A wee while ago, I posted that the Songbird project had kicked off. The aim was to build an app based on Firefox that would run on Windows, Macs and Linux. At the time I posted, they only had the Windows version.
I am happy to say that they are closer to fulfilling their aims. I am currently running one of their nightly builds (Songbird not-yet-ready-to-be-called-0.2) on Ubuntu Dapper Drake. And it looks pretty good. In fact, right now I am using it to play some music I had ripped to my hard disk.
Because this is based on Firefox, the install is easy – untar the tarball and run ./Songbird. Easy peasy. Songbird is all black, I would imagine that this would be changeable – it’s Firefox at it’s base after all – which means it doesn’t look great on my laptop. However, that’s a minor niggle because the application itself runs great. Actually, while I wrote that, I did a small amount of exploring and there’s a fix for it inbuilt! Go to File–>Feathers and change from RubberDucky to Dove. And lo, it’s white.
As you can see, it’s a good looking piece of software. If you are looking for a media player that also streams from the net natively with little fiddling, is open source and has no dependencies and works on Windows, Mac and Linux, I would say that you could do worse than install Songbird.
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Wow.. It looks great! A FOSS iTunes rival, and an excellent looking one at that. I’m definitely impressed
Try poking around a bit, and see if you can find any bugs (for fun, and to help these guys out). I might have a go myself
Well, as soon as I finish some jobs!
Yeah – will do. I think it’s a great project, the first one I know of to base itself on Firefox and do something slightly different.
And not only that, but used XUL to its advantage, and so has the Firefox look and feel.
I came across another XUL-based app the other day, and quite a large one at that… It is a film script editor/film and/or play manager, or something like that. I didn’t take too good a look at it, as it’s not the kind of app I would use – but it still looks very good. It’s called Celtx (that’s it – it’s a media pre-production suite
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Celtx looks pretty cool – if it can be extended for “normal” use, it could be the cross-platform collaborative tool we need!