With the upcoming Nightingale 1.12 release, we will be introducing the first changes to our API. Don’t worry, as they should not break the majority of our add-ons. These changes are a result of our decision to upgrade to a completely unpatched, vanilla XULRunner 1.9.2.28 — thus removing some additional patches by POTI. The patch with the most impact affects search engines. If you aren’t an add-on developer, you may not want to read on, since this post is mainly an informative post about the changes I made. Continue reading ‘Changes to Search Engines’
Archive for the ‘Add-ons’ Category
For a better equalizer
One of the CoMETE project this year was to improve the current Equalizer.
Currently, the Songbird/Nightingale Equalizer only allow to fiddle with buttons and it’s pretty much it. I did in the past an add-on for Songbird to add basic presets support and recently Brice Santus from Evry added the ability to save your own presets in Nightingale.
For techies, your presets are saved in a XML file inside your profile folder, so you can easily copy it 🙂
For now, the improved equalizer is available as an add-on for testing purposes, but it’s going to be shipped by default on a future Nightingale version.
So please test it, report any bugs on the GitHub issues page, and also tell us how to improve it !
Nightingale 1.11.0 – Our First Official Release!
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!
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! 😛
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!
More Add-ons are coming !
Since we launched Nightingale, we have had many downloads, thank you all!
We are currently working on making more add-ons compatible with Nightingale, and the list is constantly growing – keep checking here to download the add-ons.
There is documentation on the wiki on How to port Songbird add-ons, and also a page to request add-ons be ported.
Do you want to see some kind of new feature? It could be done as an add-on, most likely – feel free to put in a request here.
Currently, we have great people working to expand the list of add-ons : freaktechnik, rsjtdrjgfuzkfg, lukas_skywalker, timmythepirate, ezekiel000, fcastillo, abu and geekshadow – thanks to them for their hard work!