Songbird 0.5 was released last week, and, while not technically inconsistent with claims that its RSS parsing had been “improved,” I was disappointed to see that two of my three podcast subscriptions still aren’t coming through. The problem has been migrated to a new bug ticket.
There’s also a new “Media Views” feature, which looks promising. As of now the only add-on to take advantage of this is a simple tag-cloud library view, but I imagine things could get really elaborate there. Their line, “Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets?”, has me anticipating all kinds of innovative browsing environments; picture a navigable mood-cluster terrain, or a pannable, zoomable, clickable history wavegraph. I’m seriously considering teaching myself enough XUL to be able to write a hotness add-on.
Amazingly, 0.1 was first released over two years ago. And their releases have code-names like Bowie and Eno? Who knew.
mig says:
So, there’s actually a few addons for showing media views.
I wrote a proof of concept “watch me bring your machine to its knees” view, here:
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/extensions/detail/170
The trick is to NOT make a kazillion playlist elements like I do, each one will eat a thread and lots of RAM. Other than that, XUL is pretty easy, it’s essentially just like working with XHTML.
katie t. says:
this looks like something you would like
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/31/today-is-run-some-ol.html
Jay says:
Katie: Cool! Reminds me of this.
mig: Oh, I didn’t notice those other addons. I wish items in the addon directory were taggable or categorizable. Anyway I do not possess nearly enough knowledge to develop Songbird extensions yet. All I can do is dream :c