We’re Still Here!

Published by ilikenwf on May 14, 2012 in News. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Just a quick update, as we want to remind everyone we’re still here and developing! Things are a little slower than usual right now, because life gets in the way from time to time. More importantly, we’re waiting on pushing any major changes to the code-base until we have several new add-ons for you to use for version 1.11.1.

Get ready for some great add-ons!

Our CoMETE students are working on their add-ons, we have others (such as TagNinja) in development, and podcast support will also be coming your way soon. We are making sure to not change anything significantly until those are ready for a release, so that they’ll for sure work with 1.11.1. You can expect further improvements after 1.11.1, at which point we can go back to full production mode.

Also, the modeling process for our add-on platform featherweight is nearly finished. There are still lots to do, but expect to see some progress soon.

Join the Community

Finally, it would be great to have you aboard, especially if you’re a developer. There are some major projects we work on, and there is a even bigger list of things to come. As you can see from the list, you can support us not only with coding, but also with other tasks – for example reproducing bugs or at the documentation.

Thanks for following our development!
-The Nightingale Community

An Early Easter Update

Published by Antoine Turmel on April 6, 2012 in News. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

It’s been a month since we released Nightingale 1.11, and no we aren’t dead! :)

We are currently working on fixing small bugs and improving the 1.11 branch based on the latest Songbird changes. You can file bugs on our GitHub.

Oh – about Songbird, it’s been 2 years since POTI stopped supporting the Linux release (April 2nd), and as a result, the Nightingale project was born.
Beginnings were difficult but we ended up releasing our first version last year.

In other news, we have several new developers, one of which is augsod. While we don’t know a lot about him yet, he’s been working hard on the master branch, converting our code to work with Gecko 6. As our dev team grows, our community does as well – our latest release has had over 13,000 downloads! Wow!
While this is a shorter update, we appreciate you staying tuned and hitting us up on the forums  from time to time.

Thanks for you support , and Happy Easter!

-The Nightingale Dev Team

Nightingale 1.11.0 – Our First Official Release!

Published by rsjtdrjgfuzkfg on March 5, 2012 in Add-ons, Core, News and Release. 7 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

We’re happy to announce the release of Nightingale 1.11.0 for Linux, Windows and (drumroll, please…) Mac OS X! You can download this new release from the front page. If you choose, you can also build it yourself by checking out the source from GitHub or Sourceforge and running build.sh.

What’s new?

  • Based off of the latest Songbird changes, providing better performance
  • Uses the more recent Gecko 1.9.2
  • Play Queue functionality is now implemented
  • The feather has been refreshed by GeekShadow, as designed by Manko10
  • Update functionality – get future releases automatically
  • Build system improvements
  • Various other bugfixes – see the git logs for a complete list

Add-ons

We have already ported many of the available add-ons, others will follow. We did some changes on the underlying interfaces, allowing Songbird add-ons to be ported with just one little modification. Ported add-ons can be installed into both Nightingale and Songbird!

We welcome any addons you port yourself to be added to our addons page – just let us know on the forums, or here in the comments!

Migrating From Nightingale 1.8

If you already use the old 1.8 version, there is no update available – we apologize. In fact, since it was a developer preview, you need to first uninstall it and then install 1.11.0. Note that a new profile will also be created to avoid any collisions, meaning your old one will be wiped out.

If you want to keep your ratings and preferences, you should transfer them with the RatingFile (for 1.8) and BackupBird (for 1.8) add-ons, which are both available for 1.8 and 1.11.0. Install the extensions in 1.8 and use them to export your preferences and ratings. Then, proceed to install 1.11, install the addons, and import the settings you exported from 1.8.

Migrating from Songbird

If you currently use Songbird, now is the best time to transfer your Songbird profile to Nightingale. This functionality will only be available until there are divergences between Nightingale and Songbird in terms of the formats used to store your profile data. This means that you should migrate from Songbird before it becomes difficult or even impossible to do so upon future releases of Nightingale!

Join Nightingale – Users, Developers, Testers, Doc Writers Wanted!

Again, we’d like to ask you to become an active part of the Nightingale community. You don’t have to be a geek and/or coder to join us, we’re looking for people providing bug reports, adding ideas, and writing documentation. In terms of getting more developers, we’re especially looking for people to help out with the upcoming update to Gecko 6. Please check out the forums, or join us in #nightingale on irc.mozilla.org. In terms of the languages we need developers for, we use C++, Python, Perl, Xul, JavaScript, and CSS on the player, but we also need PHP developers willing to help us build our addons platform, featherweight, and maintain other pages. We’re growing and always looking for your help!

Build Your Own Nightly

One final note is for those of you who are brave – you can start checking out and building the sb-trunk-oldxul branch, which is a working 1.12.X (Songbird concurrent) branch for our next release. Of course, we’re still working on upgrading our Gecko version (non working as of yet, see the master branch), but we’ll be doing a few more 1.11.X releases before we achieve builds that use newer Gecko versions. To keep those of you who want the bleeding edge happy, the sb-trunk-oldxul branch is the one for you!

As building for Windows is quite tricky, we set up a step-by-step tutorial in the wiki to help you to get started. We’re looking forward to build tutorials (and distro specific packaging guides) for Linux and Mac as well. Feel free to contribute to the project by writing one after you succesfully built Nightingale yourself.

Get ready for 1.11!

Published by rsjtdrjgfuzkfg on February 22, 2012 in Add-ons, Core, L10n and News. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , .

It has been quite a while since the last blog post, so here is a fresh set of updates from our current projects, as listed on the wiki:

Nightingale 1.11 is coming!

We’re giving Nightingale 1.11 its finishing touches and plan to release it this month. Nightingale 1.11 is based on Songbird 1.11.0a / Gecko 1.9.2 and provides, among other things, better performance, a play queue for temporary playlists and finally official Mac OS X support. Of course all Nightingale-specific features introduced in 1.8 still persist, like our Coppery feather, the use of the system’s GStreamer on Linux, the folder synchronization feature, playlist folders, and tons of fixed bugs!

We do not have any update infrastructure yet,  so you will need to update manually after the release. If you’re feeling brave, you don’t have to wait for the release! You can try out our current development version by using the test builds (currently Windows and Mac builds are available), or by building the sb-trunk-oldxul branch on your own. If you need help building, refer to our build page or contact us on the forums or via IRC. Of course, you should feel free to contact us with any other issues as well! ;)

Nightingale 1.11 uses the Songbird namespace internally. While this fact may seem interesting to developers alone, it does improve extension porting speed and compatiblity, meaning most Songbird add-ons compatible with Songbird 1.11.0a can be ported to Nightingale 1.11 easily. Of course, this also means Nightingale 1.11 extensions can also be easily ported to Songbird.

CoMETE – Student Developers at Nightingale

The student developers announced in our last blog post are now assigned to projects. Currently they’re working on the basics for features like CD Ripping, Social and Cloud service integration, equalizer preset support, and meta-data completion based on audio fingerprints. We can look forward to an awesome set of features coming in the near future.

Other Projects

Our primary focus is the 1.11 release; there is still progress being made in other projects:

  • Our upcoming add-on platform, featherweight is still in development. There is progress on modeling the database, but it will need some time to complete. We hope to get all of the basic work done by the time we’ve completed our
  • update to Gecko 6, which is the next point on the list. There is some progress, but there is much effort needed to complete it, and we gladly accept any help on this conversion that comes our way!
  • We’re also investigating a partnership with Babelzilla to provide the locales for Nightingale

Especially with the conversion to Gecko 6, but for all projects in general, we’re searching for new developers to join the team. There are not only C++ specific changes and fixes needed, so don’t hesitate to join us, even if you’re not comfortable with it! We need to improve the UI (XUL) and clean up some JavaScript as well.  We assure you, there is plenty of work available for everyone! :P

We’ll release another blog post when we release 1.11, and although the blog-every-two-weeks-thing didn’t work out perfectly this time, we’ll still try to keep you as updated as possible!

Thanks for your interest into Nightingale!

Nightingale – Soaring Higher in 2012!

Published by ilikenwf on January 13, 2012 in News. 2 Comments

Nightingale is flying higher than it ever has before! This is the first of many more updates, where we want to let you know what’s going on in the project, and how you can get involved! We’re going to try and post bi-weekly,  if not every week – so subscribe via RSS, or just check the blog regularly!

Student Developers Joining the team!

We’re especially excited to have several students joining on the project for their studies, and they will be working with us to make Nightingale even better! More specific details about what they’re up to will come along in further updates.

New Add-ons and Themes!

Our developers and community members have been working hard, porting some of the themes and add-ons you know and love from Songbird…on top of that, many new add-ons are being created specifically for Nightingale. Of note is the currently in beta system themed skin, which uses the default skinning style of the system that Nightingale is running on (GTK, Windows, Mac themes). You can see all of them on the wiki page.

Featherweight -  A PHP Based Add-ons Platform for Mozilla Products!

We’re currently developing a lightweight add-ons site based on PHP/MySQL using the CodeIgniter framework. This is a result of the fact that the Mozilla add-ons platform, while complete and good, can’t run on our host’s server, and it is a little bloated for what we’re doing – it’s like buying a bathtub when you really can just use a small basin. If you’re interested in helping out with Featherweight, check out this git repo!

Git Branches!

Allow me take the time to explain our git repositories and branches – and please take the time to read if you plan on helping with development:

nightingale-hacking is our main client development repository, forked from the original Songbird source and written in XUL and C++. It currently houses 4 branches:

  • master – The main development branch, master is our ongoing work to port the current Songbird trunk from SVN to use Xulrunner 6
  • nightingale-1.8 - The current release branch, which we released our preview builds from. This is the original code from the first Songbird fork for Nightingale, with many enhancements and bug-fixes. If you want to build your own Nightingale, this is the repository you should use.
  • sb-trunk-xul-1 – In an attempt to foster development for our future versions of Nightingale, we’re working on a Songbird trunk based build using the old XULRunner 1.9.2 …this would be essentially a re-branded Songbird, with our bug-fixes and enhancements (such as system library use on Linux), meant to be a preview to our XUL6 release.
  • xul-v9.0.1 – This is the development branch for our far future release, after the release of a XUL6 based Nightingale. It will eventually be merged into master once it is stable and working…but that will have to happen only after the conversion to XULRunner 6 is completed.

ngale-deps is our repository for the XULRunner dependency. Currently, we don’t actually build any of the dependencies as Songbird’s work fine to build Nightingale, but with the XUL6 onward releases, we’ll have to build our own dependencies for building and shipping Nightingale. It has branches for each version of XULRunner we’re experimenting with at any given time.

nightingale-addons contains what will eventually be the source for Nightingale developed extensions, specific to the Nightingale project, written by the Nightingale development team.

nightingale-website houses the development of our web template files, by domain.

nightingale-mockups contains mockups for current and future modifications to the Nightingale website.

featherweight, as mentioned above, is the development repository for our add-ons management platform.

 

All that said, thanks for reading, and please join us in IRC or on the forums! We love your bug-fixes, support, suggestions, and ideas!

-Matt/ilikenwf and the Nightingale Dev Team