Songbird, the Firefox based media player, was released as a ‘User Preview’ (read alpha) amid much fanfare today. Billed as an alterternative for Windows Media Player and Itunes, Songbird comes from Rob Lord of Winamp fame and a team based of developers from the Mozilla Foundation, Muse and the Yahoo Music Engine.
Songbird is a complete desktop media player or "jukebox" with a uniquely open approach to Internet digital media network services. Examples of digital media network services included; eMusic’s á la carte MP3 store, Last.fm’s social networking service, Odeo’s podcast service or La Blogothèque, a personal MP3blog.
After last weeks IE beta leak onto the Internet, Microsoft has officially relelased Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview. Available to download here it will be interesting to see Microsoft’s view of the future for web browsing and how the browser copes with modern web design such as CSS2 and CSS3. There is a newsgroup available to post your bugs and suggestions. "And so begins the second great browser war……"
The Web Developer 1.0.1, by Chris Pederick, is not a new toolbar but it has got to be one of my most valued Firefox extensions. Also available for Flock and Mozilla, the current release was made available on the 23rd January and is compatible with any platform that the browser supports. For those who haven’t come across this extension it adds powerful web development tools right into the browser window turning your browser into a quality testing tool. Highlights include the handy CSS editor that allows you to view, modify and save the CSS file of the site you are viewing. Further the toolbar includes the ability to turn off java script, view structural elements of the page, and validate css & html all at the touch of a button. The feature I used the most would have to be the ability quickly resize the browser to other ‘resolutions’. This toolbar should be in any web developer’s toolkit!
Nick Wilson and Jed Brown have released their latest version of the Performancing Firefox Extension. 1.1 is a bigger and better version of their Blog editor that integrates with Firefox to help us blog more effieciently.Aimed squarely at the same userbase Flock (see earlier review) is aiming at, Performancing now has support for most of the major blogging solutions such as Wordpress, Drupal and Live Journal. Integrating tags and your categories, the extension allows you to blog quickly on the topics that get your attention. Performancing sits comfortably at the bottom of Firefox incorparating many of the settings that you find in your admin panels in a window that is both easily height adjustable and collapsible at the press of the F8 key.
I don’t think I need to give a big intro into Newsvine at the moment as there are great introductions available such as the one over at SolutionWatch. Mike Davidson is CEO of Newsvine and introduced Newsvine officially last week and quite rightly appears to have caused quite a stir with 104,655 page views in their first full day and a no.2 ranking on Technorati.
I received my invite to this social news site a few days ago and signed up rather sceptically, more out of curiosity than anything else.
