Now after systematically dismantling the hold of Internet Explorer over the user's internet browsing experience, comes another threat - this time to proprietary media players. Songbird might not only hurt Microsoft here, but also other biggies who are much more prominent in the post-ipod world.
For the geeks (if they haven't already heard of it, that is), Songbird is built on Mozilla's XULRunner interface, which allows seamless integration with all platforms, be it Windows, Mac or Linux. For the not so geeky, Songbird is a player that, apart from serving as your everyday desktop based media player, plays media from the web. You can browse web sites from the player itself and if you land on sites that contain music it will crawl that page and create playlists from all the media present on that page. What more? You can just click on the song in the playlist and it will play it just like it will play your local audio. It downloads the ID3 tag information and everything, and you can save the song by dragging and dropping it into your library. Yes it's as simple as that.
The screencast at the end of the post will better explain what this player is capable of.
The past couple of days were spent in installing and tweaking (and more tweaking) a new operating system in my laptop. Ubuntu (meaning 'towards humanity' as its Wikipedia entry says) is rapidly becoming the most popular and stable Linux distro. It's been surprising, the number of people shifting to either Mac or Ubuntu ever since the launch of Vista. I really don't have figures to substantiate this claim, but following negative reviews of Vista (and the promises that it hasn't kept regarding security etc) people have become more ready to explore other options. Of course, I wouldn't be expecting a phenomenal shift and with rampant piracy, those in India and China are never going to actually buy an OS anyway. So Vista, like past Microsoft OSes would definitely be the market leader soon.
But the past two days has been an enlightening experience for me. I installed Ubuntu and am slowly getting drawn into its overwhelming power. I've had my share of heartaches and haemorrhages with Red Hat 7/8 and after one such Linux installation messed up my Master Boot Record, I vowed never to use Linux again. Well, things have changed a lot and installing Ubuntu this time round was a breeze. The best part was that after installation I didn't even have to install any drivers! Everything from sound, to detecting my wireless card was automatically done and - as the Americans say - good to go. Installing software packages was also fairly easy with their package manager where you can search for codecs and other softwares. Ubuntu (Edgy Eft, the version I installed) comes with OpenOfficeOrg2.0, Gaim, Bit torrent client, Firefox and an Outlook clone for email management by default.
The only thing that is not very impressive is probably the default user interface. But even that can be remedied by installing the Beryl interface which is a Linux version of Vista's Aero interface. The best part of this interface is its speed and the bare minimum resources it requires to run, unlike Vista. Even a 256 MB of RAM is enough as against the stipulated 1 Gig or so for Vista. So, for a 512 MB armed laptop like mine, things sail. I am in no way an advanced Linux user and so, I am terribly dependent on the forums and trust me, they are brilliant to say the least. And it provides for the best environment to learn some command line stuff.
Some minor qualms are about the lack of a good enough VOIP application that supports voice chats for either Gtalk or Yahoo, and the lack of being able to stream windows media player files on browsers remain although I am pretty sure it wouldn't be long before even those things get put into place.
Till then it's probably booting up to Windows to either sync my newly acquired Creative Zen (which I will flaunt in a future post) with WMP11, or to voice chat with folks back home.
If you are actually interested to try out Ubuntu Linux, here's an installation guide for people with absolutely no prior knowledge, especially if you want to have both Windows and Linux installed on your system.
For those wanting to have a look at the Beryl UI, here are a couple of demos on Youtube.
