Second Preview of Snowl 0.2

I've just pushed the second preview release of the upcoming Snowl 0.2. It adds a non-columnar option to the river view along with grouping by time period to the river and stream views.

Here's the stream view grouped by day:


And here's the period selector in the river view:


The second preview release also includes a number of enhancements from alta88, who has added several layout and header options to the list view along with a bunch of other improvements (like a customizable toolbar button for quickly accessing Snowl features).

Here's the menu for selecting those layout and header options:

This preview release also includes many bug fixes to improve performance and functionality.

Still to come is a lot of behavior and visual design work, a number of additional bug fixes, and several more features, including Twitter-based message sending.

Get Snowl for Firefox

Get the preview release: Snowl for Firefox.

Warning: this version is a primitive implementation with many bugs, and subsequent versions will include changes that break functionality and delete all your messages, making you start over from scratch.

Get Involved

Let us know what you think by posting in the forum, reporting bugs, or conversing with us in the #labs channel on irc.mozilla.org. Or check out the source and submit your bug fixes and enhancements.

Easier Access to Sidebars

Alex Faaborg suggested to me a few weeks ago that there should be an easier way to open and close Snowl's stream view sidebar, like a button that toggles it open and closed.

That got me thinking that the same is true for other sidebars, as the View > Sidebar menu seems like a relatively obscure and cumbersome way to access them. My inclination was to place a permanent interface on the left-hand side of the browser window, right where sidebars appear, that would be contextual, discoverable, and easily accessible.

Tabs seemed to fit these requirements and are consistent with Firefox's "one sidebar open at a time" behavior, so, with some helpful input from Dan Mills on how similar interfaces in other applications have behaved, I cooked up an experimental extension that implements a column of vertical tabs representing sidebars down the left-hand side of the browser window.

Dragging a tab to the right opens the corresponding sidebar, while dragging it back to the left closes it. Dragging also lets you set the sidebar width. Or open a sidebar to its previous width by simply clicking its tab (clicking again toggles it closed).

The extension supports both built-in sidebars (Bookmarks, History) and those provided by extensions, as long as the extensions use the standard machinery for defining their sidebars. And it extends that machinery with support for tab icons: just set the image attribute on your tag to the URL of the icon.

It uses the new -moz-transform CSS property to orient text vertically on the tabs (and a bit of the new drag-drop API to start the drag operation) so it only works on recent nightlies. And it's a prototype, so there's still some wonkiness in its appearance and behavior.

Check it out in the AMO sandbox, and let me know what you think. (Also note the All-in-One Sidebar, another take on the same concept.)

Stuck on Songbird

I've tried the Mozilla-based open-source music player Songbird twice before, and each time I reluctantly retreated to iTunes for a variety of reasons: Songbird wouldn't play my DRM-encumbered iTunes Store tracks, it was cumbersome to use, it kept crashing or wouldn't start, etc.

But in August I stripped the DRM from my 50 encumbered songs by burning them to four CDs and then ripping them back.  And then I heard that the latest version of Songbird (0.7) had a redesigned interface.  So I decided to give it another try.  And this time it stuck.

The major reason is the interface redesign, which has simplified the application considerably, making it much easier to navigate.  But it also doesn't crash much anymore and has started up fine every time.

I've been using Songbird almost exclusively for the last few weeks, except when I need to burn a CD (which it still doesn't do) and during the occasional foray into the iTunes Store to see if it has DRM-free versions of songs I can't find in the Amazon MP3 Store, like Ministry's original recording of Jesus Built My Hotrod or The Damned's remake of Jet Boy, Jet Girl (sadly, it usually doesn't).

I even activated its scrobbler support, and it's been pushing my listening habits to my public last.fm profile, which feels uncomfortably revealing, although no more so than having dozens of my colleagues following my decidedly non-work-related tweets.

And I've tried out its Songkick functionality for automatically finding concert dates for the artists in my library, which feels like a killer feature, since it's so much easier than searching for concerts manually (or tediously programming Ticketmaster/Live Nation to keep me in the loop).

Finally, I've sampled its SHOUTcast internet radio integration, which seems like it could be a great way to get someone else to mix my daily soundtrack for me, except that I haven't yet put in the effort to find the stations I want to listen to from the overwhelmingly voluminous selection of them.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with Songbird.  Support for burning CDs and better integration with the Amazon MP3 Store are the only major features I'm missing.  The rest is just nits.

(Note: recent versions of Songbird supposedly play DRM-encumbered iTunes Store tracks just fine, although I'm glad to be DRM-free anyway and plan to remain so from now on by not purchasing any more encumbered music.)