... and then there were 3.

A small group of us got together in a room, with a laptop, a projector, and the Top 40 add-ons. Together we assaulted my poor Songbird profile with a myriad of extensions, argued, debated, and eventually whittled the many many awesome add-ons down to the 3 winners.

In alphabetical order, please give a huge congratulations to ChatZilla, Me.dium, and Stylish.

ChatZilla was done by Mitch_1_2 (well known to any #songbird peeps), and while on the surface it may appear to be a straight-forward port of the Mozilla codebase, if you dive deeper into the bug tracker for it you'll find Mitch_1_2 actually uncovered some bugs with ChatZilla, as well as Songbird. Don't only did he uncover bugs in Songbird, he submitted patches and has since become a thoroughly engaged developer. Additionally, he's working on pulling in display pane integration. We also see a lot of promise for music-related chat, displaying what you're currently listening to, etc.

We've blogged about Me.dium before, but needless to say - we're big fans. Socialising, sharing, and music all go hand in hand with each other. Me.dium's integration into Songbird looks phenomenal, and fully takes advantage of Songbird's unique media playing + browser heritage allowing Me.dium users to join their friends at webpages, as well as search for music their friends are currently listening to.

One of Songbird's most powerful features is its ability to completely change its look and feel via Feathers. Feathering the media player is huge, but taking an add-on like Stylish and letting it style the entire Web to match Feathers takes it even one step further. Check out this screenshot of Google in Songbird with a matching Rubberducky style.

Congratulations to our three winners, and a huge thanks to all the other Top 40 developers. Your efforts and accomplishments are amazing, and we love and appreciate all the work you guys put in. Y'all will be getting a thank you gift in the mail! :)

(a special honourable mention goes out to bard for uploading his SamePlace & xmpp4moz extensions over a painfully slow 33.6kbps GPRS modem connection while traveling through Europe in order to get them submitted in time for the Top 40 deadline! :-))

cheers,
steve and the rest of the Songbird team

... and so it ends!

The Top 40 has concluded. We had 32 completed ports, with another 8 in development still. Everyone did an amazing amount of work to get all these extensions up and running on Songbird.. I'm in awe.

We'll be judging throughout this week and will try to have winners announced by Friday.

The Top 40 is wrapping up on Saturday, so add-on developers: please finish up soon! Upload your add-ons to the site so we can get them counted for the Top 40!

Here's a nifty trick forwarded to me from Eric Jung of Foxyproxy fame. Like many of the Top 40 developers, he's building in Songbird support into the same XPI that also supports Firefox, Flock, etc.

He wanted to not only bind chrome and styles to specific applications, but to also be able to support multiple versions of multiple applications. Specifically, due to the deprecation of mainScriptsOverlay.xul in favour of layoutWithBrowser.xul & layoutWithoutBrowser.xul in 0.5, he wanted to target the right overlay for the right version.
(Yes, we kept mainScriptsOverlay.xul backwards compatibility, but Eric is being a conscientious developer and removing obsolete/deprecated dependencies as soon as he finds out about them. Yay Eric!)

What he ended up doing was using the application and appVersion modifiers for chrome/skin/styles lines and doing something like:

overlay chrome://songbird/content/xul/mainScriptsOverlay.xul
chrome://foxyproxy/content/firefoxOverlay.xul application=songbird@songbirdnest.com
appversion=0.4

overlay chrome://songbird/content/xul/layoutBaseOverlay.xul
chrome://foxyproxy/content/firefoxOverlay.xul application=songbird@songbirdnest.com
appversion>=0.5pre

(those should all be on two separate "overlay" lines - but I let them wrap for the sake of readability)

Cool, no?