I have finally gotten around to trying Fireplay (on Windows with firefly 1.0 svn-1441). It is very cool indeed.
I like the album art, although I was expecting it to display once I had selected an album (rather than waiting for me to play a song from the album). Maybe the image could default to a greyed-out box with some instructions in, e.g. “start playing a song for album art to be displayed here”. I was wondering if my songs were poorly tagged to start with.
I tried using fireplay on a Nokia 770. I was pleasantly suprised to find this works at all. However you have to be very patient with it. The Nokia complains that Flash 6 is being very slow and asks if I want stop the script…. it does display, if I let it continue. It is even slower when playing back, possibly due to the buffering of the whole song – this device has limited RAM and is using a flash-ram swap file. The slow response might mean the download is maxing out the CPU. Having some options for a low-bandwith / slow-cpu instance would be nice. However I am grateful it works on Flash 6 at all.
While testing the the Nokia 770, I noticed something else which I proved with more capable machines. I can only run one instance of fireplay at any given time. That is, if I have fireplay open on the main PC, I can’t browse the library from the laptop. The applet will open but it will not find anything in the library. Closing the browser on the main PC and reloading the page on the laptop restores functionality. Is this by design, or some limitation of (my version of) firefly… maybe not all of it is multi-threaded?
Cheers,
Steve.