer.

If you, too, are interested in the latest Songbird 0.6 release candidate, you can read the overview, download the executable or peruse our previous coverage of the project.

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More on site-specific browsers: Webkit-based Fluid

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, May 7, 2008 @ 12:47 pm

After my recent post on Prism, the Mozilla-based site-specific browsing tool, a commenter pointed me toward Fluid, Prism's Webkit-based cousin. After giving it a test drive, I'm impressed. Although it lacks the cross-platform appeal of Prism, Fluid already offers a nicer user experience than the project that inspired it.

Fluid's advantages:

• Better preferences: Fluid offers a far more polished UI, including preferences that help Fluid integrate with Apple's Spaces multi-desktop environment.
• Tabbed browsing: You can set Fluid up to launch secondary windows in a new tab instead of a new window. This greatly enhances the user experience of webapps with lots of popup windows. It also allows users to more easily open multiple screens of an application at the same time.
• Browse any URL: Prism spawns any URL that's not part of the associated webapp in your default browser. So does Fluid, at least by default. But by changing your preferences for any individual Fluid instance, you can enable browsing to other URLs within that Fluid instance. Want to click on an outside link in a Gmail message? Now it won't take you out of context and into another application.
• Less wonky Dock behavior: In the current version of Prism, when you create a new site-specific instance, Prism restarts the Dock and launches the application. Even then, the icon for the newly created instance remains the default Prism icon until you quit and restart that instance. Only then does the icon you picked - the site's favicon or any arbitrary image - show up in the Dock. With Fluid, upon creation of a new instance, you get a dialog that lets you choose whether to launch your webapp immediately. If you do, it's got the correct icon from the get-go.

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Spending time with Mozilla prototypes: Weave and Prism

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, April 29, 2008 @ 1:45 pm

I've spent a bunch of time testing two nascent Mozilla Labs projects recently and thought I'd share my experiences, one awful and one awesome.

Failure: Mozilla Weave

After casting aspersions on Mozilla's progress in the mobile space yesterday, I thought I should probably back up my comments with a real-world example: my utter failure, after five attempts, to get Mozilla Weave up and running.

For those not yet acquainted with it, Mozilla Weave is an initiative to bind the Mozilla experience more tightly with web services. To date, that initiative has taken the form of a Firefox plug-in that syncs bookmarks, browser history and cookies between multiple machines through the power of the cloud. Eventually, Weave will provide a set of APIs for individual application and plug-in developers to provide similar syncing mechanisms. But at this early stage, Weave is more demoware than anything else. The folks at Ars Technica took Weave for a spin several months ago, but despite subsequent updates, the plug-in still offers a complicated, error-prone and just plain broken user experience.

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Songbird 0.5 gets its first release candidate

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, March 12, 2008 @ 2:55 pm

The first release candidate for Songbird 0.5 is now available for download. Songbird, as you may remember is the open-source, Mozilla-based media player/web browser we've been enthused about for the past several months. There are lots of bug-fixes and API changes this time around, but the big news from a UI standpoint is the debut of "Media Pages," which are extensions that rewire the main music-browsing interface using HTML or XUL.

As the Songbird website puts it:

As of this writing, Songbird ships with two default views: a simple traditional playlist view, and a second playlist view incorporating three filter panes across the top for choosing a subset of your music.  Views can be extended via extensions that implement Media Pages.  Developers can easily create new views as HTML pages or XUL pages which provide custom visual interfaces to Songbird libraries, and playlists.

Developers looking to play with Songbird 0.5rc1 will find the following resources useful:

• Announcement
• Release Note
• Tutorial: Getting started with Media Pages

The Songbird team is targeting a final release of 0.5 later this month.

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