[desktop-discuss] Songbird porting...

[Stephen Lau]

Dick Hoogendijk wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:49:19 -0700 (PDT)
> ken mays <maybird1776 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>   
>>> Steve Lau said:
>>> We're planning to push Songbird 0.5 out on Monday or
>>> Tuesday of next 
>>> week - probably easiest to wait for 0.5 final and
>>> then make a build based off of that.
>>>       
>> Great! SongBird 0.5RC2 is simply awesome. Let's make
>> this rock on OpenSolaris distros.
>>     
>
> And why is songbird so much better than rhythmbox that is provided by
> gnome already on opensolaris?
>
>   
One benefit is that because of the exception we add to the GPL, Songbird 
can be distributed alongaside binary GStreamer plugins like the MP3 
codec Sun has licensed for Solaris.

<snarky>
plus we embedded a web browser!
</snarky>

;-)
in all seriousness, there are other benefits.  I'd encourage you to take 
a look at songbirdnest.com for a more detailed list.  Here's a couple of 
points  of distinguishing features:
* Mozilla extension system allows for easy extensions & theming.  See my 
mashTape extension for example: 
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/extensions/download/780 (download and 
then install it into Songbird)
This is a bunch of retardedly simple and easy Javascript that hits up a 
bunch of various websites for contextual information surrounding the 
artist and track you're listening to.  Namely it pulls in upcoming 
concerts, Flickr footage, YouTube videos, lyrics, bio, etc.  This was so 
easy to write, it's absurd. (seriously look at the code - it's ugly 
since it was my first Songbird extension, but you can see it's pretty 
simple)

* Has a Webpage API, which allows the media player to be addressed via 
websites.  Why is this interesting?  Because it allows websites to 
integrate and enumerate your media player.  e.g., go to my blog here: 
http://whacked.net/explore
Start playing a track and you'll see it pulls up cover art, tags, & 
similar artists from last.fm on the left hand side.  On the right hand 
side, it's building a tag cloud of your library's artists.  This is all 
done via the webpage API.  What makes this interesting is that websites 
like music stores can build in the same level of integration that places 
like iTunes + iTunes Store have.... Apple has built a really smooth 
experience if you:
a) Use an iPod
b) Use iTunes
c) Buy from Apple's iTunes Store
Change any of those 3 variables, and you lose the experience.  
Songbird's strength of talking to any device, and any website and 
allowing that same level of integration is certainly one thing I find 
compelling.

cheers,
steve

-- 
stephen lau | stevel at opensolaris.org | www.whacked.net