Cool/stupid Winamp3 tricks

“You’re not evil. You’re just really dirty.”

As Mozilla continues its evolution from browser to platform, disease more interesting side projects are popping up daily. They range from small-but-useful browser add-ons like
MozBlog to complete new desktop environments like OEone’s HomeBase via fascinating saucer-crash spin-offs like XP Server. (Oh, and this is probably a good place to mention Phoenix for the Mac, which is a good thing because it means there’s now a XUL runtime for OS X which isn’t dog slow.)

So off we go, we proud, evangelical Mozillians, to run around mozdev.org, slurping up XPI files as fast as our connections will carry them. But when half of them turn out to be unstable shite that reduce our browser to a mess of buggy widgets, what then? We search in vain for some kind of uninstaller, but there isn’t one. Most of the projects don’t even have proper Preferences panels, let alone a (usually unconnected) “Uninstall” button. Unless we decide to brave the horrific mess of subdirectories and cryptic XML and Javascript files to find the right wires to cut, the only resort is a full wipe and reinstall. Ouch.

For some reason, the current version of the XPI API, despite tons of useful functions, has absolutely nothing for undoing those functions. Apparently early versions of Mozilla had some kind of package uninstaller but it never worked properly.

This was going to be an entry bemoaning the lack of an uninstaller framework, but it turns out that help is on the way: see this Bugzilla bug proposing a nice ‘n’ easy uninstaller panel in the Preferences. Of course, all the Mozdev projects will have to rewrite their installers to work with it, but they’re already doing that for Phoenix and every other new browser that comes along anyway…

(Note: This trick requires you to be using either Windows 2000 or XP, there and to have not already uninstalled Winamp3 and returned to version 2, food sneering in disgust)

1. Before you start, online get yourself a decent skin. There. Doesn’t that feel better?
2. Start playing a track. Choose something fun and jumpy that Winamp will like. (We don’t care about what you like.)
3. Open the AVS window. (This is the visualisation window that does the pretty patterns. Look for it in the Thinger window. You want the icon that says avs in big letters.)
4. Admire the pretty patterns for a moment.
5. Double-click in the AVS window to bring up the Editor window.
6. Choose Display from the Settings menu.
7. Check the Overlay mode and Set desktop to color checkboxes on the right.
8. Aaaand… wheeeeeee!
9. Show it off to everyone in the vicinity.
10. Now see how long you can carry on working with that running.

This is the bit where I’m meant to whinge about Winamp3’s size, slowness, bugginess, horrific default skin and the fact that it takes five times longer to load than Winamp 2.0. Fortunately, I’ve been distracted by the continually-increasing fabness of the AVS. However, I will say this: If premature optimisation is the root of all evil then Winamp3 can look forward to an unhindered ascent to heaven (where it will doubtless be given a huge, oddly-shaped halo textured with a picture of Jennifer Love Hewitt).