When I woke up last night at 3:30 a.m. for no apparent reason, and couldn’t get back to sleep, I had no idea that I’d discover one of the sharpest Firefox extensions I’ve seen so far.
These days, screencasts are all I can think of, so I checked out Demogirl (my latest favourite in the matter) for some ‘midnight inspiration’. That’s when I saw this post about FoxyTunes, an add-on for everyone’s favourite browser no music lover could resist.
What FoxyTunes does is a lot. Perhaps you’d best watch the video yourself, but here is a small overview.
- Incorporate your (skinable) media player (whichever one) into your status bar
- Search for band, song and album on Amazon, eBay, the iTunes Music Store and on FoxyTunes Planet (their own music portal)
- Embed a ‘Now Playing’ signature into blog posts, form fields, Gmail etc. (these are the ones I noticed so far), like this:
—————-
Now playing: Rogue Wave – Eyes
via FoxyTunes
- Offer a ‘Post to Twitter’ button called TwittyTunes
- Search for the band now playing on Yahoo, Google (you can set your default) and Wikipedia, Last.fm, YouTube and Flickr
- An alarm clock, timer and desktop media player
- Link to a page with similar artists, lyrics, bios, and discos
- Share buttons for Facebook, Newsvine, Reddit, Furl, Digg, del.icio.us and many more
And so on…
Okay, so you won’t keep clicking every artist all the time, looking for Flickr pics of their latest gig, but you have to admit it’s pretty neat. Here’s an example, their Soul Meets Body page:
FoxyTunes calls itself a ‘universal personalized music aggregator’, and that’s certainly no lie. Apparently, they’ve been around since 2004, but this is the first ever that I heard about them. They were added to the add-ons that shipped with the Firefox Campus Editon, however, so I suppose that’s why coverage is picking up all of a sudden. Also, it seems their widget start page, the Planet, only launched a few months ago.
I’m not sure where the company is based, but judging from a couple of awkward phrasings on their FAQ, they’re not native speakers of English. However, nor am I, so that’s certainly not a problem when the service they provide is so helpful and cool.
Still, somehow there’s something off with their look-and-feel. Here’s their logo:
And here’s a screenshot of their player:
Not exactly cutting edge, are they? In a way, these remind me of services like BlinkList or Twitteroo. Not bad per se, but somehow not the snazziest kids on the block; great services that somehow just don’t pick up the momentum they deserve. Then again, Writely or Jotspot never took off much either, as far as I can tell, and then Google snapped them up (be it with varying results).
Finally, while writing this post I realized they seem to support only IE and FF (and Flock for their Twitter tool). No Mac. Perhaps that is why they look a bit shifty?
