Stevo on Songbird

Here is a preview of what the new album art manager is going to look like:

Woot! The alpha for Komodo Edit 5 is out and looks great! Get it here.
They are now on the 1.9 base and it looks pretty nice!

So I like to be able to filter by year as well as genre, artist and album. This is very easy to add with a simple change to a preference.

1. Open a new tab and enter “about:config” in the address bar.
2. In the Filter type “songbird.library.filterset”
3. Double click this entry and you can now add the year property. “http://songbirdnest.com/data/1.0#year;”

Add this to any position you want, they will appear in the order they are in here.

Apparently the nsIMIMEService doesn’t work as I expected. I use it to determine the extension for the artwork file we create when reading the meta data image from a media file. Using the following code you should be able to get the extension from valid mime types:
// grab the extension from the mimetype
var mimeService = Cc["@mozilla.org/mime;1"]
.getService(Ci.nsIMIMEService);
var mimeInfo = mimeService.getFromTypeAndExtension(aMimeType, “”);
if (mimeInfo.getFileExtensions().hasMore()) {
ext = mimeInfo.primaryExtension;
}

Using a mime type of “image/jpg” however does not seem to return a valid extension? So we are going to do a small work around that will parse the aMimeType to try and get an extension out of it if the nsIMIMEService fails. And of course we are going to check that we get only valid image extensions (no exe or bat ones please).

Songbird Beta is Released!

Posted using ShareThis

So I have been trying my hardest to make all my primary apps to be Mozilla based apps:
Web browser - Firefox (of course!) 3.0b5
Email - Thunderbird 3.0a2pre
IRC - Chatzilla 0.9.82.1 on XULRunner 1.8.0.9
Editor/IDE - Komodo 4.4.0-alpha2
Media Player - Songbird (without a doubt!) 0.6pre
Bittorrent/Internet TV - Miro 1.2.3

What I want to do:
1. Get Chatzilla to run on XULRunner 1.9
2. Make an extension on Chatzilla to show the text from all rooms at once
3. Instantbird (get this going with style )
4. Mozilla based terminal program

I have an idea for a chatzilla extension, MultiRoom chat window. Basically it is a new window pane below the current single room window that will show text from all channels (rooms).

I join a few rooms, only about 6, and I would like to see text from all the other rooms that I am not currently in. There are a few steps to this I have planned out so far:

1. Make an extension (little harder to do since there is no api for it really :P)
2. Throw a pane into the UI (probably the same as the single room pane in there now (I hope it’s a binding or something XD)
3. Monitor the text coming in for the rooms (probably ignore the server/client ones)
4. Display the same as in the single room pane except add a room column like
[12:35] {#xulrunner} <bob> Hey the man!
5. add a new command so that you can send text to any room even if it is not the one showing up:
/mmsg #xulrunner bob: how are you doing?
(need to check if this already exists )
6. spread the love!

Check it out, if you like to dance and want to show off your stuff get on DanceJam. The interface is nice and there are some pretty cool videos on it :).

Comment to Mark’s World blog post

Welcome to the backwards world of technology, it is amazing how differently countries are treated. Why is it that Canada (due north of the US) has to wait so long to get the iPhone with the reasonable data rates?

I for one am not going to buy an iPhone, in fact I have canceled my cell phone and am happier to have done so. People are always asking “How do you live without a cell phone?” easy I have a home and office phone :P. We did not “NEED” cell phones up until 5 years ago, now everyone and their monkey has to have one :P.

Maybe I should just become a Hutterite

So I have been working on sync support for MTP with Mook and dbradley at Songbird. I have always had a problem with the way media players “sync” stuff. Take for example Windows Media Player, you connect a device and go through a small wizard and tell it to sync everything, this is fine but from my experience that means that it is going to try and sync my little 30gig library to a 4gig device :P. Ok so I can go to the sync tab and drag over what I want to sync or setup a playlist and just sync that. I found it odd that the media player doesn’t check that first and in the wizard say “Hey your library is more than the size of your device” and give you the ability to create a playlist and sync that. I didn’t understand this lack of usability until today, “They don’t expect you to keep tons of music!”. I get it know they want you to cycle through a small list of music, it keeps you buying more and rebuying stuff you use to have! Of course, so instead of keeping a large library that you can listen to any song you have ever done they want you to have a library like most of the crappy music stations now adays listen to a small set of music over and over and over and …. ugh!

Give me freedom, Give me choice, Give me Songbird!